Stunslinger.com Blog

I’m finished with one job, and I’m getting ready to start my new job in Portland.  Part of this required getting another physical at the VA here.  So I went in Monday afternoon and met with the physician who asked me a bunch of questions.  One of these questions was, “What are you going to be doing in Portland?”  I told him, and then he decided he should tell me that his perception is that every psychology employee he’s seen had mental illnesses themselves.  Ok.  I made some joke about “psychologist heal thyself” and we moved on.

Then he kept asking me about Oregon and telling me about relatives or friends who live in certain cities.  I just wanted to get done with it, so I played along, “Oh yeah, Fairvilletown is a great place to live.”  I did well enough because he finally passed me off to the nurse.

She asked me to sign some forms and said, “Oh, your signature is good enough, you could be a doctor.”  I informed her that I actually am a doctor, of psychology.  I followed it up with, “A fake doctor!” and laughed at my joke.  Apparently my joke wasn’t that funny, because she didn’t seem to hear it.  What she did hear was “psychology.”  I should have remembered at the beginning of our meeting she said, “I had a rough Sunday.”  This should have told me to keep my mouth shut, but I missed it.

I should mention that while this was happening, she was prepping the needle she was going to stick into my arm.  So she began telling me about her rotten ex-daughter-in-law who has a counseling degree and treats her like crap.  Great.  “Could I just have the injection without you getting riled up please?”  For ten minutes she regaled me with her fascinating “Story of the Dying Dog and the Evil Ex-Daughter-In-Law.”  All the while the needle sat ready to go on the table.  Ugh.

Anyway, got through the physical and had my blood drawn at the lab.  As a side note, I had the best phlebotomist ever — I didn’t feel the needle go in, and after drawing three vials of blood it didn’t bleed at all onto the bandage.  I’m now physically cleared to be a psychologist resident.  Basically I have to be able to sit in a chair and talk to people.  I’m a perfect physical specimen.

That’s right folks, I am officially (well, basically) Dr. Stunslinger.  I finished my internship yesterday, which was the last requirement to complete my doctorate.  I say that I’m basically Dr., because the degree has not yet posted to my transcript.  My school has to get a letter from my internship director saying that I successfully completed internship, then send the ok to the registrar.  So it’s just paperwork at this point.

It doesn’t really feel real yet.  Yesterday people were calling us doctors, and we didn’t disagree, but it still felt like a joke.

Now I feel like I’m in limbo.  I have one month until my job begins in Oregon.  I always feel odd when I transition to not working.  At first I constantly feel like I need to do something, and then I relax and enjoy myself.  Of course we’re also moving in two weeks, so that adds some pressure.

Well, I’m upset, but life moves on.  I’ll really miss my fellow interns and supervisors, and the patients as well.  I’m sad…but it’s ok.  Every ending is a new beginning, right?  Maybe that should be my mantra this week.

Sorry about the drop in frequency of posting on my part.  I’ve been pre-occupied with my wife’s recovery from ACL surgery and preparing to end my internship.

It’s very strange: I have three workdays left before I’m done.  My whole goal for the last few years has been to get my degree, and now I’m so close it doesn’t feel very real.  It actually sort of feels like I’m watching something in slow motion.  I wanted to say a car crash in slow motion, but that seems a bit morbid.  I’m actually excited in some ways (which I don’t think I’d be in regards to a car crash), but I think it still makes sense.  It’s as if I’ve looked up from the sidewalk and I see two cars on a collision course, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.  That moment when everything seems to slow way down and you watch on, knowing full well what is going to happen any second.  Helpless to do a thing.

That’s sort of how I feel about the end of internship.  It’s strange, because you’d think this would be the moment I’ve been waiting for.  After Friday, I’ll be able to call myself Dr. Stunslinger.  After Friday, my earning potential will increase dramatically (seriously).  After Friday I’ll no longer be hemorrhaging money to my graduate school.  After Friday, there’s nothing stopping us from moving back to Portland.

But still, I’ll really miss my time on internship.  I’ve been very luck to work with 5 other great interns.  We all get along very well, and now we’re going to be scattering.  No longer will I be able to pop into someone else’s office to chat about some bizarre nuance of psychology or to debrief about a weird client.  Ok, I will be able to do that with future co-workers, but it’ll be somewhat different.  I’ll miss my supervisors, who have all been phenomenal and have contributed greatly to my development as a clinician.  It truly has felt as if they each wanted me to become the best psychologist I can, and they’re not afraid to push me a bit, to that end.  I couldn’t have asked for better supervisors.  And I’ll miss the opportunities I’ve had to work on different teams and in different settings.  Every two months something has changed, and that’s sort of exciting.  I’ve been able to better determine what I want to do (work in a hospital) and what I’d prefer not to do (purely traditional mental health work).

All in all, this has been a wonderful experience, and in many ways I’m sad to move on.  But I’m also excited.  I should have said I’ll miss the snow and the excellent snowboarding.  I’ll definitely be back for that!

So as I’m looking down the barrel of three more workdays (one of which I won’t even do any work, just out-processing), I definitely feel conflicted.  I’m sad to see things change, but I’m also excited to begin my professional career.

To my fellow interns, even though none of you read this:  I’ve really enjoyed working with you all, and building excellent friendships.  I hope we keep in touch, and who knows? maybe we’ll even end up working together in the future.  I can hope anyway.  I wish you all the best, and I’m sure you’ll all become leaders in your respective areas of our field.  Many blessings.

For some reason, I seem to have this pattern in my life: whenever I know something (school, a job, etc) is about to end, I start to feel burnout.  It doesn’t seem to matter how long I’ve been doing whatever, it just starts to drag whenever the end is in sight.

I was in graduate school for years, and it was good.  In fact, I actually had a great experience.  But then I was matched for my internship, and for the last few months, it just seemed like I was going through the motions.  Somehow, it was as if knowing things were coming to an end sponsored my feelings of burnout.

This same thing happened at all of my previous jobs as well.  Things would go along great, until it was time to go back to college, or until I was about to start a different job.  I used to chalk this up to my jobs being rather intellectually dull.  Arrogant as it may sound, I figured I needed a job where I did more than pump gas or slop food.  I used to think I had a time limit of sorts, but now I wonder if it just had to do with the fact that I knew things were ending.

The reason this popped into mind is, while I love my internship, I’m feeling a bit burned out.  It’s odd, the whole year I’ve been doing 2 month rotations and I’ve never felt burned out before.  But now I do, a bit.  Still love the people I work with and my patients, but I just don’t have the same motivation.  I can’t wait to have a job where I can work longer, have a more lasting relationship with coworkers and, hopefully, a better impact because people believe in my skills more.

Thanks for letting me share.

No, I cannot.  It seems like as soon as people find out I’m a psychologist-in-training the next question is always, “Can you read my mind?”  Is this a common belief about mental health professionals, that we have some supernatural ability to see into a person’s mind?  Believe it or not, we actually are normal people without ESP who work hard to learn strategies to help people.  I wish I had ESP, it would make part of my job much easier!

Another one I get is, “are you analyzing me right now?”  This one is harder, because it seems as if people are somewhat distrusting of me.  They’re worried that I’m working my voodoo on them, and they don’t necessarily like this.  I guess this is actually related to the first question: if I have ESP and I’m using it on them, that’s a scary proposition.  Thankfully I’ve learned to have good boundaries.  When I walk out the door of work, I stop “analyzing” people.  I actually don’t want to sit around analyzing people…that’s part of my work.  When I’m at home or at a party, I just want to relax and have a good time.

Perhaps I sound a bit frustrated.  It’s true, I’m tired of hearing these questions.  I know people are just curious, but it’s tiring.  I don’t ask investment brokers if they’re sizing up my assets at a party (unless I think they’re hitting on me), and people don’t ask my wife if she’s evaluating their furniture at a party (she works at a consignment furniture store).  I guess it’s not as bad as physicians, who probably get asked to look at rashes or weird growths at parties.  Sigh.  I still love my job!

Enough complaining.

I know recently I complained about never being able to write about work, but this post is going to be about work.  Yesterday we had a seminar on hypnosis and one of our supervisors did an induction with us.  For the record, there is no dangling watch or “you are getting sleepy.”  No spiraling black and white shape either!

Anyway, during the induction I didn’t really feel like I was getting it.  Everybody is hypnotically receptive to some degree, but some people get it much easier than others, and are more affected by it.  When he was going over the criteria for susceptibility, I figured I would not be a great candidate.  I have a hard time disconnecting my critical thinking, I don’t have great visualization skills, and I’m not very suggestible.  This wasn’t stage hypnosis, he wasn’t trying to get us to cluck like chickens or anything, so it wasn’t easy to tell who was or was not hypnotized to some degree.  The script he read, or the metaphor, was all about letting our subconscious mind take over and learn what it needed to learn.

So it seemed like it was just a time of relaxation for me (although I was a bit frustrated by my inability to “get it”).  I went through the rest of my day and then had a headache by the time I got home from work.  Coincidence?  Our supervisor did say that headache is a possible side effect of hypnosis.  Hmm…

Then last night I had very vivid dreams about dynamics that played out in high school.  I did not have a good time in high school, I felt very isolated and “weird.”  Now, I feel much better about myself, but when I get around people from my high school (which happens rarely), I still feel like that little kid.  Anyway, I woke up and realized I had been working out some of my emotions from high school in my dream.  Another coincidence?  Could be.  But part of me wonders if I was more hypnotized than I thought, and this was an effect from that.  Strange.

Argh.  I just sat down and wrote out some things I’ve been thinking/feeling about a situation at my work.  Just as I was about to post it, I realized that even though I post anonymously (really, my name’s not actually Stunslinger) and I didn’t share any specifics about the situation, it still wasn’t professional.  And, ironically, I was complaining about these people being un-professional.

Sometimes I lament the fact that I can’t write about my work life.  So many of the personal blogs I read talk about the person’s life, and often contain posts about that person’s work.  They even post pictures of themselves, their family, and other personal details.  This is part of what makes their blogs interesting.  But I cannot do that.

I have to scrape together blog posts about my life outside of work, for the most part.  Sometimes I write something in reaction to a work situation, but I try to make sure it’s something that is generic enough that I’m not revealing any personal information.

Sometimes I think this hurts my readership.  But really, shouldn’t I see that as a challenge to transcend, rather than something to complain about?  Probably.  I need to re-frame this, which is something I teach my patients all the time.   I will work to overcome this challenge and bring the interweb my odd form of blogging.  After I sleep, anyway.  Good night.

I can’t go into specifics really, but my heart is heavy right now.  I am stuck between two sentiments: Wanting someone to get the help they need, and wanting that same person to not feel as if their rights are being violated.

How do we balance when it is better for someone to be forced to receive treatment than it is to let them keep operating in the world?  It’s hard for me, being a treatment provider, to see patients forced to do something they don’t want.  But at the same time, I see families and friends suffering when the person is doing what they want.  And the argument is made that this is in the person’s best interest, that they really aren’t well enough to know what is best for them at this time.

For me, this is much easier when the person is a direct threat to themselves or someone else.  Sure, at that time they need to be protected from themselves (or the other person needs protection).  But when it’s a more chronic issue, and the person seems to act in a destructive way, but differently, it’s difficult.  My heart goes out to people, and I want to be as helpful as I can.

My job is rarely easy, but this is even harder.

If you read this blog you know I work in a VA Medical Center, and I interact with nurses on a regular basis.  I have to say, on average, nurses deal with a lot of stuff nobody else wants to but is necessary for the patients to get good care.  I appreciate nurses quite a bit.

They get patients up, bathe them, perform dirty procedures and interact with difficult patients on a daily basis.  Every time we need an enema done, or some other procedure, we call a nurse.  And I don’t think they get enough recognition.

So, here’s to you nurses.  Thank you for working so hard, so the rest of us have an easier job!

I can’t really talk about specifics, but I feel like I’m stuck.  I’m in a situation where I have little choice what I’m being forced to do, and I am having problems dealing.  I know it’s an attitude problem on my part.

The funny thing is, this is actually what I talk with my patients about a lot.  I teach a Coping Skills group, and one quarter of the class is devoted to distress tolerance.  We talk about the fact that there are always going to be things in your life that bother you, and you aren’t able to avoid them.  You just have to tolerate them.  And for me, I need to tolerate this stress.

The guys in my class would love to see this.  Why, oh why am I being forced to practice what I preach?

Enough complaining.