Group Therapy

If you haven't figured out by now, instead of trying to focus on the mundane details of everything I do all week, I'm trying to pick out the most significant things and talk about those. I'm doing this because I feel like by picking out the most important things I will end up with a more genuine blog to look back on at the end of this nursing shenanigan.

So that being said, this week we had seminar for the first time in well over a month. The topic of this seminar was "Mental Health Topics," so we didn't really know what to expect. It turned out to be a seminar about therapeutic communication, which is something we actually talk about every day in my clinical rotation. Therapeutic communication in a nutshell, is when you have a conversation with someone with the intent of digging deeper and finding out how they are feeling. It is not focused on you, you don't use any self-disclosure, and you focus on how they are feeling and ask questions to learn more. So we talked a little about therapeutic communication and then our instructor asked for a volunteer to come up and help her demonstrate what we would be doing later when we broke up into groups to practice. One student volunteered, and though we had scenarios that we could choose to use, she chose to talk about her real life (another option she told us we could use). Within a minute or so or her talking, we realized that she was genuinely having problems in her life and she got really emotional in front of the whole class. The instructor kept going with the demonstration and at the end, the entire class was absolutely silent. So then we broke up into groups and took turns being the nurse and the patient. Since the student who had gone up in front of the class was in my group, I felt that it was only fair that all talk about real life when it was our turn to be the patient. So we did. Megan and Cheryl were the other two people in my group (two of my best nursing friends), so it was pretty easy to just talk to them. It was such an awesome day though. All of us got to talk about our stuff that was going on, and it made it much easier to have a genuine therapeutic conversation. I love group therapy so it was great :) It's so amazing how these people that I didn't even know a year ago have become some of the people I relate to the most and have come to trust more than a lot of people in my life. Love them.

Sticking with talking about therapeutic communication, we talk with residents in Ferguson all day during clinical. Most of these people have really serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, OCD, etc., and they have a lot of issues and problems in their lives. Over several years of students coming in, they have learned that the students are "safe" and therefore they tend to cling to us and want to talk with us about the things they are feeling or the things that are going on in their lives. So we spend all day trying to use the things we have learned about therapeutic communication to help them to feel better, and help us dig deeper into what they are feeling. It's really interesting as we are starting to learn more about them both from figuring it out on our own, and by talking with our instructor during post-conference. Some of them have just had such hard lives. Being abandoned by friends, parents, siblings, spending time in jail, spending time in rehab, being hospitalized frequently, and so many other things. It's been such an incredible learning experience to spend time getting to know these people and learning so much about their lives. Earlier this week I was sort of feeling like I was getting bored with clinical and not really getting anything more out of it, but now I've sort of had a renewed sense of wanting to learn more from the residents. Which is good because I still have two more weeks there :)