My life is a miracle.
Tonight was my first night of class. I sat up in that bitch BLOWED because there were only like 20 people in the WHOLE CLASS! Soooooooo different from my huge university experience.
And…More than half the class were Blacks!
Damn! I never remember a single moment in undergrad when 10 Black people were in a class together at the same time. It didn’t happen. Even in a class of 200, it didn’t happen.
We all sat down and listened as the professor told us what to expect from his class (no tests, a few papers, some role playing) and then he read a bunch of articles and passed out handouts.
It seems that we will study different methods of therapy and learn to apply each method to our case studies and choose the methods we like best. Ohhhh…Now I get it! We study approaches that have worked for different therapists.
I remember the first case he discussed.
There was a therapist named Erickson, so they called it the Ericksonian method. He had a client who said she was tired of being alone and ugly and depressed and that she was going to kill herself. First he asked her if she planned to harm herself, if she had ever harmed herself before, you know just to make sure her threat wasn’t an immediate danger.
After he recognized that it wasn’t, he asked her what she didn’t like about herself and she said that no one liked her, she had never been kissed and no one would ever want to have a family with her. she hated her teeth, because she had a gap in the middle and she would always hide her smile.
Ok. He told her that since she planned to go down anyway, she may as well have one last fling with life. He told her to open her savings account, since she wouldn’t need it where she’s going and go out and have someone help her buy a nice outfit. Just one. Then get her hair done. One last time. Then he wanted her to go home and practice squirting water through the gap in her front teeth. She had to let him know when she could squirt it as least 6 feet. This excercise made her laugh but she did it anyway.
So when she came back to see him, she looked better, she wasn’t hiding the gap in her teeth anymore either. He told her that he understood that she was about to leave us but she had one more assignment, one last fling in life. She had to go to work and find a water fountain, when a man walked up to the fountain the same time as she did, she should fill her mouth with water and squirt the water through her teeth at him and then run away.
She thought he was crazy, but it sounded like an adventure she had never tried so she did it and the man cursed at her and ran after her, and then he kissed her. They started dating soon after, she got married to him withim months and a year later, they had a baby.
His method worked.
Imagine if he had tried to persuade her that she was wrong for hating herself. Imagine if he tried to diagnose her and then treat her illness with medication. In this manner, he agreed with her but subtly directed her toward living a more joyful life. What a great method!
It seems interesting…and doable. Tomorrow night I have Human Growth & Development, and Thursday I’m taking Human Sexuality. We’ll see where this all goes. I wonder what I’m going to learn.
Honestly, as I left the building I experienced a feeling that I recognized. I remembered it because, I felt like that the very first time I went to class in undergrad. That feeling of, “WTF am I doing here?” It was so weird. I guess I always figured that higher level education was for the really smart people and I never considered myself to be book smart.
Ahhh… I’ll get over it.
More pressing on my mind are these two stories that I’m working on. As I mentioned before I have published quite a few stories since I’ve been back in Miami and none of them I’m proud of. I was only doing it for the money and honestly I wish they had taken my damn name off the damn articles.
But I got paid. And I hope to never have to write just for the money again. If I can’t be proud of what I’m producing then what’s the point?
But these two stories aren’t on a tight deadline so I’m able to play and have fun finding great sources and then crafting the perfect angles and then…ohh myy..this is really turning me on…I get to comb through the words and suck on the verbs and…ooh…damn…I love this shit man.
I get to fondle the lead, caress all the grafs and just…enjoy doing what I do.
So an editor at the Miam.i Herald is enjoying me right now. I’ve pitched two stories and she loves them both. And I’m working on a story for another newspaper that is brand new to South Florida and I’m excited about that as well cuz the story is really, really interesting and the sources I got are really, really great sources.
I’m not nervous about writing them at all. I can’t wait until they are done. One of the stories is about the website Mediatak.eout.com. I have an interview scheduled with the editor tomorrow afternoon.
Man..on the real, the whole time I was in class, everytime he introduced a new theory I kept thinking, “This is going to help me sooo much in my writing.”
I don’t get as excited about doing therapy as I do when I’m writing or organizing a story. But I do love theories and philosophy and even today I learned that our brains are like…wired. It seems like he was trying to say, who we are has something to do with our physical brains.
That kind of blew me away. So he’s saying that men and women are just wired differently. That women are more emotional because we have a bigger *something* in our brains which affects our emotions.
What???
I have never heard any of this stuff before.
This therapy stuff is already affecting me. I need to go lie down.