I never did get more pictures of the more lights they put up since Thanksgiving. My apologies. Anyway, it's nearing noon which means I'm an hour away from beginning my last final for my first semester in grad school.
Yesterday was rough. I didn't get much sleep because of a phone call that woke me and sudden inability to get back to sleep . . . for four hours. I was exhausted coming into the first exam and had studied enough, but was so out of it I wasn't sure how I would do. We got to pick between Metaframeworks and Aesthetics of Change. Last year, apparently, almost everyone chose Metaframeworks because it was an easier read (although longer). Most of us picked Aesthetics this year because it was still fresh on our minds (and it is shorter). Five questions. Yep, that was the whole exam! There were two that referenced pages in the book and he told us that we could look at those pages, but I didn't want to scramble up the knowledge I already had about it so I left my book in my bag. I finished third, which was slacking on my part, but eh. I did get my genogram back and got a 100 (woohoo!!) and so that's a nice little thing.
The other test was more complex, but still good. I was so glad to be over with it. :)
We had a study session planned last night and studied the online study guides pretty hardcore only to learn this morning that they aren't on the final (unlike every single test we have had so far). Yes, I'm updating here instead of taking advantage of the last hour to study, but the only hard part on this test is going to be the case studies and we get to use our DSM-IV for that, so I'm not all that worried. Like I said, life isn't about knowing all the answers, but knowing where to find them, right?
I came into the clinic this morning, cheesecake in hand, to get rid of it. I had leftovers from last week's adventure into Cranberry Orange cheesecake world and couldn't leave it in the fridge over the break so I had to bake it. I asked the ladies at the front desk to make sure it got taken care of and they happily obliged. Then Mrs. Dawson said that I should be getting a letter this week. I asked her if it was coming today because I am leaving today and won't get it until I get back otherwise. She pulled out a copy and handed it to me, to look at, and it said that I have been chosen for a SCHOLARSHIP!!! Okay, so it's not a full scholarship or anything, but every little bit helps. It's one that the staff chooses who will get it, I'm not sure of the criteria or anything, but it's still pretty cool that I was chosen. :)
I'm heading home this afternoon after my final is over. My car is packed, in the parking lot (I always feel so lazy, driving to campus) and I'll leave right after. :)
For the record, I am bringing some of the books that I have not yet reported on so I can give you guys some updates in the month interim of school.
I went to Institute in Little Rock last night in an effort to avoid writing my final paper due this morning, but I've also become rather interested if for no other reason than the fact that the teacher is in the field of psychology, or rather, family and human development, so I really enjoy his interpretation of scriptures and how he ties it into psychology. Plus, if I do end up in Arkansas, his partner is apparently a certified supervisor. Not that I'm planning on staying.
Anyway, last night we were covering Doctrine & Covenants in section 46 and he said that is, in short, God's self-esteem plan for us. He also suggested a couple books to add to my list, I'll put those at the end. Anyway, for those of you who haven't figured it out yet, I'm LDS. So, if you don't agree with anything I'm saying then keep it to yourself, haha. In short, this is what it says (in a bit of a mixed order):
1) Everyone has a gift.
2) Nobody has all gifts.
3) Be thankful for gifts.
4) Seek gifts.
5) Gifts are for the benefit of other people.
It was a really great class. We got to chat for a very long time afterward about what he does and what I do, etc. He's a really interesting guy and it's great to have the LDS perspective on it after dealing with the perspectives of other religions.
He talked about the ways we find our gifts is to first look at what we love and then notice what we do well.
He then said "When we diminish our gifts we diminish God." and then when we have gifts you should ask yourself, will you use it? will you be grateful for it?
This ties to what we talked about in supervision where we look for the gifts or resources of the client to help them deal with their problems. Dr. Moore says to look for the gifts in therapy.
My own interpretation of my institute teacher's statement is "when we diminish ourselves, we diminish God." I say this because our lives, our continued ability to function and be alive is a gift. Maybe I'm overly optimistic about it all, but I liked how it all tied into each other.
Now the books:
Just a note, for those of you taking notes. I pretty much want to read any of the books I post so if you have a book lying around on my list (that isn't a textbook) feel free to buy it and send it to me. :)
Just a little note to say . . . that paper, you know, the one that I started the night before and had to be fifteen pages? A! Yep! Sure, it was a low A because I was short a couple pages, but in the end, an A is an A. Glad I don't have to worry about that over the holiday! Looks like the rest are going to look good as well. :)
The school's decorations are pretty nice right about now. I took some pictures. :)
I know it has been a while. I had a week break for Thanksgiving and really didn't have much to say. I did finish a book for an exam that I had yesterday and I'll make a full review later on this week probably, but right now I just wanted to say a few things.
There is this girl that we have been praying about in class. Well, she's not a girl, but she is female. Anyway, she was a graduate of this program and was diagnosed with cancer. She was pregnant. Over the past couple months we would get updates on her health and continue to pray for her in classes. At the same time there is another graduate of the program, a guy, that was diagnosed with cancer. We went through the times where she lost her baby and they were planning her funeral and everything. When we got to class yesterday Dr. Rackley said that she passed away on Saturday. I never met her, I only know her name, but it has really affected me. Not to the point of crying over it, but she and her family have been in my thoughts since yesterday.
I think part of it is because cancer is one of the few things that freak me out. Mostly because it is an actual risk for me based on my family's medical history. The fact that there have been multiple members of the graduating classes diagnosed and a couple that have already died of cancer doesn't really make me feel too confident that the odds are in my favor. I couldn't imagine working as hard as this program demands, spending what it costs to go here (or rather going into debt for that much), and then only having a couple years to use it.
Another thing that has been on my mind are the two people that have dropped from the program. The stresses of life and the demands of the classes got to them in one way or another and they stopped coming to class and were not able to keep up their grades and were counseled to withdraw. I'll be the first to admit that this is a pretty difficult program. Excluding all the papers, projects, exams, and presentations, there are emotional issues that some are not ready to deal with and even I tend to avoid them as long as I can.
I suppose I've always been strong in some areas, but I just assumed that everyone was able to overcome difficult things and handle life in spite of it all. Seeing my classmates, people I have come to care about, not able to handle the program saddens me. I'm not really sure that is the right word, but I really do think that with enough . . . I suppose faith is the word . . . things aren't really as bad as we sometimes make them out to be. I find myself wishing it were much more simple to pass around that faith to help others overcome what they are struggling with, but sometimes you just have to let people suffer through it. I think watching the suffering and feeling helpless to motivate my clients will probably be one of the hardest things when we start practicum and even when I start practicing on my own. If only faith were that easy.
Class today was good and I have thoughts that I'll point out when I have my backpack on hand, but right now I'm going to go over my "field trip" experience of the day.
Today was the day that we all were going to the state mental hospital to tour the "Forensics Unit" and interview some "patients" (a.k.a. the criminally insane). I didn't really have that many expectations of the trip. It was a little frightening, knowing I'd be in the same place as people who were capable of rape, murder, etc. but I didn't really worry about my own safety for the most part.
After class I was passing out the maps because it is an hour or so away and one of the guys in our program that has been having a hard time was in the hallway and I offered a map to him and he said that he is no longer in the program. He and one other girl are already out of the program. The other girl isn't official yet, but now there are thirteen official members of the program. The guy just got married at the beginning of the year and has been having trouble adjusting to the demands of school and married life. I get that things are hard here, but I never imagined it to be so hard that I would give up. It's discouraging a little because he really was a positive contribution to the group and he's from my home state, but he needs to do what is best.
The mental hospital was really interesting. They put us all in a room with three patients and we got to ask them all kinds of questions. It was pretty cool and there were lots of good questions. I thought that was it. Then we went to the activities area and stood around and talked (sans patients) some more, then we toured the rooms and saw the seclusion room. In most cases, on any other day, I would have loved to stick around and soak it all in, but I had work at 5:00 and it was nearly 4:50 by the time we left the hospital. To top it off, the girl I rode with was talking with another classmate up front and was only going 50 almost the entire way back (on top of rush hour traffic) so I didn't get to work until 6:00! I'll go back when I don't have anywhere to be, but today I wasn't thrilled. I didn't get to pick up my check or finish packing or anything. We'll see what happens.
Over the time in my classes several books have been suggested as necessary reading. Seeing as my readers likely have a little more free time than I do, I'm going to continue to post the books here, but this is the list so far. :)
I'd pretty much read all of them, but I can't very well go buy every book they suggest. :) Eventually. In any case, there are a couple things from class last week that I never got to post. Particularly a couple things Hickman said.
"Sin is self-centered. The more you do, the more self-centered we become." - All I'm going to say is . . . DUH!
"Comparison kills contentment." - This statement was actually in reference to pornography in particular, but I think it counts for everything. When you begin comparing things in your life with things in the lives of others or the lives of pretend others then you are not content with your own life.
Then another book I just want to read. :)
I made it back to my apartment about 1:15 or so and stayed up for a while longer, but had little trouble falling asleep. I expected to be a little out of it today because of the late nights and early mornings encompassing the weekend, but the first class of the day went off without a hitch. I was alert and probably the most participatory person in class. Even I was surprised! I went home at lunch and showered and had some leftover enchiladas that I made before I went home and then headed back to campus. The second class started out well. We talked about Luke 11 and applied it to therapy and again, I was on. It's nice to have those kinds of days.
That kind of day quickly changed. Dr. Moore had a tape he wanted us to watch. He had recorded a session with one of his clients and all the second year students from the class of 2000. We would watch part, discuss it, watch a little more, discuss some more. Before we actually heard her problem we all had to guess what her "problem" was. The girl sitting to my right guessed correctly and then everything hit home. I physically and vocally shut down as I watched this girl talk about her Trichotillomania. I've been very aware of my tendency toward this particular impuse disorder, especially since we talked about it in my Psychopathology class. This girl was sitting there, talking about all the different things people with this disorder do and it really hit me that I actually have it. After watching the rest of the tape Dr. Moore talked about many possible, often ineffective, treatments. He talked about how seeing that tape is probably the closest most of us will get to working with it.
Some days in class are harder than others.
I'm supposed to make a presenation today on the Global Assessment of Relational Functioning (GARF) Scale and the Social and Occupational Functioning Assessment Scale (SOFAS). Of course, I didn't even look at it until after I was done with my fifteen twelve page paper for Rackley's class and that wasn't done until about 6:30 on Monday morning (gotta love those all-nighters!). After classes I looked online for any information regarding the GARF and/or SOFAS with pretty much no luck whatsoever. I crashed when I got home, ignoring all other obligations. About 9:00 I woke and decided I really did need to get my tail in gear and look for some other material for this presentation. I planned to go up to campus to get some more internet sources, but because it was almost 11, I decided I would drive. My car had another agenda. Yep, Olive is out of commission. She pretty much has the worst timing ever considering I'm to be home on Saturday for a wedding and other errands. In any case, I learned that the school library might have a copy of the DSM IV and that I would have to wait until it opened in the morning. I set my alarm on my phone because my actual alarm has taken to saying it is 0:10 at random intervals and will not let me change the alarm or the time. Of course, I didn't actually get up at 6:30 aside from taking my medicine. Instead I shot for a couple hours later and made my way to the library only to find that they do not have a copy of the DSM IV. What kind of library is that?! Our honors library, the one in the clinic, also is lacking the DSM IV which I decided was the only source for anything I might need for my presentation. I talked to Paula at the front desk and she called someone, I was hoping it not to be Dr. Pollard because she is my professor and heaven forbid my professor know that I waited until the day of to get this all together! It was Mrs. Casey who is probably one of my favorites around here. She orders pizza every Thursday night and shares and since I work Thursday nights, I pretty much don't have to eat dinner before work. Anyway, she had a DSM IV and saved my life (and my grade) for Psychopathology. The PowerPoint presentation is done as well as the handout and I'm just waiting for class to begin. I didn't make a cheesecake this time so they will hate me, haha. Tomorrow I will have to see if I can get my car to work. Otherwise, the trip home is postponed if not cancelled. Only time will tell.
I finished my family story early this morning. From about 4:30 to 7:45 I was writing and managed to tell the story instead of live it. I left out a lot of things, but page restrictions made it such. One day I may finish it all, for my own clarity, but today is not that day and that day isn't coming anytime soon.
In other news, a couple weeks ago I was taking a break and decided to read one of my "coffee table" books. I picked up "The World According to Mr. Rogers" and read through it and found myself wanting to mark many of the quotes in it. If you haven't read the book, you should. For this purpose, I'm going to post the quotes that I found particularly poignant. :) I should note, all of these quotes are credited to Mr. Fred Rogers unless otherwise noted.
"Some days 'doing the best we can' may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn't perfect-on any front- and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else."
"There is a nurturing element to all human beings, whenever they themselves have been nurtured, and it's going to be one way or another."
"Part of the problem with the word disabilities is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities."
"Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing."
"All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing. As my friend the poet Kenneth Koch once said, 'You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you have ever been!'"
"I believe it is a fact of life that what we have is less important than what we make out of what we have. The same holds true for families: It's not how many people there are in a family that counts, but rather the feelings among the people who are there."
"I must be an emotional archaeologist because I keep looking for the roots of things, particularly the roots of behavior and why I feel certain ways about certain things."
"Deep within us-no matter who we are-there lives a feeling of wanting to be lovable, of wanting to be the kind of person that others like to be with. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving."
"Each generation, in its turn, is a link between all that has gone before and all that comes after. That is true genetically, and it is equally true in the transmission of identity. Our parents gave us what they were able to give, and we took what we could of it and made it part of ourselves. If we knew our grandparents, and even great-grandparents, we will have taken from them what they could offer us, too. All that helped to make us who we are. We, in our turn, will offer what we can of ourselves to our children and their offspring."
"It's the people we love the most who can make us feel the gladdest . . . and the maddest! Love and anger are such a puzzle! It's hard for us, as adults, to understand and manage our angry feelings toward parents, spouses, and children, or to keep their anger toward us in perspective. It's a different kind of anger from the kind we may feel toward strangers because it is so deply intertwined with caring and attachment."
"Forgiving and forgetting are often paired together, but the one certainly doesn't necessarily follow the other. Some injuries, real or imagined, we may never be able to forget, even though we say we've forgiven them. Other injuries we may never even be able to say that we forgive. Those are the ones, it seems to me, most likely to involve people we've loved, and so I'm inclined to look at what our experiences of forgiveness may have been like from the first people who loved us.
The first time we required forgiveness, we probably did something we shouldn't have when our closest grown-ups thought we should have known better. We made someone angry. We were to blame. What did the first brush with blame begin to teach us?
If we were fortunate, we began to learn that 'to err is human.' Even good people sometimes do bad things. Errors might mean corrections, apologies, repairs, but they didn't mean that we, as a person, were a bad person in the sight of those we loved. The second thing we learned (if we were fortunate) was that having someone we loved get mad at us did not mean that person had stopped loving us; we had their unconditional love, and that meant that we would have their forgiveness, too."
"There's something unique about being a member of a family that really needs you in order to function well. One of the deepest longings a person can have is to feel needed and essential."
"I received a letter from a parent who wrote: 'Mister Rogers, how do you do it? I wish I were like you. I want to be patient and quiet and even-tempered, and always speak respectfully to my children. But that just isn't my personality. I often lose my patience and even scream at my children. I want to change from an impatient person into a patient person, from an angry person into a gentle one.'
Just as it takes time for children to understand what real love is, it takes time for parents to understand that being always patient, quiet, even-tempered, and respectful isn't necessarily what 'good' parents are. In fact, parents help children by expressing a wide range of feelings-including appropriate anger. All children need to see that the adults in their lives can feel anger and not hurt themselves or anyone else when they feel that way."
"I believe that infants and babies whose mothers give them loving comfort whenever and however they can are truly fortunate ones. I think they're more likely to find life's times of trouble manageable, and I think they may also turn out to be the adults most able to pass loving concern along to the generations that follow after them."
"In the external scheme of things, shining moments are as brief as the twinkling of an eye, yet such twinkling of an eye, yet twinklings are what eternity is made of-moments when we human beings can say 'I love you,' 'I'm proud of you,' 'I forgive you,' 'I'm grateful for you.' That's what eternity is made of: invisible, imperishable good stuff."
"When we love a person, we accept him or her exactly as is: the lovely with the unlovely, the strong along with the fearful, the true mixed in with the facade, and of course, the only way we can do it is by accepting ourselves that way."
"There is no normal life that is free of pain. It's the very wrestling nwith our problems that can be the impetus for our growth."
"I hope you're proud of yourself for the times you've said 'yes,' when all it meant was extra work for you and was seemingly helpful only to someone else."
"I wrote in a song that in the long, long trip of growing, there are stops along the way. It's important to know when we need to stop, reflect, and receive. In our competitive world, that might be called a waste of time. I've learned that those times can be the preamble to periods of normal growth. Recently, I declared a day to be alone with myself. I took a long drive and played a tape. When I got to the mountains, I read and prayed and listened and slept. In fact, I can't remember having a calmer sleep in a long, long time. The next day I went back to work and did more than I usually get done in three days."
"It's true that we bring a great deal of our own upbringing on into our adult lives and our lives as parents; but it's true, too, that we can change some of the things that we would like to change. It can be hard, but it can be done."
"A few years ago I was asked to be a part of a White House meeting about children and television. Many broadcasters from all over the country were there. During my speech, I asked the audience to spend one minute thinking of someone who'd made a difference in the person they'd become. As I was leaving that enormous room, I heard something from one of the military guards who was all dressed up in white and gold, looking like a statue. I heard him whisper, 'Thanks, Mister Rogers.'
So I went over to him and noticed his eyes were moist, and he said, 'Well, sir, as I listened to you today, I started to remember my grandfather's brother. I haven't thought about him in years. I was only seven when he died, but just before that, he gave me his favorite fishing rod. I've just been thinking, maybe that's why I like fishing so much and why I like to show the kids in my neighborhood all about it.'
Well, as far as I'm concerned, the major reason for my going to Washington that day was that military guard and nourishing the memory of his great-uncle. What marvelous mysteries we're privileged to be part of! Why would that young man be assigned to guard that particular room on that particular day? Slender threads like that weave this complex fabric of our life together."
"Whether we're a preschooler or a young teen, a graduating senior or a retired person, we human beings all want to know that we're acceptable, that our being alive somehow makes a difference in the lives of others."
"One of the mysteries is that as unlike we are, one human being from another, we also share much in common. Our lives begin the same way, by birth. The love and interdependence of parents and children is universal, and so are the many difficulties parents and children have in becoming separate from one another. As we grow, we laugh and cry at many of the same things. At the end, we all leave the same way-by death. Yet no two threads-no two lives-in that vast tapestry of existence have ever been, or ever will be, the same."
Well, that's all I have from Mister Rogers. I love this book and it is therapy in itself. Buy it, read it, love it.
