(no subject)

Hee.

One of my co-workers is skipping around the office, grinning happily. She got engaged over the weekend, and there is much happiness.

I? I am sleepy, and starting to run down the Great Rail of Stress. I have:

* Final paper to do for psychopathology.
* Self-evaluation for co-facilitating the group tonight.
* Integrative Project for group.
* Journal for group.
* Final project for group.
* Self-evaluation for Techniques
* Final client evaluation for Techniques
* Final exam for Individual Apprasal lab.

All due in the next two weeks. At least two on the list are 15 pages long. Two on the list require research articles.

I have started...one of these. Deep breaths. Deep, long breaths.

(no subject)

Oh man, did that suck.

It sucked on levels of pain that I was previously unaware of. Or rather, I sucked. My partner in the co-facilitation was excellent. She was poised, friendly, sounded knowledgeable, and drew people out. I? I sucked. We chose a fairly difficult group...we had the members role play being sixth, seventh, and eighth graders whose parents were either about to divorce, in the process of divorce, or had divorced sometime in the recent past. I wrote out the little personas, myself...I did a good job of that, apparently, because people got quite deep into their roles.

Unfortunately, it was rapidly made aware to me that I had no idea how to handle a group of young teenagers. Individually, I think I would have done fine with any of them, but I couldn't concentrate on one without excluding the others, and when I tried to bring others in, I got either withdrawal or over-talkativeness back. We made a bad decision in putting both the most acute case (parents just announced their intention a week ago) and the strongest case (parents were divorced two years ago, has adjusted well) in my group. The acute case wasn't ready to hear that things would get better, and the strongest case was too far removed from the situation to be really empathic. The third member of the group withdrew from the conflict between the two, and my attempts to draw her in were largely unsuccessful. Which is a shame, because I think she would have been the strongest person to help the acute case...there was a mildly similar situation, similar symbology, and a coping style that was more adaptive, but still similar.

There was so much suck, the teacher was passing me notes. When we got back into the larger group, she actually had to take over asking questions. That was beyond embarassing...more so because we /needed/ it. She hasn't had to do that with anyone else.

GAH.