Julie’s News from Maryland

As I suppose that you have surmised from the infrequency of my posts, CPE has been taking a ton of time.  Here is a run-down of what we’ve done in the past 3 weeks:

• genogram- A genogram is a diagram of a family tree that shows relationships between people and exposes relational dynamics in a family.  The goal of preparing and examining a genogram is to learn how family dyamics effect how we work in the world, and specifically in this case, how we do pastoral care.
• mid-unit evaluation - Last week was the mid-point of the program, so we each completed a mid-unit evaluation.  The evaluation form asked us to identify group and personal dynamics and to critique our progress to date.  My evaluation was about 8 pages and took me 6 hours to complete.  As a group, we read all of the evaluations and shared all of our impressions and perceptions.
• spiritual autobiography - This week we each wrote a short story about a moment in time when we “suffered”.  We read the stories aloud in group and talked about how the event had affected us - how we made meaning out of our suffering.  We talked about what we learned from that experience and how that will help us to do pastoral care.

It has been a very intense three weeks.  My group is fabulous in that we are very willing to be open and authentic with each other.  We all shared very personal things and gave one another very important feedback.  I am grateful that my group helped me to understand some important areas of growth.  I feel like I learned a lot about myself, but such intense self-analysis is very emotionally tiring.  I feel like I have very little energy for much else than the group process these days.

This week we are learning about doing spiritual assessments - basically, how to ask the right questions to learn more about the patient’s faith life and how it does or does not play a part in how they are dealing with their illness.  It looks very interesting, but I just don’t know how I am going to learn how to do anything new in this state of emotional exhaustion.  Even with lots of energy and emotional stability, it seems like it would be difficult to learn how to ask all the right questions and listen for all the right cues in order to evaluate someone’s spirituality.  But, in this state it feels next to impossible.  My supervisor encouraged me today to just give it a try.  She says that the only way to learn this stuff is to just practice.  So, practice I will.  She suggested that I try the different methods to evaluate my own spirituality as a good starting place.  It will be interesting to see where I am.