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So, I haven't been giving regular updates on my life as I usually do. I'm sorry, I kept meaning to, but CPE was (as it is designed to be) highly stressful, and when I got home I wasn't really in the mood for writing about it--I just wanted to relax and forget as much about it as possible until the next day. As you may recall, I did my CPE at Oregon State Hospital, the mental facility where they filmed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
I don't remember what I've said before, but the point of Clinical Pastoral Education is to find any issues you might have that interfere with your ability to act pastorally/counsel people. And help you deal with them, or at least figure out how to not let them interfere with the counseling. Needless to say, dealing with one's issues can be quite emotionally stressful. My supervisor was very experienced, and very, very good at his job--which I had mixed feelings about, since it would have been much easier for me if he'd been not quite so good, y'know? One of those experiences that one is glad for afterwards because it was valuable, but never never never wants to have again.
My primary ward wasn't exactly an easy one--it's one of the geriatric wards. Not all elderly people, but all people with dementia for one thing or another--illness, traumatic brain injuries, etc. The reason they're at the state hospital instead of a nursing home is that they're too difficult for regular nursing homes to handle. Most of them are either incapable of or don't like taking care of their own personal hygiene, and don't like anyone else doing it for them--some of them have to be sedated to be showered, for example. Which made them really, really gross, but no less needing of pastoral care. Here are some highlights from my time there:
I was hit on more in those ten weeks than in the entire rest of my wife. Everything from patients saying I'm pretty to asking if I want to have a baby with them. Eep.
Patients so out of it they can't tell the difference between the hospital ward and their own home trying to form romantic/sexual relationships with other patients. And managing to slip off unobserved while the (severely undermanned) staff is busy elsewhere, and have sex. Both were equally enthusiastic we think (they certainly spent enough time cuddling and trying to sneak off together), but neither is anywhere close to the level of cognizance required for consent.
Watching the movie Girl, Interrupted on TV in the Day Room. It's a movie about a girl in a mental hospital who (among other things) seduces one of the orderlies. And one of the patients I was watching with was fixated on one of the staff.
We had a couple of fights; in the one I remember most, the aggressor was a guy I wouldn't have thought was capable of getting out of his wheelchair. He can't even feed himself without assistance, most of the time. But one day out of the blue he lunged at another patient walking by, grabbed him and used his momentum to pull himself out of his chair, and started beating the guy with his other hand. It ended with the aggressor down on the floor, three MHTs (Mental Health Technicians--orderlies, in other words) sitting on him as the RN jabbed him with a sedative.
A couple of patients in there for clinical depression--apparently, when you're severely depressed enough for long enough, depressed thought patterns slip into delusional thought patterns, and you become incapable of separating the delusions from reality. It just broke my heart because the staff try almost universally to make the hospital a safe and welcoming place for everybody, but it's still a pretty scary place. And when you're depressed, it's really a very counterproductive environment, y'know?
Most surreal moment: sitting in a ward at Oregon State Hospital watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with patients.
Anyway, got done with that and wrote my Endorsement Essay and sent it off to the synod office and to my seminary. Endorsement happens in your second year of seminary; your candidacy committee or a representative thereof meets with your seminary's faculty and your advisor and looks over your records so far, including from CPE, and your essay, and decides whether you're Endorsed, Postponed, or Denied. If you're endorsed, you get to continue on. If you're postponed, you can't go on internship until you've convinced them that you've fixed whatever problem they think you need to work on. And if you're denied, well, thassit. You're done. Not going to be a pastor in the ELCA. Sure, you can go to another denomination and try to convince them to ordain you ... but then you've got the unenviable task of explaining to them why your own people didn't want you, even with a shortage of pastors. So, even though I know that my academic record is good, that my CPE final evaluation was positive, and that my candidacy committee likes me ... I'm still not going to be breathing particularly easy until October, when my Endorsement is.
I greatly enjoyed being able to go to my own home congregation for a worship service aimed at people who actually have functioning brains. Worship services at the hospital have to be very carefully planned so that they don't feed into delusions or go over peoples' heads. There are a lot of people in the hospital who ordinarily would have normal IQs, but whose level of functioning is severely compromised by their psych meds. There are even more people who have some degree of mental retardation, either naturally occurring or due to severe drug/alcohol abuse, which again is not helped by their psych meds. And most patients have delusions or weird thought patterns of one kind or another--I mean, if they didn't, they wouldn't be there, right? So you have to tailor worship services to meet the needs of the patients and give them messages they can understand with a minimum possibility of playing into their delusions. And that may meet their spiritual needs, but it sure as Hell doesn't meet mine. That was one of the ongoing things that surely didn't help my stress level.
When that was done, I started staining the deck at my parents place. I can't complain, they're paying me to do so, but I can't say I've ever much cared for painting and there's so much of it. In a week, I managed to get the first coat on the rails and posts and stiles. Much of which will need a second coat, because we had to replace it because of dry rot. (Faulty design--it practically invited water in to hard to reach areas to sit. It's the same style of railing as we have inside the house at the top of the stairs, and for some screwy reason it's sealed much better inside than it was outside.)
My oldest brother had a month of leave this summer before reporting up to the Abraham Lincoln, a Nimitz-class supercarrier home-ported in Everett, Washington. (He's a nuclear reactor technician.) In that time, he got engaged to his high-school sweethear. Both families are thrilled. He was home for the weekend last weekend (the Lincoln's currently in port), and went to the movies with me, his fiancee, fiancee's mother, fiancee's sister, and fiancee's sister's best friend. (We wanted to see Becoming Jane, a chick flick about Jane Austen. He's an easy-going guy and went along with it.) Afterwards, we took him shopping--he had almost no civilian clothes. We had to explain to him, among other things, that buying two pairs of the same jeans is not the same as buying two pairs of jeans. I feel very safe in handing him over to his fiancee; she knows very well how to manage him. It's not that he can't take care of himself; he definitely can do so very well. It's just that I'm his big sister, y'know? I like knowing he's with someone who can take over the reigns.
Next weekend is Labor Day weekend, with the big family gathering that has more people show up, on average, than Christmas. And the day after Labor Day it's back to school for me.
I don't remember what I've said before, but the point of Clinical Pastoral Education is to find any issues you might have that interfere with your ability to act pastorally/counsel people. And help you deal with them, or at least figure out how to not let them interfere with the counseling. Needless to say, dealing with one's issues can be quite emotionally stressful. My supervisor was very experienced, and very, very good at his job--which I had mixed feelings about, since it would have been much easier for me if he'd been not quite so good, y'know? One of those experiences that one is glad for afterwards because it was valuable, but never never never wants to have again.
My primary ward wasn't exactly an easy one--it's one of the geriatric wards. Not all elderly people, but all people with dementia for one thing or another--illness, traumatic brain injuries, etc. The reason they're at the state hospital instead of a nursing home is that they're too difficult for regular nursing homes to handle. Most of them are either incapable of or don't like taking care of their own personal hygiene, and don't like anyone else doing it for them--some of them have to be sedated to be showered, for example. Which made them really, really gross, but no less needing of pastoral care. Here are some highlights from my time there:
I was hit on more in those ten weeks than in the entire rest of my wife. Everything from patients saying I'm pretty to asking if I want to have a baby with them. Eep.
Patients so out of it they can't tell the difference between the hospital ward and their own home trying to form romantic/sexual relationships with other patients. And managing to slip off unobserved while the (severely undermanned) staff is busy elsewhere, and have sex. Both were equally enthusiastic we think (they certainly spent enough time cuddling and trying to sneak off together), but neither is anywhere close to the level of cognizance required for consent.
Watching the movie Girl, Interrupted on TV in the Day Room. It's a movie about a girl in a mental hospital who (among other things) seduces one of the orderlies. And one of the patients I was watching with was fixated on one of the staff.
We had a couple of fights; in the one I remember most, the aggressor was a guy I wouldn't have thought was capable of getting out of his wheelchair. He can't even feed himself without assistance, most of the time. But one day out of the blue he lunged at another patient walking by, grabbed him and used his momentum to pull himself out of his chair, and started beating the guy with his other hand. It ended with the aggressor down on the floor, three MHTs (Mental Health Technicians--orderlies, in other words) sitting on him as the RN jabbed him with a sedative.
A couple of patients in there for clinical depression--apparently, when you're severely depressed enough for long enough, depressed thought patterns slip into delusional thought patterns, and you become incapable of separating the delusions from reality. It just broke my heart because the staff try almost universally to make the hospital a safe and welcoming place for everybody, but it's still a pretty scary place. And when you're depressed, it's really a very counterproductive environment, y'know?
Most surreal moment: sitting in a ward at Oregon State Hospital watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with patients.
Anyway, got done with that and wrote my Endorsement Essay and sent it off to the synod office and to my seminary. Endorsement happens in your second year of seminary; your candidacy committee or a representative thereof meets with your seminary's faculty and your advisor and looks over your records so far, including from CPE, and your essay, and decides whether you're Endorsed, Postponed, or Denied. If you're endorsed, you get to continue on. If you're postponed, you can't go on internship until you've convinced them that you've fixed whatever problem they think you need to work on. And if you're denied, well, thassit. You're done. Not going to be a pastor in the ELCA. Sure, you can go to another denomination and try to convince them to ordain you ... but then you've got the unenviable task of explaining to them why your own people didn't want you, even with a shortage of pastors. So, even though I know that my academic record is good, that my CPE final evaluation was positive, and that my candidacy committee likes me ... I'm still not going to be breathing particularly easy until October, when my Endorsement is.
I greatly enjoyed being able to go to my own home congregation for a worship service aimed at people who actually have functioning brains. Worship services at the hospital have to be very carefully planned so that they don't feed into delusions or go over peoples' heads. There are a lot of people in the hospital who ordinarily would have normal IQs, but whose level of functioning is severely compromised by their psych meds. There are even more people who have some degree of mental retardation, either naturally occurring or due to severe drug/alcohol abuse, which again is not helped by their psych meds. And most patients have delusions or weird thought patterns of one kind or another--I mean, if they didn't, they wouldn't be there, right? So you have to tailor worship services to meet the needs of the patients and give them messages they can understand with a minimum possibility of playing into their delusions. And that may meet their spiritual needs, but it sure as Hell doesn't meet mine. That was one of the ongoing things that surely didn't help my stress level.
When that was done, I started staining the deck at my parents place. I can't complain, they're paying me to do so, but I can't say I've ever much cared for painting and there's so much of it. In a week, I managed to get the first coat on the rails and posts and stiles. Much of which will need a second coat, because we had to replace it because of dry rot. (Faulty design--it practically invited water in to hard to reach areas to sit. It's the same style of railing as we have inside the house at the top of the stairs, and for some screwy reason it's sealed much better inside than it was outside.)
My oldest brother had a month of leave this summer before reporting up to the Abraham Lincoln, a Nimitz-class supercarrier home-ported in Everett, Washington. (He's a nuclear reactor technician.) In that time, he got engaged to his high-school sweethear. Both families are thrilled. He was home for the weekend last weekend (the Lincoln's currently in port), and went to the movies with me, his fiancee, fiancee's mother, fiancee's sister, and fiancee's sister's best friend. (We wanted to see Becoming Jane, a chick flick about Jane Austen. He's an easy-going guy and went along with it.) Afterwards, we took him shopping--he had almost no civilian clothes. We had to explain to him, among other things, that buying two pairs of the same jeans is not the same as buying two pairs of jeans. I feel very safe in handing him over to his fiancee; she knows very well how to manage him. It's not that he can't take care of himself; he definitely can do so very well. It's just that I'm his big sister, y'know? I like knowing he's with someone who can take over the reigns.
Next weekend is Labor Day weekend, with the big family gathering that has more people show up, on average, than Christmas. And the day after Labor Day it's back to school for me.
