learning...

yay ladies night!
yay martinis!
yay weekend!
yay samoas!
yay spring!
boo social work!

i made the mistake of going to an msw job fair this afternoon, and it was very depressing. everyone was nice and eager and talking about all the important work you get to do with cancer patients or adolescents or substance users. then i ask them about starting salary and they talk about their "competitive starting salary" of $46K, and this is from the hospitals which are known for their relatively high salaries. now, yes, i know that this is more than i'm making now and not a bad salary for tulsa, but in new york city, after taxes it barely covers the rent... on a 1br apt. back to the drawing board...
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don't tell my boss (who's one of the founders of the cognitive tradition in psychology), but i'm learning to love psychodynamic psychotherapy. there's a certain artistic and intuitive quality that makes it more engaging than other, more "evidence-based" intervention techniques. it also uses the therapist more so than a more cognitive or behavioral approach. i am learning a lot about myself as i explore the various pathologies and neurotic tendencies of my clients. i always thought of myself as a fairly uninteresting specimen. my parents once gave me a cartoon from the new yorker with a college girl sitting in her dormroom writing a letter that says: dear mom and dad, thanks for the happy childhood. now i'll never be a writer psychologist. and i thought it was pretty much true, but as i go through the process of analyzing my clients, i realize that there's a lot of me that i've left unanalyzed (maybe for the better). i mentioned in an earlier post that i am more neurotic than i ever thought of myself as being. i tend to judge myself pretty harshly against a standard of perfection that i will likely never achieve. i think this is part of the reason i've had such a difficult time figuring out what i should do with my life. at some level, i've internalized my parents' hopes and desires for what i'd achieve, and they're not quite meshing with what i see myself enjoying. the difficulty is parsing out what is me and what is my parents and what is everything else.