Bittersweet

Well tomorrow my cockatiels are coming back to me. It's been 18 months since we traded with another bird loving couple and took their female Senegal Parrot while they took our two male tiels. I adore my boys but they were very VERY loud and shrill all day and with me away most of the time and AR working 100% from home it was a bad situation for everyone. They were much happier at the other place, and Teranga, their little girl Sennie, is much happier here. She was being harassed by an Amazon Parrot who love her and whom she did NOT love back. The man, B, was diagnosed with bone cancer about a month after the trade, and I was happy that my little Tiel, Chewie, loved to sit on his shoulder and rub his head on B's chin. B had never had a bird who really bonded to him, so it was a really nice comfort for him in a difficult time.

Last night B went to the hospital and nearly died. The cancer has spread throughout his body and the end is clearly near. They are an older couple and his wife, S, just can't cope with 6 birds, so my boys are coming back to me and her two rescued Amazons are going to a sanctuary. I'm not sure how this will go. I want to keep my boys for the rest of their lives, but Teranga is very aggressive toward other animals (she terrorizes our cats and keeps Gus, our male Sennie, on his toes) and the tiels are still LOUD! Male tiels just are, and for some reason my boys seem to be extra loud, though they seem happy enough. Russ still works exclusively from home and I'm gone even more now that I have a regular job. For now I'm just delighted to have my boys back. I've missed them. Tomorrow will bring whatever it will bring.

Happy for Small Blessings

I get along well with my fellow intern. That may seem a small thing, but when you have to share an office in as hectic a place as we work, getting along well is critical! So that's a nice thing in general, but we had it brought home to us in spades this past week when we learned that all four of the interns at a neighboring site are being cited for ethical violations toward each other. Just got too lax and verbal horseplay turned ugly. Someone finked on someone else and next thing you know EVERYONE was in the soup! What a horrible mess to find yourself in when you're trying to shine your brightest... as we all are at the internship stage. Being professional is REALLY IMPORTANT, people!!! I wonder how big a deal this will turn out to be for them as they go forward?

Climbing out of the Hole

Lord, I am SO tired! It's good to be on my couch in my jammies with a cup of hot tea just BEING for a change. Of course, I might not be doing it right. My supervisors seem to think that being is hard for me and I am always doing way too much (See! Sentence before last I said what I was doing was being, as if being is something you do, so obviously I'm confused about the whole concept). I keep missing the point that it's not if my therapy is right, it's whether it's relevant. So then I ask, was I being relevant this time and hear that I was supposed to just resonate, not attend to the topic at hand. Sigh. Dynamic therapy is not at all my style. Sitting there letting my patients just ramble on and then reflecting on how they feel about me or how it was to tell me that last thing doesn't feel very productive. Having no plan and no map and no landmarks is very hard for me, and flies in the face of much of what I've been taught about standard of care. I know connection is important, but I just do it in a different way! I had live supervision on Thursday and got slammed pretty hard. After years of good reviews, or at least partially good reviews (in the case of couples therapy) I'm not accustomed to flat out bombing. It's not a fun place to be, that's for sure. On the flip side they assured me that I am just where most interns are, developmentally, and that there is no reason to think I won't improve with time. Hmm... I'm still trying to decide if improvement in their books is what is best for this population. I felt partially vindicated by a fellow intern in our consortium who commented yesterday in our didactic that he was struggling at his site because he was dynamically oriented and that he was having to do more behaviorally oriented work, but he understood this was important because that is the sort of work that is empirically supported for forensics. THANK YOU!!! There is not just evidence that insight oriented therapy is not best in this population, if the person is in the psychopathic range then it is actually harmful. Seeing as we don't really screen for that (sorry, without using the PCLR I'm not convinced you're really screening effectively) I don't know how they can be so assured that they are providing the best standard of care.

Anyway, but for that day the week was pretty good, and on Tuesday my primary supervisor observed me working with 4 case management patients and said that for two of them my work was "beautiful," and 'absolutely perfect.' Of course this is 180 degrees from just a few days ago so I'm still kind creeped out by that whole thing. Trust is damned hard to rebuild, ya know? I'm just keeping my eye on December, when I'll get to change rotations and my schedule might lighten up at least a little bit. Not to mention January when I will have a new primary supervisor. She's someone I knew in a 'past life' and didn't care for, but I've actually really enjoyed her at this site, so I'm hoping it will go well.

The inlaws have left now. I enjoyed visiting with them, but felt guilty that both AR and I were so busy we couldn't do anything with them. Oh well, it was their planning that put them here M-F and not on a weekend, and they didn't seem unhappy about it. AR got sick and made his mom sick too though, and that really sucked. For some reason my little cat got all freaked out about them being here and hid most of the time. They brought her brother and her here from Wyoming when they were tiny kittens, but apparently she doesn't remember that... or maybe it was a traumatic trip for her and she's afraid they'll take her away? I dunno, but Entree was in 7th heaven having people to attend to him all day long. He was smack in the middle of everything all the time. LOL!

So my house is pretty clean and now I can just sit back and try to head off this damned virus before it really gets a hold on me. There are things I probably should be doing from work but I opted to leave everything at the institution because I'm feeling like I really need to separate myself from it when I'm home. I could work on my dissertation... maybe tomorrow. Today I just want to catch my breath and get my head back on straight.

Steady as She Goes

Well better this week. Weird, but better. P gave me rave reviews on Monday and Tuesday and then in supervision proceeded to ask me what my problem had been. See? All better! Then he went off on vacation for the rest of the week leaving me with my mouth hanging open and feeling very much as if there is another steel toed boot up there somewhere waiting to drop.

But then I had supervision with a different supervisor and she flipping ROCKS!!! Stuff I have been going around in a fog about with P suddenly snapped into focus with B and I felt like I made a quantum leap in my therapy in just a single day! I made a couple of transcripts for her, we went through them with her explaining exactly how the therapy model I'm supposed to be learning (dynamic, which is insane for a forensic setting, but that's a tale for another day) could be applied in a blow by blow fashion. Then I had another patient immediately after that, tried out the new concepts, and came back for another hour with her. The next day we had live supervision with my unfortunate fellow intern as the victim, and it all got clearer still. Funny how learning can go along at an even pace and then LEAP ahead in a single jolt like this! Now I'm sure I'll move along more sedately, practicing practicing practicing what I learned this week.

My DCT also spent some time with me, working on scheduling. After I explained some of the expectations that P had for me, it was quite clear she had no idea what he'd been asking of me. She was at a loss for words and just said "I don't know why that should be" every time I explained that what she was telling me about my rotation duties was NOT what P was telling me. It turns out that we will change primary supervisors at the halfway mark for sure, and that this is something new this year. They emphasized that they're "all about fit here" so obviously someone did NOT fit with someone else in the past, and I am quite clearly not fitting with P in the present, so they are going ahead with their plan. The rough thing was that she also informed me that rather than getting better after this, my rotation is going to get even heavier, workload wise. Akk!!! So as she moved 2 hours of weekly intakes off my calender she move 5 hours of groups and additional supervision onto it. And that's not counting my assessments, which are finally underway and take up a boatload of time. Akk!!! But then one group is with B, so I'm stoked about that, and the other group is DBT, which I'm fairly versed in. Now if I can just maintain in my other stuff with P...

AR's inlaws are on their way now from the upper reaches of the planet, so we've been cleaning house like mad. I'm thinking a backhoe might really be what we need. Sigh... It will be a nice change of pace to have them though, even if the timing is terrible. LOL!