Dilemmas

I like the work at the psychology department of a high school, however I feel more comfortable as a career counselor in that environment. What is a psychologist supposed to do at a school? Many things and nothing, at the same time. I can’t conduct a therapy there and I don’t really know if I believe in the power of talking and listening. It surely is great to be able to talk and have someone to listen to us but, as a psychologist, I feel I should and I could help more. This takes me to another dilemma: more than the purpose of a psychologist at a school, what is the purpose of a psychologist?

The well-structured cognitive-behavioral therapy really suits me. It’s like a class: in short, you help patients (or clients) see what their lives are like and teach them coping strategies to get rid of their problems. You really give them something. You make their money worth. But do we people work as mechanically as that? There are lots of things people see as disfunctional in their personalities and they even have an idea of how to fix it, but they just can’t; deep down, it may even seem that they don’t want to. Maybe they are not being well oriented, maybe they are not being persistent enough. I don’t deny it, and I don’t disagree that we can use the knowledge on how the human mind works to change the way people think and act.

In my opinion, the cognitive-behavioral therapy is the most efficient kind of therapy – but this doesn’t prevent me from wondering if there is not a key, a finding of a reason or a cause that could be treated and make us change our behavior… like a virus that we could kill. This is what Freud (and the pychoanalytical crew) thought, and although some of their theories seem ridiculous, others may be true. Paying attention to what a person says and which words he or she picks up may tell a lot about the constitution of this person. Could we get to a “cure” by changing the way he/she looks at, and uses, language, not forgetting that language translates thoughts? We may have made some dysfunctional associations with words and symbols and images that we’re not even aware of. This is something that often comes to my mind when I take the time to listen to the students that get to me with their complaints at school, since I don’t feel I can do more than that in that place.

The dilemma, then, is: should we waste those particular and rich words that constitute each one of us as different individuals in order to follow a structured therapy? But, on the other hand, once finding out all those particularities and linking them to someone’s way of being, how could we make use of them to accurately treat a person?

Why insist?

Today I had a rather pathetic class. What’s the use of having a PhD degree if you don’t make use of it? Well, none, no use: it’s useless.

Professor F. must count 45-50 years of age. She seems friendly, smiles a lot and shows some care for students. She was pretty concerned when we organized a protest against violence and some of the students were standing in the middle of a busy street. “You’re like my sons and daughters”, she explained. She’s also fragile and emotional and can’t skip stories about her life, her adolescence, events like the birth of her first child. “I didn’t know what to do for the baby to stop crying”, she confessed. She had just graduated in psychology and it seemed awkward to her that her newborn daughter would calm down just by listening to her mother’s voice. She also seems to enjoy gossiping and wanted to know all about a party that was being organized to a pregnant girl in class. Actually, part of her interest, I think, is related to the fact that she misses the good old days so badly.

It’s hard to understand how a sensitive person like her can’t be perceptive enough to realize when class is over, when class is boring and when she’s lecturing to herself. It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy teaching; in fact, she seems to extract a lot of pleasure from this activity. Why, then, hasn’t she invested on her career, I mean, why hasn’t she ever tried to improve her teaching skills? She opens a Word document and, after struggling with the text editor to find a way to make the font size bigger, reads it aloud. Skips some paragraphs, chooses another document and reads it from the first to the very last sentence.

What really annoys me is that she must indeed have an idea of what is going on. The more she realizes we want to leave – because we start packing, yawning and chatting – the longer she makes the class last. Sadly, she does it for revenge. She was lecturing at an art conference and invited everyone to go check it. Five, no more, out of 40, went to listen to her debate – a debate that would have another participant that didn’t show up either. She was alone to conduct the speech in an almost empty room – and today we had our punishment for her frustration, just like we did the following week after we all had the same idea of leaving early from one of her classes. What’s your problem, Mrs. F?

Citizens of the world

In the shadows of tall buildings
Of fallen angels on the ceilings
Oily feathers in bronze and concrete
Faded colors, pieces left incomplete
The line moves slowly past the electric fence
Across the borders between continents

In the cathedrals of New York and Rome
There is a feeling that you should just go home
And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is

“Cathedrals”, by Jump Little Children, is one of my favorite songs. Songs that say something to me and about me. Songs that don’t get old and are part of my story. The lyrics, especially the parts in bold, play a major role on the importance of this song in my life.

I’ve been living in the same city for nine years and I can’t stand it anymore. I desperately wanted to come live here, but now I can’t stand it anymore. I did wonder if the problem was about the city or about myself, since I also couldn’t stand living in the place I lived before, and one explanation I find is that I am a citizen of the world: I was born to know different places and cultures, to talk to different people and never settle in.

However, the possibility of settling in doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t bother me to think of my life as an old lady in a farm, raising five kids among cows and chickens. It’s not the lack of movement that haunts me, it’s not the routine that scares me. I am driven by the easiness of a home, and what I long for is a city where I can feel at home – in a wider sense.

Don’t worry

Don’t worry: you’ll have several times to be born again. Adolescence is like a birth, feeling close to death but not yet there is like a birth, a deep trauma is like a birth, moving to another country and having to learn how to express yourself in another language is like a birth. You’re not the same, you’re another. Another you, if you don’t wanna be confused: but, still, another. Another language, another name, another body: big changes, new births.

The misteries of dreaming

I had (or I remembered having) plenty of dreams last night. One featured a thief and kidnapper (!), another featured a cousin of mine. But one of those several dreams called my attention because of something that happened to me this morning.

As I mentioned before, the TAT is a psychological test – and I’m doing a course on it. One of the assignments for this course is to administer this test to someone. Actually, not the whole test yet, just one picture. It’s a rehearsal, after all. Furthermore, we’re not required to buy it: the supervisor will lend a picture to each one of us. However, we’re supposed to borrow it from the TA on Wednesday from 2 to 5 p.m., which is very much an inconvenient time for me, causing me to worry and leading me to dream of it.

In my dream, the TA was happily waiting for me. She had especially found a time that would suit me. It was a self-centered dream. As she lended me the first TAT picture, one that shows a boy with a violin, she was talkative and she seemed to like me so much that she treated me as an one of her best friends.

This morning I met a girl who’s in this course with me and happens to be a close friend of the TA. She mentioned that she had already finished the course’s assignment and offered to lend me the picture she had borrowed: it was the one showing the boy with the violin.

Now I won’t have to find a way to go meet the TA tomorrow. If only I would have relaxed after that dream…