Fall 2020 Journal Reflection

I want to give a title as the Fall 2020 Drama Therapist Journal Reflection. And I laughed at adding “Drama Therapist” into it.

I read the prompt: write about how the transferential process reflects “the bones” of your life experiences prior to graduate school over which you “sing” as La Loba does in order to breathe new life into those experiences. I laughed at the words “transferential,” “new life,” “sing,” and “bones” a little bit because this assignment is kind of out of sync with the reality of 2020. It expects me to synthesize internship experiences to great insights of life before graduate school (like millions of years ago). The time cut confuses me. It seems to signify that by the beginning the graduate school, I have assembled a whole version of skeletons and am ready to sing into a new one. It seems that being a therapist must bring something significant that forcing me to let go of the past. It seems that by the end of this semester, I should have a sense of what a therapist looks like and have a somewhat great discovery of my bones.

A little irony is I am writing in the time of Covid. Everything is on pause. It forces me to remain on the ground as a wounded human being. I am learning to cope with anxiety and uncertainty. I am struggling with being a good student. The isolation inside and outside makes it hard to focus And I don’t have enough client hours to explore because of the organizational restructure at my internship site. Four one-hour intake sessions and two clients for a month don’t give me enough room to do drama therapy. I don’t know what kind of drama therapist I am and what groups I can do.

Behind a strong sense of resistance are anger and sadness. Covid forces me to remain lying on the ground as a wounded human being. Every day there’s something new, something excepted. I have been dead and then reborn every day to be alive. Chaos and trauma are the main topics for this semester’s journals. Here are the main roles appearing in my journals for 15 weeks: witness, fixer, impatient one, child, overwhelmed one, friend, therapist, angry one, sad one, holder, empath, chaotic one, aggressive one, and passionate one, etc. As I look through, my transference encounters can be categorized into three groups: individual supervision, peer supervision, and individual session. For interactions with my supervisor, I am more like a child expecting from mom’s care. For interactions with my peer therapists, I am a male figure and problem-solver trying to hold their anger and sadness. For interactions with my clients, I am mostly an empath, sometimes a wise person, sometimes a friend. It actually corresponds to my three prominent inner roles. I am a wise and empathic elder, a problem-solving and efficient leader, and a willful and anxious child. When I am the therapist and my inner child feel safe, I can work well, listen to my clients with my full heart, and respect their pace of growth. “The bones” I collected prior to graduate life are love and self-identity. I am loved and full of love. I have solved the question of who I am in regard to sense of purpose and therefore can give my adolescent clients enough containment. I know my next bone to collect is accepting who I am and therefore can company my clients together and work on that. However, I don’t think some bones prior to graduate school are valuable for me to move forward. In fact, Covid brought social isolation and organizational dysfunction, triggering my childhood trauma, and my strong sense of control. I try to breathe in a new life with existing bones, only finding out the breath throwing me backward.

Therapy always brings the most real version of self and deepest fears and hopes. As I look at my journal, I see a pattern of a child trying to control the world. The child is me. She tries to fix the organization, hold the client, save herself, etc. She is powerful and vulnerable. She is creative and innocent (usually vibrant colors). She is messy and chaotic (disorganized lines). My life stories begin with the keyword family. As the only child of my small family and the only girl (my cousins are all boys) in my big family, I got a lot of attention. I am a spoiled child with abundant love, but I am also a sensitive child without enough emotional care. I grow up in a family when love is guaranteed, but the way to get love is by demanding. Because one knows how to deal with negative emotions, it can turn into big arguments and fights. Even though I understand the special family dynamics now, I still feel a sense of insecurity ingrained in my subconscious, which is also shown in my journal. It created some difficulties as I treat everyone who shows some authenticity as my family. The boundary issue rises up because I care for them deeply. However, caring too much drains my energy. Then, the next keyword is study. I don’t have much working experience, so school occupies most of my life. I know I am good at and have a deep passion for learning. For this semester, I have understood more about compromise and expectations. The transferences and countertransferences showed me how much I have accomplished, about trusting and honoring others’ free will. I see myself interacting with others and discovering their patterns and behaviors. Those are what I always did before coming to graduate school. I discover the good side of people and share that with enthusiasm. Then the final keyword is loneliness. I am strongly aware of myself versus others. Those images include either a small figure representing me or concrete edges representing boundaries. I reflect growing up I always feel lonely and try to use the stimulus to distract myself. Before graduate school, I thought becoming a therapist can help others and make me feel less lonely. Partly is true. Now, I see those transferences with compassion. It shows that I am working on facing my own. I’ve overcome a lot. I am gaining courage and safety.

At the time of writing, I am singing with a mourning tone and saying goodbye to some old patterns of negative thinking and sacrificing. I am breathing out the smell of fear and breathing in human connections. Even though I am not growing as a therapist, I am growing as a human being. Hope the La Loba one day can realize she doesn’t need all the bones she collects to bring a new life. Some bones have already died by the time she starts to sing.

PS: Attached are a few journal drawings: