It's Personal

My story begins with music. 

Music was part of my life for as long as I can remember. The radio was always on the classical music channel, I started going to concerts from the age of six, I joined every singing group in school, tried out for any instrument, and then I started piano lessons. The piano was an extension of my voice. I loved the feeling of getting immersed in the music, it was a nice place to be. I understood things in the music that I couldn’t anywhere else and it was okay that I didn’t have the words to describe that experience.

Music made me a listener; I heard people’s stories. Little did I know that this was forming my path towards becoming a Music Therapist and then a Creative Arts Therapist.

I can see it now as clearly as if it were yesterday. 

It was painted a shiny gold and had a small black and white saddle bag hanging down in the back from the seat. My first Glider bicycle was perfect! I spent many a happy time on that bike. But it was what I found inside that saddle bag that most influenced the direction my life would take. I found special bicycle tools, 5 of them. I didn’t use them to fix my bike. I lined them up on the floor according to the tones they produced and “played” them, with a metal spoon handle, like a xylophone. I was 7 years old. When my parents came to see how I was making the “music” they were hearing, they couldn’t believe their eyes. And then I heard them asking me: do you want to take piano lessons?

My Bachelor of Music degree didn’t teach me music so much as it taught me who I was. When I knew that I was a Music Therapist, I then went about choosing the graduate program that met my criteria of what learning and training I needed to become a Music Therapist. I found a program in the Creative Arts Therapy department of the Mental Health Sciences department of a medical university in Philadelphia, USA. That program not only taught me to be a Music Therapist, but it taught me to be able to articulate “what kind” of Creative Arts Therapist I chose to be. I can describe myself as a therapist who works with individuals from a developmental psychology, humanistic approach.

But it was my mother who worked as a biochemist that taught me “who” the future therapist would be. I was still in High School when I was helping my mother in her lab during my summer vacation. After giving me a tour and a quick explanation of what happens in that lab, I sat next to her as she sat at her microscope. She picked up a requisition and said, “See this piece of paper, it is a person, a human being. And if I am to help the doctors properly treat this person, I need to know everything I can about this person. Your job is to read to me all the information on this requisition that will tell me who this individual is.”

And it was my Aunt who taught me who the individual was that I would be treating in the future as a therapist. My Aunt was a rare sight in her medical school in Romania in the 1920’s; she was a woman and she was Jewish. She excelled as a doctor and influenced her little sister when she told her that the most important skill a doctor can have is to think; treat the person, not the symptom. Ask questions; why is this person exhibiting this particular symptom at this time? She didn’t rely on her having been able to memorize the list of symptoms and their origins. She used her knowledge as a tool to understand what was happening to that person she was responsible for treating.

My life has also been shaped by my father (of blessed memory), the storyteller. He was outgoing, flamboyant, dramatic, and witty and he managed to pass on to me tremendous insight and a wealth of values.

The act of storytelling is a central part of who we are. Stories help make sense of our world and our place in it and we define ourselves by a story within time. We create stories; verbally, oral and written, and non-verbally, through movement/dance, visual symbols and signs/visual arts, and sound making/music. Where there is life, in any form, there is communication. But only humans tell stories.

I am in awe of this thing which we refer to as a human being; I am in awe of us. 

Image credits:

www.flibbuilder.com

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