love

This semester is OVER! It's official. Matt and I only have one semester before we graduate. So. Weird. Today I watched Bethany and Graham walk at their graduation and it was. weird. Real life outside of school? What? Who thinks I am even ready for that? NOT ME!

This semester concluded my internship. I loved my internship. I did so much with it. It was at the Children's Justice Center, and I might have mentioned it before on here, but it was probably just to complain about how busy I was last semester and this semester. I started interning there at the beginning of August and my last day was yesterday! What it is is basically a place where therapists provide group therapy for kids and teens that have been sexually abused. Sad, right? The youngest kids that we have attending are 3-5 year olds and they are usually the largest age group out of all of the people that come. Even sadder, right? The cool thing is, though, that I got to help them! That is the best thing about my major, I think...the fact that I get to use it to help  people. Not that other majors don't do that, but that mine is so focused on that aspect is so wonderful. 

The way that the group therapy is divided up is on Tuesdays the children meet. There is a 3-5 age group, a 6-8 age group, a 9-12 age group, a spanish speaking group, and a parent group for all the parents of the kids that come. One of my favorite things about my internship was seeing the strength and love of the parents for their children. My last day at group I sat in on the parent group therapy session. The parents have no idea how to handle the situation or how to cope with their child being abused. In a lot of cases it was a family member that was the perpetrator. It is just a really hard situation, but what I love is that they are at therapy. They might not know how to handle the abuse and the consequences of that, but they do know that they need to do everything that they can to help their child cope. If that means therapy, then they will do therapy. If that means talking to court officials to try to get laws changed in Provo saying that both parents have to have custody even when one is the abuser then they are willing to do that. The parents definitely don't understand everything, psychologically, that is going on with their child, but they understand that they need to do something about it.

Lately I have been thinking about what my role as a therapist will be..since that is ultimately what I want to do with my degree. I thought about the Holy Ghost and how he is a constant companion, and through his guidance we are able to be teachers. When teachers teach lessons at church sometimes they say that they don't even know what they said during the lesson because it was the spirit just using them as a vessel to get to the other people. I like to think that it is kind of the same way with therapy. A lot of the people that come to therapy will not have a testimony of the gospel, or they won't have ever even heard of the gospel, but that doesn't mean that the spirit can't communicate with them. I have thought a lot and I think that my role as a therapist is to be a vessel for the Holy Ghost to help other people heal. If that makes any sense....At first I thought that I was just helping people help themselves, but it is totally something that I would not be able to do without the help of the spirit. Just something I have been thinking about a lot lately. Whether it is having a better understanding of a love of a parent, or a better understanding of how the spirit works, I am learning something everyday, and it is beautiful.