Editors’ Reflections
Why do so many music therapists leave music therapy? Roia Rafieyan, MA, MT-BC, Editor-in-Chief Sometimes, walking around our large residential facility with its many buildings and large grassy areas, I watch the grounds workers. They sit on top of their tractors, wearing earphones, mowing the fields in the sunshine. And I think to myself how peaceful it must be to have a job like that, one where you can go home at the end of the day and not have to keep thinking through and reliving the workday. It would be so much more straightforward than what I do. I mean, sure you can mess up lawn mowing, but there aren’ t that many ways to do it. Pretty much everyone gets what you’ re doing, and there aren’ t legions of people asking you to explain or justify your work. They’ d just take for granted you know what you’ re doing and let you do it in peace. At least that’ s my fantasy( a fantasy, granted, which would fade pretty quickly once the snow and ice came along and shoveling and salting the sidewalks was involved).
I suspect part of the reason I harbor this fantasy is I’ ve worked at the same facility for almost three decades. While I’ m pretty sure I haven’ t lost my passion for music therapy, working in an institution is difficult, and exhausting. Everything Judy Belland points out in her piece,“ Why did you leave music therapy?” One music therapist’ s answer, is just as true for me. Every word of it! Some days more painfully so than others.
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Occasionally I wonder what the heck it means about me that I can still go to work every day and do this. I suppose I could have gone and worked somewhere else. There’ s no law that says I have to stay in a difficult job. And maybe this speaks less of my passion for music therapy and a lot more about my pathological need for familiarity, my tendency to guilt, my lack of objectivity, and maybe about needing my clients more than I should. After so many years, it gets complicated.
But these are the musings of a 50- year old music therapist.
I often share about being an anxious mess for the first six years at my job. And that was back at a time when I actually had a music therapist supervising me at work and there were two other music therapists in our unit! I felt awkward coming up with activities, and mostly they didn’ t seem to work. I thought about all the wonderful Nordoff-Robbins videos I’ d seen and wondered why none of my sessions seemed to work the way theirs did. Granted, I worked with adults, but music therapy was supposed to work with everyone! Especially for people with disabilities. Why wasn’ t it?
I began to worry I wasn’ t very good at being a music therapist.
I read Edith Boxill’ s book, Music therapy for the developmentally disabled, over and over. I was inspired by it, and, yet I still didn’ t see much change in my clients’ responses. So I started to look outside music therapy for the answers, thinking if I learned about special education or social work I’ d somehow become a better music therapist. I started considering graduate school, and, because I made the( insanely inaccurate) assumption I’ d learned everything there was to learn about music therapy( and still wasn’ t doing it well), I looked into social work and special education programs.
That’ s how close I came to giving up on music therapy.
I was at the end of my music therapy rope, and I was about to try the one thing I had yet to try and knew nothing about: clinical supervision. As it happened( and as I have said on numerous occasions and to anyone who will listen), it saved my music therapy life! I stayed in the profession, remained at the facility, and I went on to finish graduate studies in music therapy.
And here I still am.
Even though I continued to be a music therapist, it didn’ t mean there weren’ t times when I needed to stop for a while. I took a break from work for three months in the Summer of 2008. I remember it taking at least a month of not being at work to finally feel as if I could