Question about structure

Tinderbox Tasks
1

Ok everyone, I’m a new tinderbox user (technically returning, I used it over about 15 years ago when I was in grad school to help write papers in class) and have spent the last several days figuring things out. I am a psychotherapist by day, so this is not my natural habitat, but I’m figuring it out. I have a question for those of who who think more naturally in this software and in terms of system architecture.

Every psychotherapist needs to use the exploration their own life and experiences as the basis for everything they do. With that in mind, I initially wanted to use tinderbox to think more visually and creatively about my own dream life. I have about 500 dreams (and counting) from the past couple of years that I have kept in a running doc; I broke those all up into individual tinderbox notes and have been happily tagging linking and mapping all sorts of things for the last couple of days. All sorts of themes and questions are coming to the surface now that I can do that, and that alone has been worth the sticker price.

The plot thickens, however: in addition to individual dreams, I also meet once a week with an analyst to specifically discuss those dreams. So now I’ve got notes beginning to accrue that link to specific dreams but also call out certain themes that I’ve already mapped as well as specific questions that are starting to surface.

I also see around 30 patients a week. those patients bring in situations and problems or even their own specific dreams that suddenly seem awfully familiar given the patterns I’m mapping and the questions that are beginning to become apparent from my own unconscious life. I also might have a conversation with my daughter or a friend that suddenly reminds of one of these other notes that I might want to link and think about. So now I’m adding notes that link to various patient experiences as well as patient dreams that I want to think about.

I also meet every other week with a consultant to talk about specific cases, and those meetings regularly result in different ideas and questions that, of course, link to my own dream life, various patient experiences and dreams, and the larger questions.

I also read quite a bit, so I’ve also got articles and books that I’m working through that surface questions and could connect to any kind of note.

The larger themes and questions, of course, are the point of all this. I might have a specific question I’m thinking starting to think about (i.e., “how does raw experience/energy become symbolized image? What happens when it doesn’t?” or “how can we bear what cannot be changed?”) that also has numerous smaller working questions (i.e., what is the difference between the false self and the claustrum?”) that aren’t questions to explore but rather have actual answers that I need to clarify and which inform the larger questions.

So that seems to be what makes up the giant heap of notes: personal dreams, patient dreams, patient experiences, fragments of experience with those in my personal life, professional consultations, specific notes from external sources, and the questions that are beginning to arise from all this. I think about these kinds of things all the time and have kept them in a number of formal and informal locations using a variety of note taking strategies, so I have quite a bit of data that I can ultimately pull on if I really want to dump it all in as well as new stuff that’s being generated all the time.

The question, then, is, for those of you more used to thinking with tinderbox, how might you structure this? is this a “put it all in a giant heap, create prototypes for the various types of notes, make agents that collect them according to different elements and play with what shows up from there?”, or does this call for individual structured folders? Or even separate tinderbox files? I am aware of the unwieldy nature of all of this and have never tried to formally put it all together but am already finding great value in this and am interested in seeing how this can possibly grow.

Edit: to be clear, everything in this project will be anonymous. no patient data will be revealed. I have dedicated HPAA compliant software for that. this will just be for building out ways I’m understanding larger questions.

2

Interesting use case. One quick, and easily overlooked divide in this is own vs. patient info. The former is yours and you can do what you like. Patient data is subject, rightly, to all sorts of legislation, with teeth. It seems natural to blend the two strands, for the reasons you lay out.

One possible avenue is to anonymise patient’s info, so the patient’s identity is never stored (or even hinted at) in your overall doc. So more ‘#47’ than ‘Mr H.’ or ‘Jane Doe’. Even then I’d get someone conversant with the law to double check if you’ve made identities guessable at.

There’s lots more to unpick but the above is worth sorting earlier as trying to put secrets back in the box, one opened is hard. :slight_smile:

3

Definitely, nothing will ever be traceable or shared and all data will be anonymous. I have dedicated practice management software for the specifics that is HPAA compliant. this will simply be for observations that point to a question that I’m thinking about. I will try and make that clear in the original post.

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4

No problem—you’ve clearly got that angle covered. Excuse my caution. :slight_smile:

5

So am I, but I don’t regularly use Tinderbox for my work. I just create a new Tinderbox file if/when I have something I want to understand and I mostly use the Map view to work things out. I might, for example, create a Tinderbox file for a certain patient and arrange items on the Map view (e.g. deprivation → frustration → anger, etc) according to their importance or some other criterion. It’s all very fluid and extemporary for me.

7

at’s pretty interesting and I’ve been playing around with that as well. I think what I’m realizing as I think about this today and write all this up for the forum, is that this is almost like a scholarly process to think through larger questions more so than ways to work through issues with specific patients. We will see where I am with it next week :slight_smile:

8

That is the impression I got from what you were writing. It is not really something that I am interested in doing. I just want to help my patients. I have worked in various fields during my life and I’ve noticed that whatever the field I’ve usually had very little interest in theory. I think this disappoints my supervisor, who I’ve known for twenty years, who is a Cambridge PhD, a brilliant mind, psychoanalytically trained, and seems to have read everything. I’ve no doubt spent too much of my life flitting between different subject areas and I no longer have the energy to wade through deep material about “larger questions” :wink: .

Having said that, I do have a mountain of research material, but I keep that in DEVONthink, along with the few notes that I have written about various items. I keep (anonymised) brief session notes in Obsidian, which are indexed by DEVONthink. This can help for spotting connections between items that I might otherwise miss. As I said, if I need to grapple with understanding something (or somebody), I can create a Tinderbox file for the purpose of thinking it/them out.

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