Public perception of recovery often relegates it to lockdown facilities with stark white walls as they are portrayed in movies. Traditional treatment programs often have similarities to Hollywood misrepresentations of addiction treatment. However, addiction treatment has evolved as research and community engagement have shown the significance of whole-person healing. Recovery is more than treating withdrawal symptoms and eliminating substance use. Long-term recovery is built on holistic care and accompanying therapeutic modalities like the power of music therapy.
The power of music to support recovery can be found in music therapy as a mind-body approach to care. Through mind-body therapies like music therapy, you can explore how your brain, mind, body, and behaviors interact with each other. Moreover, mind-body therapies focus on and foster a connection between the mind and body as tools for healing each other. As the New England Journal of Medicine notes, with guidance and practice, mind-body practices can decrease physical and mental health symptoms. In addition, mind-body practices can support a deeper sense of connection with yourself and others.
Thus, as a mind-body therapy, music therapy can help heal the emotional distress of trauma and substance use disorder (SUD). There is an ancient and powerful history in the art of music as a healing practice. The power of music is deeply interconnected to our lives, whether in a medical setting or our living room. Music is woven through every stage of life, like your favorite songs acting as the soundtrack of your experiences. The power of music and its importance in our lives can be seen in a long history of mixtapes, musicals, and teenage angst.
At The Guest House, we believe in multidimensional and personalized treatment to meet you where you are on your recovery journey. Long-term recovery is not a one-size-fits-all approach that resolves every issue no matter the background. Rather, long-term recovery must be built on the needs and experiences of the individual. Through holistic treatments like music therapy, you are offered the space and safety to discover your path to recovery. With a holistic trauma-specific treatment program, you can harness the power of music therapy in treatment and beyond.
However, you may still have questions about what music therapy is. What makes music therapy different from the way you may engage in music in your daily life? How can music be a healing tool for challenges like addiction and trauma-related disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? By expanding your awareness of music therapy, you can understand the power of music as a tool for well-being.
What Is Music Therapy?
According to Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, music therapy is a creative arts therapy that uses arts-based activities in therapeutic settings. Specifically, interventions in music therapy develop a therapeutic process between you and your clinician through tailored music experiences. Moreover, the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) states that music therapy is the use of music interventions to set and achieve individualized goals for healing.
Music therapy’s definition is expansive due to the power of music to heal. As the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) states, the term music therapy is not a specific type of intervention. Rather, music therapy encompasses a variety of music-based interventions. At its core, music therapy relies on the power of music to manage various health conditions and improve well-being. In particular, music therapy is used to help alleviate stress, pain, anxiety, and depression caused by underlying conditions like trauma.
Further, to enact the power of music in music therapy, music and parts of music must be used. As the Cleveland Clinic notes in “Music Therapy,” to enhance the power of music therapy, music and or elements of music like sound, rhythm, and harmony are utilized. Yet, what music interventions and types of therapies encompass music therapy?
Types of Music Therapy
There is a wide range of musical activities that can be utilized in music therapy to showcase the power of music for healing. Moreover, music therapy can take different approaches to best meet your specific needs. In general, music therapy may be broken down into active interventions and receptive interventions. Active interventions in music therapy focus on experiences where you take on more of an active role in the process.
Through active music interventions, you engage in making music with your clinician, such as singing or playing an instrument. Whereas receptive interventions in music therapy focus less on you making music and more on you listening to music. The music you listen to in receptive interventions can be made by your clinician or previously made music that your clinician shares with you. Thus, in receptive music interventions, less focus is placed on the making of music and more on discussing the music you are listening to.
Then, within the active and receptive interventions of music therapy, there are a variety of other music-based therapies:
- Cognitive-behavioral music therapy (CBMT): Structured rather than improvised music as a nonverbal tool of expression
- Uses cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in combination with music
- Reinforces wanted or positive behaviors
- Modifys unwanted or unhealthy behaviors
- This can include listening to music, dancing, singing, or playing an instrument
- Analytical music therapy: Improvisation through singing and or playing an instrument to express unconscious thoughts
- Utilizes music to explore your relationship with yourself and others
- Supports self-exploration, awareness, and understanding
- Compositional music therapy: Focuses on teaching you how to compose a piece of music
- Music compositions can include lyrics, vocalization, and instruments
- Supports creativity and creative expression
- Boosts self-esteem
- Helps to express and process difficult emotions like grief and trauma
- Improvisation music therapy: Focuses on spontaneity in the creation of songs
- Your clinician helps you interpret your mood based on the sounds and lyrics that come out of spontaneous musical expression
- Supports building confidence
- Encourages self-expression
- Supports indirect expression of thoughts and feelings that are difficult to talk about directly like traumatic experiences and accompanying emotions
- Re-creative music therapy: Focuses on you recreating the music your clinician plays for you
- Can include vocalization or instrumentation in which you sing the lyrics of the song or recreate the instrumental elements
- Supports motor skills
- Community music therapy: Can be active or receptive as the focus is placed on making community connections and change through music
- Done in group settings
- Active participant driven
- Flexible application to best suit the community
- Supports collaborative work, social connection, and musical accomplishment for well-being
- Receptive music therapy: Your clinician presents music for you to listen to and respond to
- Provides space for you to express your thoughts about the music through words, dance, or composing a composition, to name a few
- Supports reduction in anxiety symptoms
Music is a wide and varied therapeutic modality that can encompass more interventions and techniques than the major categories. Yet, the major categories of music therapy, like re-creative and improvisation, highlight the flexibility in the power of music and the countless activities that can be used in combination with therapy. Listed below are some of the activities and or tools that can be utilized in music therapy to support well-being:
- Songwriting
- Writing lyrics
- Composing music
- Music performance
- Listening to music
- Music improvisation
- Singing and or playing instruments to make music or sounds
- Playing an instrument or instruments
- Guitar, drums, piano, or tambourine among others
- Moving or dancing to music
- Tapping your hands or feet, bobbing your head, or choreographing a dance number
- Singing known music or singing a song you created
- Discussing the lyrics and meaning of a song
Thus, many of the activities and tools found in music therapy may feel familiar to some of the things you do in your daily life. Music therapy hones in on the power of music beyond daily life to foster a deeper connection in the healing properties of music. The connection to your everyday life found in the power of music speaks to the long history in which music has captivated and moved our hearts and minds.
Power of Music: Addressing the History of Music
According to AMTA in “History of Music Therapy,” understanding of the power of music has been known since ancient Greece in the writings of Aristotle and Plato and long before them in some cultures. Although early concepts of music therapy were gaining interest in the early 1800s, a major shift was not seen until the 1900s. It did not become clear in the United States that the power of music could be effective in medical settings until the Second World War. Countless veterans returned from the war with physical and emotional trauma, so hospitals brought in amateur and professional community musicians to entertain them.
However, something extraordinary happened as medical staff saw notable and positive physical and emotional responses from the veterans. The power of music expanded the need and desire for more educational resources to increase the benefits of music for patients. Thus, more educational programs for music therapy were developed and continued to be expanded throughout the 20th century and today. Along the way, in the mid-1800s, great interest in the scientific nature of music was growing with the development of musicology.
As the American Musicological Society (AMS) states in “What Is Musicology?” musicology is the study of music. More specifically, musicology encompasses all aspects of music in all cultures across all historical periods. Some of the ways music is studied in musicology include:
- History
- Chronological periods like the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical
- Nation or region like American music, South Asian music, and African music
- Musical styles like art music and popular music
- Composers, performers, and the audiences
- Symphony orchestra and soloists
- Society
- The sociology or anthropology of music
- Structure
- Music theory and music analysis
- How music functions as an art
- Music aesthetics and the philosophy of music
- The means of performance
- Study of musical instruments, acoustics, and the physiology of voice
- How music is perceived
- Music perception and cognition
Eventually, musicology would come into contact with psychology to help form the understanding of music and music therapy today. As noted in Britannica under the definition of musicology, the new sciences of psychology and ethnology influenced musicology as the psychology of music was born out of psychology and musicology. Within the psychology of music, a greater understanding of the power of music on well-being was uncovered.
Through the psychology of music, an effort is made to understand and explain how music impacts your emotions, mind, body, and relationships. Thus, the science of music speaks to the connections music forms with individuals, communities, and society as a whole for well-being. By deepening your understanding of the brain science of music, you can recognize and understand the power of music for your well-being and recovery.
Understanding the Science in the Power of Music
Where does the emotional connection to music stem from? According to Brain Science, “Music is a universal phenomenon that utilizes a myriad of brain resources.” This universal phenomenon, known as music, is intertwined with human identity and experience. The expression of music is one with emotional connection and understanding beyond language across every society. Thus, the emotional connection and power of music are born in the fundamental nature of human biology.
Understanding the emotional power of music on trauma starts with the impact of pitch, rhythm, and tonality on the brain, including:
- Pitch perception
- How the brain handles sound information
- Pitch helps you recognize melodies, discern intervals, and frequency perception
- Rhythm perception
- Your ability to recognize beats engages specific brain regions associated with motor planning and timing
- Tonality perception
- Your ability to comprehend key and harmony in music engages distinct neural domains in the brain
- Auditory, prefrontal, and parietal cortices
- Helps with the creation and comprehension of musical constructs like melodies
- Your ability to comprehend key and harmony in music engages distinct neural domains in the brain
Pitch, rhythm, and tonality interact with emotion, memory, and your motor systems. The brain fosters emotional connection, meaning, and understanding through music. Through the process of music-making and or listening to music, your brain’s reward system is activated. The reward system in your brain creates rewarding and emotionally charged experiences. Further, the power of music invokes vivid emotional and mnemonic experiences that transport you to different places in time. For example, listening to music engages your auditory cortex, which is responsible for sound processing and several other emotional functions.
Your auditory cortex and the hippocampus are integral to memory and emotional processing. Together, the auditory cortex and hippocampus can trigger sad memories or feelings of sadness. Thus, complex interconnections happen in almost all the regions and networks of the brain when music is heard or made. Music creates intense and meaningful emotional connections to the self and others. Thus, pathways and networks in the brain connect to and strengthen emotional processing, learning, and cognitive function.
Value of Music Therapy for SUD and Trauma
The science of music for emotion, learning, and cognitive functioning highlights the power of music for addressing SUD and trauma. Trauma is often at the root of self-defeating behaviors like SUD, which is a reflection of an unhealthy coping strategy. Therefore, music therapy can give you the tools to break down the barriers to expression, self-awareness, and self-understanding.
Trauma and SUD often create barriers to expressing yourself and discussing difficult to talk about about experiences and feelings verbally. Through the power of music, you can find a safe and supportive environment in music therapy to engage in self-expression. With self-expression comes greater self-awareness and self-understanding to build resilience to trauma and life stressors to heal.
Fostering the Power of Music at The Guest House
At The Guest House, we believe everyone deserves the chance to build a fulfilling and purposeful life in recovery. Therefore, we are committed to providing diverse therapy options to address your unique experiences and needs to heal. With a commitment to individualized care, you can take full advantage of support services to customize your recovery plan. Moreover, our holistic approach to trauma-specific care gives you the space to discover the therapeutic tools that best fit you.
Whether you want to explore music, art, adventure, or equine therapy, there is a path for you. We provide a space built on comfort, safety, non-judgment, respect, and love to support you on your recovery journey. At The Guest House, we are here to support and remind you that you are loved and worthy of recovery.
Self-defeating behaviors like SUD are often rooted in unaddressed trauma. Trauma can make it difficult to express yourself as distressing thoughts and feelings overwhelm you. However, the power of music can help you reconnect to yourself and others. Music connects to most regions and networks in your brain to interconnect with emotional processing, learning, and cognitive functioning. Through a variety of active and receptive music interventions that support self-expression and self-awareness, you can build self-esteem and resilience to dismantle self-defeating behaviors. Therefore, at The Guest House, we are committed to providing holistic therapeutic modalities in a customizable recovery plan to support your inner experiences with your recovery. Call us at (855) 483-7800 to learn more about the power of music.