"What's your story?" 2013 Social Media Advocacy Month

It's Social Media Advocacy Month again, and this year we're talking about connections and the stories we share about music therapy. Or, put another way, we might say we're looking at how our stories define us and then help us to connect with each other. 

Whether or not we're aware of it, we're always telling stories. Stories help us describe (among other things) what we do, who we are, what we believe, how we've come to be, who we've come to be. And stories connect (and sometimes disconnect) us to/from ourselves, to/from our history, our families, our friends, our clients, our communities, our cultures. 

For this moment, let's focus on the stories we tell ourselves. Let's consider the stories we choose and use to help us form a professional identity.

The way I understand it, our identity as music therapists is a compilation of the many stories we have about ourselves: as musicians, as people, as therapists, as family members, as community members, as service users, as learners.

In the process we consider our beliefs about music, about therapy, how we define music therapy, what we understand about health/illness, how music fits into health/illness, about our clients, our biases, what it means to help someone else, what is/isn't helpful, what is meaningful, what we embrace, what we avoid. 

And our stories evolve even further as we give thought to how we choose to present our professional selves/stories to our clients, to our places of employment, to supervisors, to potential users of our services, to curious people, to lawmakers, to our larger communities. 

All of these elements start with the stories we tell ourselves. 

To that end, I'd like to share a list of questions I put together a few years ago for a presentation I did for a self-care series at the Kardon Institute for the Arts.  My hope is the questions will help you become more aware of your own stories, how you decide which stories you'd like to share, how you choose to share them, and with whom. 

What does it mean to be a music therapist? 

• Who am I, or who do I think I need to be as a music therapist? How have I constructed my music therapy identity?
• Do I think there's a "right" way or a "wrong" way to tell my stories as a music therapist?
• What does it mean about me if I present myself in the "wrong" way?
• How much does my history/personality/temperament influence who I am as a music therapist?
• How comfortable am I when I feel I have to defend my role as a music therapist? In sessions? At work? In team meetings? What if someone doesn't like my story?
• How comfortable am I with regard to my skills as a musician, my skills as a therapist? And does that level of comfort (of lack thereof) have an impact on my identity as a music therapist? In what way(s), if at all, does this change my story?
• In what ways do my clients’ needs and expectations of me shape who I am as a music therapist? How do we weave our stories together?
• What do I believe makes someone a “good” music therapist? 
• How do my race, culture, gender, sexuality, abilities/disabilities inform who I am as a music therapist?
• How do my beliefs and/or prejudices with regard to race, culture, gender, sexuality, abilities/disabilities impact my work?
• How do I feel/respond when someone outside of my field defines my profession or makes assumptions about music therapy? What happens when someone else tells my story? What if our stories conflict?
• How has my identity as a music therapist changed and evolved as I’ve moved through my 20, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc.? What are the ways in which my story has changed as I've grown through significant life changes (marriage, birth, loss, death, serious illness, natural/human made disasters, etc.)? 
• If I am a music therapist practicing in a culture that is not my culture of origin, how has this affected my identity as a professional?
• How committed am I to a specific identity or role (or story) I play as a music therapist? Am I comfortable expanding my identity/role? Is it okay to change the story? Under what circumstances? 
• How much of and which aspects of our clients' stories are okay for me to hear? And which aspects frighten me or make me uncomfortable? 
• What roles do I unconsciously assign to my clients?
• How do my beliefs about what constitutes music therapy affect the stories I tell about being a music therapist?

 (Copyright 2010 Roia Rafieyan)

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Introduction: Advocacy --> Recognition --> Access

Since 2005, the American Music Therapy Association and the Certification Board for Music Therapists have collaborated on a State Recognition Operational Plan. The primary purpose of this plan is to get music therapy and our MT-BC credential recognized by individual states so that citizens can more easily access our services. The AMTA Government Relations staff and CBMT Regulatory Affairs staff provide guidance and technical support to state task forces throughout the country as they work towards state recognition. To date, their work has resulted in over 35 active state task forces, 2 licensure bills passed in 2011, 1 licensure bill passed in 2012, and an estimated 7 bills being filed in 2013 that seek to create either title protection or a licensure for music therapy. This month, our focus is on YOU and on getting you excited about advocacy.

Wow! It was an honor just to be nominated!

A few weeks ago, a kind woman by the name of Rebecca from the Masters in Counseling website, sent me a note to tell me my blog had been nominated as one of 100 Best Resources for Counselors. Who knew?

And then, a short while later, she sent me a congratulatory note. How neat! And I'm in such fine company to boot. Thanks, Rebecca, and thanks to the kind folks who nominated me, and, mostly, thanks to you, you lovely readers you! I very much appreciate (and am humbled by) your willingness to slog through my commentary and carryings on about my music therapy experiences.

As it happens, a few other favorite bloggers are also on this list, so check them all out at some point.

Bringing it all back to "Do"

I live in New Jersey, and everywhere I went during the two weeks after mega storm Sandy (work, the grocery store, the library, the gas station), people asked me, "Did you lose power?" 

And I was struck by the metaphor contained in the question: "Did you lose power?" 

People in this area experienced, quite literally, being- let alone feeling- "powerless" (on a lot of different levels). They struggled through "power failure" and had to wait for their "power to be restored." 

Many of my students at Montclair experienced "loss of power", leaving them sounding  somewhat rattled when we returned to class. A music therapist I know described her disabled clients' distress as they coped with yet another storm requiring their temporary relocation to safer and warmer living quarters (we had Hurricane Irene last year, along with a freak snow storm at the end of October, both of which caused a lot of power outage and flooding). 

In pondering our collective experience, I got to thinking, as I tend to do, about how this connects to our work as music therapists- how we react to the unbalancing effect of going through a frightening experience such as a major hurricane (for example). 

As I played around in my mind with this idea of power loss and restoration, I thought about how we in music therapy are, essentially, working in a musical way to restore power, intra- and inter-personally. 

And, sure, this may be sort of a weird way to say it, but, if I were to say this using musical terms, I guess I'd be saying that in music therapy we're working toward "bring(ing) us back to 'Do'." 

[A special thank you to MJ Landaker for her recent post about the important connection between music theory and music therapy. It certainly helps to understand why music is so "powerful" (if you will).]