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.