Backslash

Congrats to Ube and her man - they've got a new baby on their hands! Kaloo, kalay! Little Backslash has been born!

Upside down you turn me

Did anyone out there hear about the incident at Montebello High School that happened last year, in which students (apparently from neighboring districts) took down the school's American flag, flipped it upside down, and hung it below the Mexican flag? If you've heard about it at all, it's likely you gleaned the information from a frothy-mouthed mass email message that's been circulating for a year or more since the incident. That's how I got the info, just today, in my inbox, from a friend of my mom's who insists on including me in all her mass mailings, which include dumb jokes, prayers for our soldiers, mainstream-conservative political diatribes, virus alerts (all hoaxes), "Amber" alerts (actual and unsubstantiated), and god knows what else.

It turns out that the Montebello High incident, the result of last year's national walk-out to protest Congressional immigration reforms, is news that I happen to be interested in, when it's not couched in the right-wing vitriol of a random mass emailing:

"If you choose to remain uninvolved (Ed. note: i.e. if we don't stop those uppity brown kids), do not be amazed when you no longer have a nation to call your own nor anything you have worked for left since it will be 'redistributed' to the activists while you are so peacefully staying out of the 'fray.'"

Yeah, our American Way of Life is truly in danger when high school students march in solidarity to protest U.S. immigration law and (ooh, shivers!) turn a flag upside down (the sight of which, by the way, the mass email in question called "heart-stopping!") I guess they're really sullying that old First Amendment by exercising free speech and freedom of assembly. The argument can be made that school officials must keep kids in class; in fact, the Montebello kids weren't the instigators, because they were on lock-down and unable to participate in the demonstration. But shit, if kids are skipping school once in a while to engage in activism of all things, and they didn't even destroy the flag (an act I have no moral qualm with, though I could see someone getting busted for damaging school property,) what is the bloody fucking harm?



So, despite my interest in this particular subject, I decided to attempt to cut off any further junk mailings by my mom's friend. I hit "reply" on the message, and immediately fell into a writer's block when considering how to word such a request in a polite manner. I really wanted to say, "Pardon me, but I have no interest in this racist alarmist crapola and would you kindly remove me from your list?" Hey, at least that statement was half-polite. I found this site, which might be useful to folks finding themselves in a similar dilemma:

ThanksNo.Com

It's a pretty straightforward form letter available for linking to anyone you need to school in mass mail etiquette. After getting inspiration from Thanks No, I opted for my own wording, which I hope was innocuous enough:

I'm emailing you because I'd like to request that you take me off your "group email" list. While I'm always happy to receive personal, one-on-one emails from friends, or invitations to specific events, I'd rather not receive mass-forwarded jokes, political messages, etc.

I don't mean to be ungracious or rude. I'm happy that you include me among your nearest and dearest! I just don't like receiving mass-delivered mail.

Thanks a bunch, and take care!

Viva La Raza!
--Bree

Getting in Touch

Last week, I had a session with my very first ever psychotherapy client! I'm sure there was nothing particularly healing about the session, other than the simple Hawthorne effect - here was an eager psych intern listening intently and asking detailed, very personal questions about someone's life, and maybe they did or didn't benefit or feel better as a result of just being paid attention to by me. But we had a good rapport, the client was open to sharing stuff with me, and I was a lot less anxious and more grounded than I thought I'd be. After I got back to the clinic from lunch break, I mentioned to a colleague that I thought, in the minutes before seeing my first client, that I would feel out of my body, like I was floating, and I that I actually didn't feel that at all. I was also worried about how much I'd be sweating from nervousness in the session, but that too was under a reasonable amount of control. Focusing on my breathing really helped. Keeping alert and attuned to what was being said (and not said) by the client kept me centered on the task at hand. And recording my progress notes directly after the session was a useful exercise in remembering a lot of the detail that may have escaped my mind by now.

The other really cool thing that happened was that I had a phone appointment with a local psychotherapist who has some expertise in grief work and running bereavement therapy groups. Graciously, she gave me about an hour on the phone to give me some insight and pointers about starting a grief group at the clinic. Talking to her really put me in touch with why I want to do this work: I want to help people hold and move through their suffering, particularly as it relates to loss and grief. Essentially, she was inviting me to play on the "existential playground" as she called it, to join a community of healers who help people navigate this life/death threshold. I feel very new and humble right now, not taking myself so very seriously or trying to sound self-important. Of all the playgrounds, this is certainly one of the scariest to choose for myself, like being a two year-old at the top of the spiral slide on the "big kid's" side of the park. But this is where I want to be.

Back to Skewl

Had my first day of school today, with the end of summer on my mind. This song's been in my head all day.* Had me a blast, I did. Off the top, this is what I did this summer:

- went camping a couple times
- started a nerdy alumni site for my Jewish camp friends
- started my clinical internship
- watched a lot of Buffy
- read a bit for my thesis
- started taking ballroom dance lessons with the GF!
- put all my old photos into albums
- made out with Olivia Newton-John under the dock

We had one class tonight. I think I'm gonna like our new instructor for family therapy; she's a no-bullshit kinda lady. The other thing that happened at school was that the dean of our department assured us that even though our hippy-ass college is under probation and may lose its accreditation, our degrees won't be affected. As long as we are enrolled in an accredited college, she tells us, we're covered. Future students might not fare so well. I'll keep you all posted, naturally.

*Note: link changed from original. Now, watch the stop-motion Lego version of "Summer Nights" from Grease - it's hilarious. Something sublime about little lego men saying, "You got in her drawers, right?"

Technorati

Just listed myself on Technorati. Check it out.

Technorati Profile

I've pinged them, but they're still only listing really old entries - does anyone know how this thing works? Thanks!

--Bree

Me/You

Where do "I" end and "you" begin?

Patrick Swayze thinks he knows the answer.

"This is my dance space; this is your dance space," he asserts, with confidence.

I don't buy that whole idea, though, that we exist as totally separate entities with precise boundaries (not that Patrick Swayze was making an analogy about human interaction, and not that I seek some permeable merging of self with Patrick Swayze, either, mind you) but as I live and love and experience the world, I'm coming to realize that the concept of "self" itself is a much more ambiguous notion than we tend to conceptualize here in the West.

I'm coming at this from the context of being a very green psychotherapist- in-training: what is my client's shit, and what is my shit, when I'm sitting in the room with him/her/hir? Will I be able to suss out what the client is expressing (or not expressing) from my own feeling states as they arise in our interaction? The operative technical terms here are the transference and the countertransference, which are generally used in a psychotherapy context, but can obviously be applied to any interaction we have with a particular person, or with people or institutions or objects more generally. Crudely put, transference phenomena are the projected feelings a client puts onto the therapist (or a person puts onto another significant person), in an enactment of unconscious, deeply ingrained relational dynamics. The classic example might be the client regarding the therapist as a parent figure and unconsciously acting out as if one was with a parent. On the flip side, the countertransference refers to the therapist's feelings toward the client, and is understood in a couple different ways. It can refer both to the therapist's personal unconscious processes being enacted with the client and to the therapist's conscious utilization of the feelings that are generated in the presence of the client in order to forward therapeutic ends. It's at this very early stage in my development as a therapist that I am beginning to understand how crucial these concepts will be.

This is a very simplistic representation of how I'm imagining the interaction I'm describing:



The main anxiety I'm feeling about beginning therapy with my first clients (which will be within about two weeks' time) is how to negotiate that intersection: when is that intermediate space well-boundaried and productive, and when is it a mushy-boundaried, collapsed space? Certainly, my boundaries with clients need to be kept quite intact, and just permeable enough in order to have a human, real interaction, but when might a collapsed space actually be fruitful, if not totally inappropriate, over-exposing, or detrimental to the curative work of the therapy?

Of course, these anxieties are not contained just to my work as a therapist-in-training. As a person moving about the world with all my particular emotional baggage, I do this delicate dance of intimacy all the time. How much of myself is melding into my lover, and how much of her is melding into me? Are we creating enough space for each other to be wholly ourselves, or are our personal boundaries becoming ever blurrier, to the point that we will dissolve into this indiscernible mass of Bree/Astrid – Brastrid? Astbree? And even in the face of this fear of overlapping, of losing myself, I experience moments when I want nothing more than to completely merge with her, stripped, both of us, naked bellies pressed as far together as possible before we come out the other side. Ah, sweet collapse.