Every year for the past 15 years I have curated a playlist of my most listened to songs of the year. In the beginning, in 2008, it was music from my own rather massive collect but somewhere along the line I switched to newly discovered music I find on YouTube. YouTube has about 2 billion monthly users who listen to music. If you aren’t putting some sort of posting of your music on YouTube you are massively limiting your reach.
My Playlists I currently have about 800 subscriptions to music labels (big and small), as well as individual artists and bands. Each year I listen to about 1200 songs and reduce that to a maximum of 54 songs. I wrap the playlist up by December 31, although I did not finish the 2022 list until the second week of January 2023.
Currently working on the 2023 playlist and here is a song from the 2023 curated favorites song playlist: Margaret Glaspy – Get Back
The lives of individuals are shaped, for better or worse, by their experiences in groups. People are born into groups. Throughout life, they join groups. They will influence and be influenced by family, religious, social, and cultural groups that constantly shape behavior, self-image, and both physical and mental health.
Groups can support individual members in times of pain and trouble, and they can help people grow in ways that are healthy and creative. However, groups also can support deviant behavior or influence an individual to act in ways that are unhealthy or destructive.
Because our need for human contact is biologically determined, we are, from the start, social creatures. This propensity to congregate is a powerful therapeutic tool. Formal therapy groups can be a compelling source of persuasion, stabilization, and support. Groups organized around therapeutic goals can enrich members with insight and guidance; and during times of crisis, groups can comfort and guide people who otherwise might be unhappy or lost. In the hands of a skilled, well-trained group leader, the potential curative forces inherent in a group can be harnessed and directed to foster healthy attachments, provide positive peer reinforcement, act as a forum for self-expression, and teach new social skills. In short, group therapy can provide a wide range of therapeutic services, comparable in efficacy to those delivered in individual therapy. In some cases, group therapy can be more beneficial than individual therapy ( Scheidlinger 2000; Toseland and Siporin 1986).
Group therapy and addiction treatment are natural allies. One reason is that people who abuse substances often are more likely to remain abstinent and committed to recovery when treatment is provided in groups, apparently because of rewarding and therapeutic forces such as affiliation, confrontation, support, gratification, and identification. This capacity of group therapy to bond patients to treatment is an important asset because the greater the amount, quality, and duration of treatment, the better the client’s prognosis (Leshner 1997; Project MATCH Research Group 1997).
The effectiveness of group therapy in the treatment of substance abuse also can be attributed to the nature of addiction and several factors associated with it, including (but not limited to) depression, anxiety, isolation, denial, shame, temporary cognitive impairment, and character pathology (personality disorder, structural deficits, or an un-cohesive sense of self). Whether a person abuses substances or not, these problems often respond better to group treatment than to individual therapy (Kanas 1982; Kanas and Barr 1983). Group therapy is also effective because people are fundamentally relational creatures.
There are many solutions to homelessness, including: Permanent supportive housing Federal housing assistance, such as public housing and Section 8 vouchers Increasing access to job training and employment Helping people pay for housing in the short term Helping people access services to stay in housing Preventing homelessness by helping people find alternate housing arrangements Homelessness can expose people to serious health risks and make it difficult to access health care.
1. Figure out why you lie and who you lie to. We’ve all lied at one time or another, to different people, to ourselves, and for different reasons. But coming up with a systematic plan for becoming more honest will be difficult unless you try to define those reasons and those people for yourself.
Lies to make ourselves look better might include exaggerations, embellishments, and flat-out tall-tales we tell to others, and ourselves, to make ourselves feel better about our inadequacies. When you’re unhappy about something, it’s much easier to fill it in with lies than tell the truth. o We lie to peers we think are better than us, because we want them to respect us as we respect them. Unfortunately, being dishonest is disrespectful in the long run. Give people more credit for their ability to empathize and understand you on a deeper level. Lies that avoid embarrassment might include lies told to cover up bad behaviors, transgressions, or any activity we’re not proud of. If your mom found a pack of cigarettes in your jacket, you might lie and say that they’re your friend’s to avoid punishment. We lie to authoritative figures to avoid embarrassment and punishment, including ourselves. When we’ve done something we feel guilty about, lies are told to eliminate the guilt, avoid the punishments, and get back to the objectionable behavior we’re forced to lie about. It’s a vicious cycle.
2. Anticipate behaviors that will make you feel guilty. To break the chain of embarrassment and lying, it’s important to learn to anticipate things that you’ll likely feel guilty about in the future, and avoid those behaviors. When you lie, you’re covering up some uncomfortable truth that’s more easily couched in a lie. You can either get comfortable with the truth, or abandon the behavior that makes you embarrassed. If you smoke cigarettes, you won’t have to lie if everyone knows it’s true. Own up to it. If a behavior is un-own-upable, it’s probably best to avoid it. It would be humiliating for your wife to find out that you had an inappropriate relationship with a coworker, but you won’t have to lie if you don’t do it.
3. Avoid situations in which you’ll have to lie for others. Be wary when someone tells you something in confidence that you know that you should share with someone else (e.g., knowledge of a crime, a lie, or a harmful act against another). Hearing such information puts you in a difficult position, especially when the truth eventually emerges and reveals to the affected person that you knew all along. If someone begins a sentence with “Don’t tell so-and-so about this, okay?” be prepared to offer your own disclaimer: “If it’s something that I’d want to know about were I them, then please don’t tell me. I don’t want to be responsible for anyone’s secrets but my own.”
Here is a simple and potentially deep handout. It developed out of a process conversation in Mens group when I asked who was the first person to turn you onto drugs or alcohol. From that question and conversation came the next which was what character traits did that person have. After many Mens groups it eventually developed into the handout below. Sometimes I combine who first turned you on with other people who had an influence. Sometimes I add: what characteristics does a person in recovery have, or what are your characteristics?
Ideally this is a conversation, but if your group is not open to sharing than I hand out a sheet with the questions and folks write out their answers and than we share.
The Handout: List four people in your life that have had an influence, affect, change. Two positive and two negative. What aspects stood out in their characteristics; (respectful, kind, stingy, generous, loner, peple person, ect).
People are homeless when they lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. This includes those living in emergency shelters, transitional housing, or places not meant for habitation, such as an abandoned building. In the United States, there are over half a million people experiencing homelessness. The top four causes of homelessness are lack of affordable housing, relationship breakdown, substance abuse, and a previous experience of family homelessness. Nearly three-quarters of people experiencing homelessness are adults aged 25 or older, and 18% are children under the age of 18. Other groups of people who are more likely to become homeless include people with physical and mental disabilities, people experiencing alcoholism and substance use, women, children, and youth, and seniors. The four types of homelessness are transitional, episodic, chronic, and hidden.
While therapists can draw upon any number of talk therapy techniques to help their clients, there are times when talk isn’t helpful or can’t be summoned. In such cases, the arts can open a back door to the psyche, drawing from individuals that which they cannot yet put into words, thus catalyzing subsequent therapeutic conversations. Creative arts therapies involve the use of the arts—visual art, music, dance and movement, drama, and poetry—to facilitate therapeutic goals.
According to photographer Marianne Gontarz York, MSW, LCSW, “Eighty percent of sensory stimuli enters through our eyes and goes into our brains where it is retained visually, nonverbally. Most of us think, feel, and recall memories not in words but in imagery. These images become a verbal language when we attempt to communicate what is going on in our mind to someone else.” The creative arts, Gontarz York says, “offer our social work clients a nonverbal way of expressing themselves and communicating their needs. These adjunctive therapies are invaluable in allowing people to express themselves when words cannot.”
In addition to facilitating communication, the arts also help clients forge relationships. “Creative arts therapies are wonderful starting grounds for building a verbal and nonverbal trusting relationship between a client and therapist and in group therapy between members of the group,” says Sally Bailey, MFA, MSW, RDT/BCT, a professor and director of the drama therapy program in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance at Kansas State University. “Working together on a project—whether that is a drama game, a mural, a song, or a group poem—creates connections that gently allow clients to reveal parts of themselves to others for a richer interpersonal knowledge.”
While creative arts therapies aren’t necessarily or entirely nonverbal, they recognize that talking isn’t always the best way to communicate, and, as a result, encourage and facilitate self-expression and active participation without depending entirely on a verbal articulation of issues. “The arts therapies provide a complement to traditional ‘talk therapies’ because they can address the full range of human experience—cognitive, behavioral, and affective domains,” says Nicholas F. Mazza, PhD, dean and Patricia V. Vance professor of social work in the College of Social Work at Florida State University. These approaches, he says, are being increasingly used in social work practice because the evidence for their usefulness has grown and been demonstrated by clinical reports and by qualitative and quantitative studies.
Arts therapies are “old human technology that has been used as long as there’s been art,” observes Shelly Goebl-Parker, MSW, LCSW, ATR-BC, program director of the art therapy counseling program in the department of art and design in the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Indeed, the healing power of the arts was well known in ancient Rome and Greece.
“The arts have a long history in the practice of psychotherpy going back to the settlement house movement in the late 19th century,” Mazza says. “Through the years, the arts have been incorporated as adjunctive techniques in individual, family, group, and community practice.”
Any of the creative arts modalities may be used as a primary form of therapy or an adjunct to other modalities to improve the physical, cognitive, and psychosocial well-being of individuals with psychiatric disorders, developmental disabilities, neurological diseases, physical disabilities, and medical conditions, and may be practiced in the entire spectrum of therapeutic settings.
