Oh Lordy Loo! What Now?!?! (Summer Shine)

What happens to people in the summer?

As a mental health professional, to some degree, other people's misery is my bread and butter. Now of course this is a totally grim and cynical perspective. But there is truth there nevertheless.

Absolutely my job is to, well, work myself out of a job. I get paid to help people learn how to do 1 (or more) of the following three things..

1. Learn to cope
2. Learn to make a change
3. Make a choice

The idea is that once they have learned how to do these things on their own, they will no longer need my services. Great, fantastic, whoo hooo! This is the good part about it.

The bad part is, honestly, when they no longer need me, I no longer get paid. I consider myself an ethical professional. I follow the rules, and I DO NOT keep people in therapy just to collect from them. What I am complaining about is the phenomenon that I call Summer Shine.

Summer Shine is what happens to my business when the weather is nice. Suddenly, people don't have problems anymore. They are no longer depressed, anxious, or confused. They believe that their problems just dried up with the snow and the spring rain. And to some degree, they are absolutely right.

Summer Shine has some basis in factual science. Without getting too technical, yes, the nicer weather has physiological effects that do in fact improve our overall moods, temporarily.

The problem lies in that when Summer Shine wears off, the clients come running back (Late August, Early September around here). Their lives have essentially fallen apart, and they are DESPERATE to see me again. That's fine, it's one of the reasons that I am here. But, my issue is that if they only could recognize that Summer Shine is temporary, they might continue their therapy through the beautiful summer weather, and actually make progress. Instead, they neglect their emotional issues because the weather is nice, and they kind of feel better. But that whole time they think they are feeling better, they are backsliding in the progress they made up until the Summer Shine kicked in.

The worst part about Summer Shine is how the parents use it against their children. See, the majority of my clients are children. They range in ages from about 6 through about 16 at the moment). I'm good with them. They like me, their parents like me, and we make progress. The unfortunate reality is that PARENTS get affected by Summer Shine, and they THINK that their children are affected by it as well. Sometimes they are, but usually, they aren't.

My theory is this: Most of the kids I see aren't in therapy because of Seasonal Affective Disorder (kind of the opposite of Summer Shine). Most of the kids I see aren't depressed or anxious. Most of them are there for much more chronic issues like ADD/ADHD, ODD, or various Adjustment Disorders (which usually aren't all that chronic).

These things do NOT go away when the Sun shines. The parents feel the stress of their children's issues lighten, due to the parents' experience of Summer Shine. So they pull their children out of therapy for the Summer. Meanwhile, all the progress we've made to date starts to slip away. When they come back a few months later, things are even worse than they were before.

My wish is that parents would stick to the Treatment Plans that we formulate with them. We do that for a reason, not just for our own health. We try to show the severity of the issue, how long we EXPECT the treatment course to take, and what we are going to do in order to achieve the desired impact. I ALWAYS tell my clients to give me a termination session. That is 1 final session where we review our progress, and reinforce the things that the client has learned. They always agree to it. They RARELY follow through.

More often than not, it doesn't happen. Therapy for their children becomes a low priority for the parents. They miss a session or two (incurring "no show" charges in the process) and just stop coming altogether.

Perhaps you could think about it like a water balloon. When you attach your balloon to the faucet, you begin to fill it with water. The balloon stretches and takes more and more water (until its physical limit of course). When you remove the balloon from the faucet, you are probably pinching the open end so that the water doesn't leak out. Then you tie it into a knot and throw it at your brother, sister or other unsuspecting victim. But what happens when you don't tie that knot? Well, if you let go of the balloon, almost all of the water is going to be expelled from the balloon. It will leak out all over the place. Before you know it, you have an empty balloon again, and if you want to use it as a water balloon again, you have to fill it, AGAIN.

Therapy is kind of like that. The balloon is the client, the water is the therapy, and the knot is the termination session.

Since I can't force the clients to come back, I can only have faith enough that I taught them what they needed to know, and HOPE that they learned how to tie their own knots. But when they haven't learned how, and don't allow me the opportunity to do it with them, all our progress goes down the drain. With it goes the client's (and/or the client's parents') faith in the counseling process. Somehow then it becomes my fault that their issues come back. "You didn't fix my kid. He's worse off than before we came to see you in the first place." I just want to tell them "Maybe he wouldn't be if you had allowed us to finish what we started." I mean, really, you don't pull a cast off of your broken arm after 2 weeks because its starting to feel better now do you? No, because you risk damaging the fragile healing process that is STILL OCCURRING beneath the surface.

My point is this: FINISH YOUR TREATMENT PLANS AND TERMINATE PROPERLY IF YOU EXPECT TO SEE ANY RESULTS. Otherwise, don't bitch to me about it...unless you want to pay our facility another $70 per hour listen to it. Which, of course, we are more than happy to take.

Back to you Joan.....