understanding (n.)

My friend Nicole has started blogging here,  and if you have any extra time, dear hearts, it will be more than worth your while to stop by.  She is loving, charming, funny, smart and one of the most talented therapists I know.  (I know a lot of therapists.)

Nicole and I met in graduate school when we interned together at a children's community outpatient mental health clinic in NE Portland.  I can't speak for her experience, but having her there was one of the most positive parts of my last year of grad school.  I adored interning with her, Amirah from Lewis and Clark and Joyce from OHSU.  Many positive memories of our intern cubicle, the crazy phone line we shared, group supervision, process recordings, Narrative Therapy, Data/Assessment/Plan, coffee at Black Sheep Bakery ....

Nicole now lives on my side of Washington State, about 2 hours North.  Over here, that's no more than a  daily commute.  We have tentative plans to have coffee in January, and I could not be more excited.  I miss  my friend.  That time in my life (although I thought I hated it then).  The clinic.  That growth.

Glad she's blogging.

When I was a kid, we lived in Europe.
When I was a kid, we lived in Europe and every Thanksgiving and Christmas my mom would make Apple Pfannkuchen.  There is no special reason why she made it on the Holiday holidays.  She just did.

When Shoes and I started dating seriously, I began making it for him.   We don't have a lot of family traditions.  I'm not that close with my family.  Sharing this with him was a big deal.

This year, I made it again on Thanksgiving and again on Christmas.  Shoes, who is not a breakfast sweet eater, partook enthusiastically.

But Shoes did something almost blasphemous.  This year, he unceremoniously dumped a healthy pile of Redi Whip on his.

I don't have many traditions, and one of the ones I do have, he Redi Whipped all over.

I gave him the eye.
He said, "What?  Is that ok?"
And what was I going to say?  No?
Hardly.

After many glances of stink eye, I took a forkful of his to prove him how wrong he was.
Turns out, the Redi Whip made it even more delicious.
So that's how this tradition changes for us.
That's how it became ours.  Kind of the same as my mom's.  But kind of different.

Besides.
This year, in October, I found out that my mom had gotten the "European" recipe we ate in Europe from an American 1983 Kitchen Aid recipe booklet.

This bring this truth home:  We make our own family traditions.  Apple pancakes, in and of themselves, are just a dish.  A bunch of pastry, capable, in itself, of doing nothing.

We decide what's meaningful to us and what we want to carry forth.
Every year Shoes and I are together, we make new decisions about what we want to carry forth.

Next year, I'll make sure to have the Redi Whip on hand.




Also, in other December related news:

ROSIE PASSED BASIC DOG OBEDIENCE AND HAS BEEN APPROVED TO TAKE GOOD CANINE CITIZEN CLASS IN FEBRUARY!

Good job, my dog!

Rosie has her last basic obedience class next Tuesday.  It's a big one guys.  This is the class where we find out if she can go on to take the Good Canine Citizen class (a critical step in her therapy dog training).  Fingers crossed.  This week is akin to university dead week for us, and Shoes and I are asking her to so a variety of recall tasks before she does anything:  receives food, goes outside, gets playtime ... 

Rosie and I had our first official training day visit to my office up north today.  I should have gotten a picture, but too many confidentiality concerns in the room.

I feel like this is going to be a strange post.  There's these ... things ... I want to share ... but I'm fully cognizant of the fact that I have to be wise in how I share them.

So I work with families, right?  Big families.  Little families.  Single parents.  Partnered parents.  Parents with infants.  Parents with teens.  Families.

For many complex, varied, and multifaceted reasons, the families I work with are having difficult times.  Every family I've ever worked with has wanted to see behavioral change in their children.  This is completely logical ... as I'm a child and family therapist; I don't get called when the forecast is sunny and a high of 72.

Child behavior doesn't exist in a vacuum.  Families are dynamic, restless creatures with complicated interactions.  For me, working with children automatically brings a family component.  So, as a professional kid worker, here's some of what I know:

We have to model the behavior we want to see in our kids.

If we want our kids to model gentleness and problem solving, we have to model that.
If we want our kids to get along well with peers, we have to model that.
If we want our kids to display honesty, we have to model honesty.
If we want our kids to be more compassionate, we have to model that.
If we want our kids to stop yelling at us, their peers, the dog, we have to model respectful communication.

Is it always that simple?  Of course not.  At any given time, there are always a myriad of factors that are taken into account and other points of clinical focus. Am I implying that all families who have children with explosive anger have parents who have explosive anger?  A resounding no. However, this is something I find coming up again and again in my work with families.  Am I trying to shame families?  Oh, please, dear hearts, no.  Not at all.  There are varied and complex reasons why these behaviors aren't being modeled.

I get that.

But it's a place for growth to begin for the entire family.

Often to introduce whatever change is needed, I work with the family to facilitate a "Full Values Family Contract."  Family members (sometimes this has included dogs and cats, too.  I'm not picky!) trace their hands on posterboard in a circle.  On the inside of the circle we write down what values we want to keep or increase; values such as honesty, respect, fun, laughter, etc. often show up here.  On the outside of the circle, we write down what we'd like to leave behind or chance; often, this includes dynamics such as yelling, fighting, and lying.  I've found that it is incredibly validating for children to see their guardians participate in this and take ownership for behaviors they would also like to change.  It is often a point in which families, even if just for a moment, experience a shared moment of being:  This is who we are.  This is how we are strong.

We, as adults, have to be examples of what we want to see in our children.  I would even go so far as to say it is not fair or reasonable to ask our children to exhibit behavior we ourselves have not mastered.  Am I saying parents  need to be perfect?  Dear heart, please.  What kind of a family therapist would I be if I thought parents could be perfect?

What an amazing opportunity for growth.  What would happen if we modeled taking a risk to change for the better?  What would happen if we modeled grace and compassion for ourselves as we tried new things?  What exactly would our kids be seeing?  (Our kids, by the way, are geniuses - smart and savvy in surprising ways.)

This, for me, is an exciting part of family therapy.  The implications are tremendous.
Effective change.  We all jump on board.

Rosie is having a bad training day.  As in, I took her to the park to practice skills (we do this in public a lot - she is one highly distractable pup and needs to work on focusing on me) and she was just not into it.

Oh, friends.

It's been a long time since I've been here, catching up with your lives and my favorite stories.  I've missed you.

I had originally written out a light, breezy bulleted update on what's been going on here lately, but then deleted that sucker.  I don't feel light.  Or breezy.  I feel tired.

As in, tired in my bones.
Nothing new in the helping profession, I know.
I've been running at top speed for several weeks, working 50 hour weeks.

(And before I get the well meaning advice of "Don't do that" and "You have to take of yourself," please, loves, let me just say I know.  And let me just say that there are certain peculiarities to this job, including draconian fidelity measures, that make that impossible to do for several weeks at a stretch.  What would be more helpful are things like, "Hang in there" and "You're doing a good job."  Also relatively not so helpful and even more tiring are things like, "That's why I left social work."  That's a good choice for you, and I'm glad you made a choice that was good for you.)

So.  I'm working all these hours.  And my families are in remote, remote locations where there is, at times, a lack of:  cell service, law enforcement, running water, electricity, flush toilets (oh, yes, this still happens in rural America).   I now know all the park port a potties and park flush toilets in the county.  That is a very helpful think when you spend three hours providing in home services for one family and then drive an hour and a half to do the same thing with another family.

(Side note?  Drive me crazy when I attend urban trainings that address "safety."  Sometimes urban discourse is quite unhelpful for rural practice.  There is no McDonald's for me to duck into to use the bathroom.  My cell phone doesn't work at 85% of the homes I'm in.  Several of my families have lived at least 60 minutes from law enforcement, whom I would be hard pressed to call without cell service.)

Also I would LOVE to share some of even the most light hearted, non clinical anecdotes about my day, but because this town is 10,000 people without the students, I feel limited in that.  Even if I were to change identifying details, I still feel like my clients could be identified.

And then there's the not fun things that come with a job of providing in home family therapy to high risk families.  In the past 6 months, I've seen some stuff, y'all.  Stuff I haven't seen in the last 12 years of providing bachelor's level social work, which says something.  I've been around.

I've also seen a lot of healing, growth and change, to be fair.

So there's that.

Then.  I had this AMAZING idea that it was time for Rosie to start the AKC Therapy Dog process.  Because what BETTER time would there be?  (Sarcasm font.)  Only, Rosie and I needed to back up to re do basic obedience (where we are now).  Then Good Canine Citizen Class.  Then the visits to school/hospital/nursing home, etc. for more training.  I wanted to start her now, while she's still relatively young (the only time I've been grateful that Goldens stay young at heart for 2 years).  And I thought, it's only an hour of class a week.

And 15 minutes of practice twice a day.  Minimally.
And trips to the community to practice recall in distracting situations.

If Rosie weren't doing as well as she is, friends, I might throw in the towel, because I am just that busy. But Rosie, my darling demon possessed pup, is becoming a shining star.  And her becoming a shining star is validating and rewarding in ways I didn't know were possible.  When we practice body touching during training times, the way she rests into me and allows me to touch her ears, feet, tail and mouth just pulls at my heartstrings.  This little "girl" trusts me.  It is tender and a lovely moment of bonding.

And the fact that she loves and trusts people so much is just one reason why I think she's going to make a fabulous therapy dog.

Now if she would only calm down a little ....

But that's not enough to have on a plate, right?  Because life is simple for no person.

We had to replace our sewer line.  That doesn't sound like a big deal, right?  It was.  It was and it was terribly expensive.
Good.  Gravy.
Of all the places I wanted to put our home remodel dollars, replacing the sewer line was not one of them.  Maybe updating one of the upstairs bathrooms?  Replacing carpet?  Knocking out a wall in a bedroom?
But no.  When the sewer line calls, it calls immediately.
And thus commenced the ground shaking process.

So that's where I am.  I am exhausted.  Like, gained weight, bags under my eyes, feel like I need a nap all the time but my brain is too buzzy and full to pass out for a few minutes.

I open this up now to the helpers out there.  When it gets like this, how do you, in the moment, address your own needs.  Vacations are not going to be a possibility for awhile.  Days off are not a possibility right now.  In the moment, what do you say to keep yourself going?  What do you remember?  I'm not leaving social work.  I love it.  But it's kind of taking over my world right now and I need to find daily moments of balance.