The #2 question I get asked ever so frequently by people that I'm not just giving the 5 second answer of what a music therapist is/does is:
"Right, so...what do you actually...like you know...do exactly...?"
I gradually learned throughout my practicum, internship, and early professional experiences, that nothing can happen therapeutically without a properly established rapport. Developing one's own approach to clients is a very personal journey and while I'm someone who tends to just jump in and make friends with everyone there have been plenty of times I have fallen completely on my face.
How a therapist chooses to build rapport with their clients is completely individual to the therapist's personality, the setting that the therapist is working in, and the needs of the client. The relationship built has a basis in what happens during therapy but it also is the little things that occur between activities and before and after each session.
All I can do is speak to my experiences, and I know that in a psychiatric setting it meant showing up every week at the appointed hour, speaking to your clients like they were real people, and sometimes popping in to different activities throughout the week so that your face and presence would stay fresh in someone's mind. More often than not, it meant encouraging multicultural interactions (the language I spoke, ethnic instruments, childhood songs) to present novel stimuli in order to engage an individual.
In my experience in the educational setting, I worked with early childhood classrooms full of children who came from Spanish-speaking families. Each child had a different reason for being in the classroom, and I was awed at the mix of typical as well as special needs children. This was a co-teach situation in which there were three teachers, and I don't remember exactly what all their specific jobs were but I knew that one was from South America and spoke primarily in Spanish, one was from Mexico and was bilingual, and the other was a Dallas native who spoke mostly in English. In speaking with the children and their teachers, I wondered about how the language we speak to our clients affects our relationships with them, and this concept was at the heart of my master's thesis. The study itself ended up being quantitative in nature (measuring standardized test scores at the beginning and end of the year) but there were so many immeasurable experiences that I would like to eventually explore in the future. Building relationships with these kids meant making jokes in English and in Spanish, taking time to engage them and answer their questions in a way they could understand. Sometimes this meant switching languages, and a lot of times it meant asking the teachers for help. This setting was where I really developed my child's group facilitation skills, and between that and all the language swapping, I would exit the classroom absolutely sweating.
In a pediatric hospital setting it looks different across specialties. It may mean bringing in an instrument in which the patient is interest in order to engage them in a different way, presenting a new way of thinking about swallowing pills using their favorite band, or watching a whole lot of Barney on the computer. This setting immersed me fully in an eclectic approach to music therapy, where I basically had this big theoretical bag of tricks and would tailor my knowledge to the situation and the patient. It's an exhilarating way to approach therapy, because I knew that I could have a general idea of what I wanted to use and what I wanted to do with it, but more often than not the patient and their present circumstance, family, what they had for breakfast, the latest news from their doctor would throw me a curve ball. Knowing your patients, knowing what tools to use, words to say (and often, what not to say), and how you relate to their family members (HUGE when we're talking about multicultural implications of therapy and relationships) can all be factors in building that relationship. I could talk all day about this setting and therapeutic relationships and the perks of being bilingual, and you'll hear a lot about it as I flesh these ideas and experiences out.
So, there's an overview of therapeutic relationships, with a multicultural twist. Next up: goal setting (with spice!)
