How Music Therapy Heals Trauma
When words aren’t enough
I can’t even count the number of clients I have sat in front of who have told me “therapy doesn’t work for me” or “I’ve tried therapy but it just never clicked.” But here they are, trying again, because they want to be able to break through what is holding them back in life. The betrayal, loss of safety, loss of control, and horror of trauma is something that is beyond what verbal language can express, so why are we expecting talking to solve it every time?
Let me be clear: I’m not a talk therapy hater. I am also a talk therapist, after all, and have seen incredible moments of peace and clarity come from talking it out. But I also know how incredibly frustrating it is when someone is expecting you to have words for what you experienced or what you are feeling and you just… can’t. You know that there is something there but words just don’t quite capture it. Or you have talked it over endlessly and still aren’t feeling relief. That is where expressive arts therapy shines; in those moments where words aren’t working and we need to go deeper. Music therapy excels at that piece specifically, because of the neuroscience behind music and how it impacts the traumatized brain.
What is music therapy?
Music therapy is an evidence-based therapeutic approach, practiced by board-certified music therapists (MT-BC), that aims to improve your quality of life. You often see music therapists working in hospitals, schools, or outpatient private practices. Music therapy is a broad field with many specialties from working with children with disabilities all the way up through caring for those on hospice care. My specialty in music therapy has focused on grief and trauma. That means that I know how to use music making, listening, and analyzing to help you work through traumatic events in your life. Music therapists who specialize in mental health know how to harness the neurological and emotional benefits of music to help you go deeper and process beyond what we have words for.
The neuroscience behind music therapy
You have probably heard that music is a “whole brain” activity, that it helps people remember what they have forgotten, walk in a steady rhythm, or relax on a neurological level. There are a lot of complicated and scienc-y reasons why this happens, but for trauma we are interested in a few specific neurological mechanisms that music uses.
Traumatic memories often live in the subcortical brain structures (things like the thalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, basically all the parts of your brain that regulate emotion, memory, and your senses). That’s why you experience changes in your emotions, memory, heart rate, etc when you have a trauma trigger. You don’t have to think “oh, that’s traumatizing,” your brain just does it for you. These parts of your brain are significantly impacted by trauma, and because they aren’t the areas of your brain that process speech, verbal language isn’t always the way to calm that part of the brain down.
Sound and rhythm, however, do access those regions of your brain and can help heal them on that neurological level. Board-certified music therapists are trained in techniques that use these tools to help you feel relief. Take for example rhythmic entrainment, where the music therapist matches the music up to your nervous system’s tempo, and slowly helps your nervous system regulate out of fight or flight mode.
What happens in a music therapy session?
You’re gonna hate this: it depends. Music therapists tailor the sessions to the needs of the person sitting in front of them. Sometimes we use active music making, sometimes we are listening to and discussing music, sometimes we are using the music as a nervous system regulation tool. It’s all depending on what your goals are and what you feel ready for. Also, you don’t have to have any kind of musical skill or experience to benefit from music therapy. That’s where the music therapist’s training comes in, we have that part covered. You can learn more about my approach to music therapy here.
I can, however, tell you a few of my favorite things to do in a music therapy session. I often use lyric analysis, where you bring a song that describes your experience and we explore what those lyrics mean to you. This is incredibly helpful for people who know they are in pain, but don’t really have the words to describe it. We all have that song that says it better than we can, so bring it to therapy with you.
On the more receptive end, I like to use rhythmic entrainment and guided imagery to help regulate my client’s nervous systems. We all know meditating is good for us, but we can take that up a notch and use rhythm to target those brain regions I talked about earlier. I can guide you through a meditation that your brain will connect with on a deeper brainstem level. This can help you feel safe and ready to process the big things.
Here’s one you can do on your own (and might already be doing): playlists. I invite my clients to use music to describe their life, making a playlist that thematically describes your personal experiences. We can use this to more accurately target times in your life that might need a little more attention and soothing. Or I might have you create a playlist that can modulate your mood. We target whatever feeling you are getting stuck in, and create a playlist of songs that you love that can help you express that feeling, then move through it into a place of peace and calm.
If you are a musician, you can bring your instrument to therapy and we can use it to communicate where words just aren’t working. By having musical conversations, improvising together and letting the instruments do the talking, we can help you practice accessing and sitting with emotions that feel too intense to verbally process. Plus, that connection you get from making music with other people lets you practice relationship skills that help us all feel less alone.
Feel ready to start music therapy?
I provide music therapy at my in-person office in Glendale, Arizona, or virtually throughout the state. Reach out for a free consultation and we can see if music therapy is the right fit for you.