Shouting Down the Inner Demons

For my internship, I had to create three professional and three personal goals that I want to accomplish while I am here. 

The three professional goals came to me almost instantly. It was so quick and easy to think of them that I actually have four. 

1. Implement a music therapy grief and bereavement support group. 

2. Develop the skills and materials needed to approach a hospice and create a music therapy job.

3. Complete a hospice music therapy research proposal.

4. Develop a much larger professional song repertoire. 

These are all fantastic things that I can't wait to accomplish! The personal goals, however, were much harder to come up with. Reflecting on myself as a professional is much easier than shining the bright light of self-examination into the dark corners of myself. 

After a lot of reflection, I came up with two fairly obvious goals and one really tricky one. Because music therapists like measurable outcomes, I also have to create behavioral objectives for my personal goals so that my internship director and I both know when I have accomplished my goals. Here's my best guesses so far. 

1. Continue to integrate self-care as a habitual way of being.

This is an obvious one. Sometimes caregivers are lousy at caring for themselves. My objectives here will likely center around logging healthy, self-care behaviors. 

2. Process any counter-transference issues that arise during internship relating to my own mortality or the death of my loved ones.

This is another gimme for end-of-life care. My objectives will probably consist of identifying a certain number of sources of counter-transference, either real or potential, and then utilizing a few different methods for working through those feelings. This is surprisingly cut and dried. 

The last one, however, was actually the one thing I thought of first and it's going to be the hardest. It's hard both in terms of creating objectives and in terms of managing to do it. 

3. Offer more of my genuine self without fear of repercussion.

This one merits a little explanation. 

Many times, the very most important thing we can offer patients is our genuine presence as a human being. Our own liveliness. Our creativity. These are all potent tools we can bring to our interactions. They are the tools that empower our musicianship. 

For most of my life, I have struggled with bringing these things to the table. 

I think I started life as a fairly open personality but one without a lot of social skills. 

Early experiments with being genuine with others taught me that being open and vulnerable was a bad idea.

Whether consciously or not, I thereafter decided I would not be open, vulnerable, or genuine with others unless it: 

A. Could not be avoided or 

B. Was with people I loved and trusted immensely. 

That's a fairly significant barrier to effective musicianship and effective therapeutic relationships, for starters, not to mention in relationships with friends and family. 

Over the years I have made huge leaps of progress in coming out of my "shell" and just being Emily with other people. Much to my surprise, this has not blown up in my face. 

Instead, it's actually been wonderful. 

However, I am still my own worst critic. I am a paradox of desperately wanting to be unabashedly creative and being far too internally hyper-critical of myself to actually create anything. 

There's a reason I don't write my own music, but in my heart of hearts, I want more than almost anything to be able to express my thoughts and feelings uniquely through my own music. 

Whenever a little blip of creativity sneaks up on me while I'm not looking, it never gets by for very long before the laser beam of internal criticism stops it dead. 

I think of lyrics. And the demons begin, "Does anyone actually talk that way? Now it just sounds contrived. Are you seriously calling that a rhyme scheme? Justin Bieber had more lyrical complexity." 

And the lyrics get trashed. 

I think of chord progressions or melodies. The demons continue: "That sounds exactly like every music theory exercise. That's too repetitive. A monkey could play that on guitar."

And so I trash the chords or the melody. 

This is absolutely self-sabotage. It has to stop before I completely kill my ability to spontaneously express myself (in music or in speech) without beating my every thought or note to death with analysis.

It's a work in progress. Yesterday, I posted a video of me improvising with the Native American flute. I shared a moment of genuine, open, musical vulnerability with a lot of people and the world did not implode. Nobody even said they hated it. Or me. 

I had to shout down the inner criticism demons to allow myself to share. I am glad I did it. 

This blog post has my genuine self all over it, too. I am trusting that the world will not implode. 

Back to this very tricky goal. I think my objectives will probably consist of examining some of the factors that initially lead me to place a barrier between my genuine self and others, and then making myself engage in so many acts of uncensored creativity. Maybe it will be drawings that I am not allowed to throw away. Or more music that must be shared with at least one other person. 

Do you lovely people have any suggestions for more ways to work on shouting down my inner demons? 

Thank you for reading; it took a lot of courage for me to name these demons out loud.