[Verse 1]
Eleanor is seventy-nine, her worry never sleeps,
She catalogues her stomach's ache in fathomless dark deeps,
GAD has wrapped its tendrils round her mornings and her nights,
But the CBT clinician must calibrate the rites,
Speak in shorter sentences, the hearing aid distorts,
Write the thought-records boldly out, cognitive reports,
When she says her chest is tight, don't dismiss the flesh,
Somatizing is the vessel — meet the mind afresh.
[Chorus]
Assess, address, adapt your frame,
The older adult's not a textbook name,
Somatize, traumatize, drink through the years,
A trauma-informed clinician hears,
Vellichor — the ache of knowledge stored —
Geropsychology, sharpen every cord,
Assess, address, adapt your frame.
[Verse 2]
In the nursing home, a man resists the morning aide,
His flinching is a grammar from the terrors that were made,
Reactivated PTSD can masquerade as spite,
When personal care encroaches on autonomic fright,
Don't restrain, explain your name, narrate each gentle move,
Offer choice and signal safety, let the resident approve,
Trauma-informed means reading what the body's trying to say,
A refusal is a sentence, not a patient gone astray.
[Chorus]
Assess, address, adapt your frame,
The older adult's not a textbook name,
Somatize, traumatize, drink through the years,
A trauma-informed clinician hears,
Vellichor — the ache of knowledge stored —
Geropsychology, sharpen every cord,
Assess, address, adapt your frame.
[Verse 3]
Retirement arrived and took his calendar away,
So the bourbon filled the hours from the early afternoon's gray,
Seventy years old and functional, nobody would guess,
But daily drinking since the pension came deserves redress,
A brief alcohol intervention plants the motivational seed,
Ask him what he values, let ambivalence concede,
Reflective listening, a ruler from one to ten,
Importance and the confidence to want to change again.
[Bridge]
Here is the word for what we carry when we know too much —
Vellichor: the wistfulness of secondhand lives we touch,
The clinician who studies age must hold this strange refrain,
Each elder brings a library no algorithm can explain,
Quiddity — the thisness of a person, hard to name —
Their singular particularity is always not the same,
So calibrate your protocols, but never lose the art,
Assessment is a dialogue before the treatment starts.
[Chorus]
Assess, address, adapt your frame,
The older adult's not a textbook name,
Somatize, traumatize, drink through the years,
A trauma-informed clinician hears,
Vellichor — the ache of knowledge stored —
Geropsychology, sharpen every cord,
Assess, address, adapt your frame.
[Outro]
Eleanor, the veteran, the retiree who drinks —
Each one holds a different thread upon the chain of links,
Adapt the protocol, the font, the pace, the tone,
No elder is a composite — each grief is their own.