It's Official, I Am Retiring My License

This is the month that I have to renew my license with the Board of Behavioral Sciences if I intend to continue practicing as a Marriage and Family Therapist.  Actually, I haven't actively practiced in a couple of years.  I have all the continuing education required to renew - but it is time to face the fact that I'm just not going to practice as a MFT.  So I have sent in the application to retire my license and officially close that chapter of my life. 

I find that I have just gotten cranky about the whole formal process of therapy.  I think it has been regulated to the point of meaningless.  I think people can change, but it is a lot of hard work and it isn't done in a vacuum which is sort of what the therapeutic hour is.  Real change happens in the real world, the rough and tumble struggle of having a person hold our feet to the fire and having to really look in the mirror of life and see what we are doing to contribute to our own problems. I could probably hold forth on this for hours of boring reading and I certainly know that therapy is a complex process.  I think in some ways the practice of therapy has created a false sense of "getting better" or "the pretense of changing".  The excuse of  "I'm in therapy" is used as a rationale to inflict special needs and accommodations from others for our PITA behavior or the PITA behavior of our kids.  Now, this is not in reference to the heartbreaking and very real mental illnesses of Schizophrenia, etc.  This is the general everyday play nice with others type of stuff. We all have something that we bring to the table that is problematic in our lives, personality wise.  I deal with anxiety - I get it.

Having said this, I really value the training I received and the work that I did with others.  I learned a lot,  I love the work of Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the positive psychology movement.  But what I have also learned through my work and being a professional observer of human behavior some of the following:

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should
Yes it is important to learn to say please and thank you
If people worried less about how others were treating them and more about how they were treating others everyone would be happier
We need Miss Manners (see learning to say please and thank you)
It isn't all about us
"No" is a very important word
Self  Discipline is not a dirty phrase
Delayed gratification is a good thing if practiced in moderation
Integrity counts
Character counts (yes, if no one is looking it still counts)
Don't lie, truth is slippery enough
Take responsibility
We need to get off the couch
We need to have a hobby
We need to do something for others on a regular basis (visit a housebound friend, volunteer, etc)
We need to tell others that we love them, that they did a good thing, etc.
Create something of beauty for yourself and others (an apple pie will do, a picture, a hand knitted item)

Okay,  this list is just getting longer - life can sometimes be hard, very hard which is why we need to be kind, gentle and generous with each other.  In the meantime - I am going to go back to my knitting a life of meaning and joy.

In the Business of Secrets

My daughter read my blog and was somewhat noncommittal.
Well, I demanded: "What do you think?"
Em: "I think you are whining."
Me: "Well, I was trying to be partly amusing and besides it is the truth"

Em conceded the "slightly" amusing, but said just because it is the truth doesn't mean you have to say it. "People have STD's and that is true but you don't have to tell everyone. Besides it isn't like Jon is going to ever read it."

"Think I should send it to him?" I asked. She just gave me "the look". Our family is good at "the look".

I absolutely love it when my kids have internalized lessons that I have tried to teach. The two lessons here being:

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
and
Who's Story is it? (In other words you can always tell your own story, but you really don't have a right to tell someone else's story).

Being in the business of spelunking into people's personal lives (in case you didn't read the part where I said I was an MFT/psychotherapist) I have always been aware that our lives are stories that we tell to ourselves and to others. I have done a support group with a colleague for 6 years for caregivers. Mostly they are spouses dealing with a loved one that has Alzheimer's disease or some other progressive dementia. They live in a gated community where everyone knows everyone. Every time someone new joins we do the usual and customary disclosure at which we tell them that they are more then welcome to tell their own story to whomever they want - heck we don't care if they take a full page ad out in the local newspaper, but what gets said in the room stays in the room. Your free to tell your story anywhere/anytime but not a story that belongs to someone else. Other than that we will talk about anything and everything, and I mean everything.

So, yes- I am whining and yes I will try and remember the lessons that I tried to teach my own kids and only tell my own story. But I have to say that I personally find it very irritating when my kids have internalized my teachings sufficient to throw them in my face periodically - but I try to tell myself that this is just evidence of what a good parent I was (gag me).

But just as a side note. I worked for a program that paid T. and I to facilitate the caregiver support group. When the funding ran out T. and I continued to facilitate. We have done it for free for the last 2 years. This last Friday I told them I was no longer able to be there. With Jon having left the country and no income I am scrambling to find anything that will pay the bills. I can no longer guarantee that I will be there for them once a month. I may be asking people "if they want fries with that" instead. But for now T. will continue the group.