Good Call

We had our therapy call with Katie last night. It was good, if interesting.

First, she made level 3, and is actually going up for level 4 next week. Plus she graduated Principles, so I guess (and this was news to me) that we don't have to wait 4 weeks from when she makes level 4 fora pass - the requirements are level 4 + EITHER 4 weeks or graduate principles. So we may have a pass pretty quickly - but I'm not jumping on that yet.

She was very excited and happy, but then we mentioned we might have to cut the call a little short (we were on our way to meet some people to go to the local comedy club to see Heywood Banks, who our band boosters are booking for a fundraiser in February), and she had a bit of a meltdown on the phone. Instant victim mode. She was so concerned about losing any of the call time - and spent half of it crying and upset, feeling like we didn't care about her.

However we were able to work through this, and help her to see he own victim mode and language, and the rest of the call was good. Yes, we had to cut it about 5 minutes short.
She has been writing a lot of poetry lately, which I did at her age as well. She read one, and I felt I did good because I did not go into critique mode, which is what I tend to do anymore with it (probably because I took Creative Writing in college one too many times :-) ). I did talk to her about being able to receive criticism and not to take it personally. I recognized in what she has been writing the pure raw emotion that is so typical of teenagers. She has a huge amount of talent, but it will take a lot of development before she truly gets good.

So the call ended well. In 6 weeks she and Diane are going to have the call with just the two of them - so that could be good.