Morning … morning …Getting a little break here in our day. I didn’t take the opportunity to write earlier, but I’m feeling a strong need to now even though we’re at work. Today, I still am substituting for our Group 2. I’ve been with them for their first hour of the day, but now they have about an hour in chapel. The local Priest comes to say the mass every Friday. He’s one of the good guys and I think most of the individuals appreciate his sermons. They are usually fun and meaningful.
There are other things going on in our head now to sort out … Today there are eleven individuals in the group. The first hour we got to know each other a little better. On the surface they each work on their own jigsaw puzzle. While they are doing that, I take copious notes. Just love doing that. Being observational is one of my favorite duties. During the hour of course, there are a jillion and two things going on in the room. People come in one and two at a time and adjust themselves. They are to accept a task, but in the process there is talking and issues to be gone over. There is also a balancing of power. For the last couple of days, I found out, they’d switched theseating order on us. Shoot … where were we? Eh, littlething. There are ten females in the group and one male. I know poor odds all around!
There is a balance of time and attention and an undercurrent. The balance part may be more a matter of power struggle. The one who causes the most disturbances has the most attention sought - usually in a negative way. There is differences too in that I know most the older clients, but there are the new clients to adjust to and they need to adjust to us. They’ve all been hanging together for the last two months and have pretty much got the pecking order down. And my! They do peck at each other. We’ve already had to institute the “Be nice” rule. One of the girls in particular is a little bit of a dare devil hot shot, although on the outside, she pretends to be very female in a helpless manner. I think she purports to control the room and in general does that by leading others astray with her. We’ve decided to go straight forward with her and call a spade by a spade. After she acted out this morning, we told her that over the last couple of days we’ve noted a little mean streak in her. Then we told her we’d be paying attention to that and calling her on it. She seems to have understood because she’s challenging me now as an authority. I think this is great news, because its best she deal with me directlythan sabotaging the group as a whole.
We have another one who is the brightest of the group … Her I worry about in that she seems to be down without sense of hope. I think she realizes that she is the smartest one too, by far. So the goal today with her will be to encourage her intelligence instead of trying to have her fit in with the group. She is and should be a leader. She should also be moved up to the higher group and given a job, but those aren’t the kind of cards I hold. She’s not even on my caseload … so we’ll have to settle for the best we can in the hour after they are back from chapel. I also have the Thinking Group today. There will be some time to plot and plan there. I’m actually looking forward to it, while before I couldn’t see past the point that it hurts our back to be standing as much as we do. But, with 40 clients, there are too many to just sit in one place. Need to roam and keep up with all the distractions. I think today, we’ll finish an exercise I started last time on testing self-esteem.
I think I am doing a lot more “controlling” in the group than I would have wished for. Mostly likely do to the amount of testing we are receiving. I am a pretty fun teacher … Most likely more than any other of the staff, but we have our expectations. I don’t like goofing around during work time. I do like to have fun with thework, but all as a group with everyone on the same page. If there are too many subplots nothing gets accomplished. Part of this effort is trying to understand where each of them is at. After two days, I have a pretty good grasp of their intellectual levels. Today, we explained carefully that one individual I knew could work on harder puzzles, while I knew others needed easier puzzles. One of the hardest parts with this group is making sure that they are “On each other.” There’s a lot of negative stuff going around and between the old and new people there are smaller groups formed of the “popular people” and the others. There is also a third group formed of people who are a little different. Usually this means that people with real mental problems get ostracized. There is also quite a lack of control over the situation of boy and girl friends. The “popular” group wants to make up their own schedule. Hehe – they shall learn. The Center has an agenda all our own. I don’t think they have any idea just how smart we are … sure fun changing that ideal. We can take em to the skies the limit!
Hmm, better get back to work.
1 comment:
Wow. Look at how much you know of this group so quickly.
V
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