Music, Memory, Trauma and Recovery

In this episode, we'll look at the sometimes surprising associations the brain make between trauma in the past and experiences we are having in the present.  In this case, we'll explore two musical experiences I had that brought up emotional memory (as opposed to memories of events) - one was "safe" for me to process and the other started leading me down a dark path.   We'll examine the power of grounding, discuss the importance of allowing ourselves to process while giving ourselves permission to put boundaries on our brain.  Finally, we discuss the importance of community in the healing process.  Due to the content - discussing some of my own trauma history - please take care of yourself while you listen and give yourself permission to hit pause if necessary.  

Transcript

 Before we get started, I want to make sure you are aware of the fact that today's episode is going to discuss my own experiences that may be triggering for some of you, and I wanna encourage you to do what you have to do to take care of yourself and hope that you'll find your way through the episode and find it helpful.

Back in the late summer of 1983, I was 16 years old and the soccer field was, was pretty much my sanctuary. I was in a fog. I had just come through essentially the epicenter of my trauma, which included moving 3000 miles away from my hometown of Andover, Massachusetts to Portland, Oregon. And the soccer field was where I had always felt at home, regardless of the coast.

I'd throw my body around at soccer balls, shot from any and every angle. I loved the training. I loved the exhaustion. I really, the rug burns on my hips and knees from diving around all day, uh, to, you know, use a corny phrase that were a small price to pay for watching a ball glance off my fingers and go anywhere but the back of the net.

But this summer was different because the year prior, in the summer of 1982, I was on the verge of achieving one of my dreams to be the starting goalkeeper for my prep school's soccer team. Now, to be fair, I was only a sophomore at the time. I was only getting a little game time here and there, but the bottom line was I'd made the varsity.

And you can't start if you're not on the team. Right? It felt like a big deal. And part of that big deal was that early in our season, I'd been given the chance to start when we played a college freshman team from from Brandeis. No one gave us a chance, but late in the second half it was tied. It was 0-0, and we were playing really well.

I still remember seeing all the students and faculty lining the sides of the field - we didn't have stands - cheering us on and, I remember thinking, “oh wow, this is cool. We might actually win.” Well, we didn't, but it got interesting because with a precious few minutes left in the game, right, it's 0-0.

The other team gets a penalty kick due to a handball on one of our guys. And if you don't follow soccer, a penalty kick is basically when the other team gets to line up 12 yards from my goal and have a free shot at scoring, and you know, about 85% of the time they score. So this is a memory I’ll never forget,

I threw my body to the right just as the ball was kicked. And I remember watching the ball come toward me and thinking, in sort of slow motion like, “oh my God, I am gonna save this.”  And sure enough, the ball smacked into my right palm and went out of bounds. We were still tied. The game ended in a tie and it was glorious.

Students actually ran out onto the field to celebrate with us. And when that final whistle blew, I honestly felt like Jim Craig. Now for those of you who are not old enough to remember Jim Craig, he was the hockey goalie for the United States in the Olympics in 1980 when they beat Russia in what a lot of folks say is the greatest upset in the history of sports.

They were college kids beating these seasoned professionals in the Olympics. You know, We were just high school kids, but we had tied a bunch of college kids and it felt like a huge upset. So I had watched that United States upset of Russia on a little black and white TV while babysitting for my English teacher.

And I'll never forget Jim Craig skating around the ice with an American flag draped over his shoulders, looking for his father in the stands. My dad had come to almost every game, baseball, soccer, basketball throughout my life. And when the whistle blew, before high fiving and hugging my teammates, which there was a lot of, I looked for my dad on the sidelines and he was nowhere to be found.  And that was the beginning of the end of my life back east of which I'll share a little bit later. 

But fast forward a year and the soccer field moved 3000 miles away to Portland, Oregon. It was a hot day, was sunny, and we were in the middle of practice when an airplane flew overhead. Now, normally I'd have been a hundred percent focused on whatever drill we were doing. But on this day, I stared at the plane and I remember thinking, “I wonder if that plane is flying back east.”

And I remember feeling like I just wished - I would give anything to be on that airplane. It literally still gives me a pit in my stomach. To remember how much I missed home. I just felt this deep, deep longing to be back at Andover - and that was high school for me in a lot of ways, feeling like an outsider, despite honestly being included in so many different groups.

I was in student government, I was on the soccer team. I was in a 50s/60s band that is still together to this day. We're having our 40th reunion next summer. And yet I was lonely. I was depressed, I was full of angst and I was just trying to get by day to day, I felt overwhelmed at times. At other times, I felt like everybody knew what my father had done and I took on his shame and, and at other times I just completely checked out.

Now, that was a long time ago, and I have done lots of years of therapy. I've done a lot of healing. And what I wanna talk about today is that these layers of trauma, they just keep revealing themselves emerging and peeling away. And in this episode, I wanna share with you two musical experiences I had recently that revealed layers of the onion in ways that honestly surprised me because while they were both related to my trauma, it was in a really vague way, meaning the connection between my trauma and these two musical experiences was almost nonexistent on the surface.

So what I'd like to do is normalize having emotions triggered by something in your environment that may have almost no connection to your past trauma, 'cause it's just the brain doing what the brain does. So the first of these two musical journeys, so to speak, was a huge concert with about 25,000 people, and the other was a very small gathering of about 50 each had a profound impact on me, and I hope by sharing them with you, I can emphasize the importance of letting the brain do what the brain does over time.

Meaning we're rarely ever done, quote unquote, processing trauma, even if that processing isn't intentional. Right? So my intimate partner and I went and saw the Cure about two months ago, which is a little odd because I was never a big fan of the cure in high school or college, or any time for that matter.

And to be really transparent, I literally only yesterday (and today's August 5th) learned of the allegations against Robert Smith, the leader of the band. And I wanna acknowledge that they've been made, but be very clear that the experience I'm about to describe happened entirely without any knowledge of his past reported behavior.

So, when the tickets were going on sale, I saw an article that talked about how Robert Smith had railed against Ticketmaster for charging too much money in their service fees and how he wanted to make the show accessible, not just to his hardcore fans who were doing well, but, but even the casual fans who didn't really have 150 bucks to spend on a ticket.

And I thought I'd remembered Meg being a fan of the Cure when she was in high school and college. So as soon as they went on sale, I bought two tickets, I think it was $35 each, and just crossed my fingers that this was something that she would enjoy. And sure enough, we both did.

We sat in the third deck. We were only about five rows up. We were right next to the stage and it was a spectacular show. Right now, I don't know, you might, you might be wondering, well, I am proud of you, like good for you, but why are you telling us about it? Right? What's the deal? So here's what happened when they played their second song.

I recognized it after a bit. It's a song called Pictures of You. If you've never heard it I would actually encourage you to hit pause, go to YouTube and search for the cure pictures of you, and it'll really give you a sense of what I heard, right? Now, if you don't do that, that's fine. If you've never heard the song, I would describe it as hauntingly beautiful.

It has this slow, rhythmic, happy, melodic pattern to it that makes it really easy to listen to, and then that then plays against Robert Smith's voice that has this, what I would call melancholic beauty to it. Now, when the song started, almost immediately before I even realized I recognized the song, I started having memories of how I felt in high school.

Not any specific memories of high school, but memories of how I felt, meaning I started to have these feelings and I went, “oh my gosh, this is high school.” And immediately I thought, “oh, well that's because the cure sounds like the eighties, right?” And my trauma was around 82 or or 83. But as the show went on and other songs I heard and recognized, played.

I kept having these memories and, and let me reiterate, they weren't memories as we normally think of memories. They weren't memories of events or moments. They were just memories of feelings, memories of what it was like for me in high school and, and to be fair, even college. Now I'm a musician myself. Um, so that, that kind of colors what I'm about to say.

But, some of their music is this wonderful mishmash of what I would call happy sounding melodies with this beautiful melancholic undertone, meaning even with a happy sounding chord progression and melody, Robert Smith's voice and the words he was singing, they had this aching melancholy and beauty to it.

And it struck me that this was very much like my high school experience. Happy times and moments of joy, but also this deep sense of melancholy that felt like longing. This deep sense of, I miss you, I miss my friends, I miss my home. And as I mentioned above, when I saw that airplane flying overhead and I wished I was on it.

I honestly remember thinking, “man, I just wanna play with my teammates, not these strangers.” Now to be fair, the, the re-experiencing of the melancholy and angst of high school didn't last very long, 'cause the light show was incredible. The band was amazing, and I was enthralled with the entire experience.

I mean, I was blown away, honestly. So those memories of how I felt in the eighties faded pretty quickly. They would come up and they would fade. They would come up and they would fade. But it resonated with me. This music that I'd never really listened to perfectly represented the headspace I was in, the melancholy and, and quite frankly, I would even say depression.

So the show ends, and I'm raving about it. I just, I loved it. We get home really late at night. And the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning, is I go download a bunch of those happy songs that I'd heard the night before. The sort of upbeat, melodic - Now side note, if you ever go to a live show, you can almost always find the set list the next day somewhere online, and that's how I found out the titles of these songs I'd really never heard before.

So I have this thing that I like to do. It's a habit that I've established, which is to, when I get up in the morning, I either watch a funny TV show or I listen to fun music and given all the songs I'd just downloaded were melodic and fun, I put them on and I started the shower. And while I was in the shower, I started thinking more about this experience of high school and college.

And as I heard his voice and I heard those melodies, I again, I started resonating with that melancholy, with the longing, and I started crying, and the crying turned to sobbing. And at the same time, this awareness hit me, “wait a minute, why is this music bringing up these emotions? I never listened to them in high school. I never listened to 'em in college.”

I hated listening to the radio. It just amazed me that this band I'd never really heard so deeply resonated with me and, and brought up such deep feelings. And from that place of sadness and sobbing came these actual thoughts. I thought to myself as I'm standing there with warm water running over my head, remembering high school.

I thought to myself, and then I said out loud spontaneously to no one “God, I fucking hated it,” and I sobbed some more.

And it hit me that my friends who might hear this would say, what really? Because we had so many wonderful times. I mean, genuinely, as I mentioned before, I was in a fifties/sixties band. I played soccer. I didn't mention, I was in the marching band. I got to play the tuba. I was on the speech team.  Heck, I even, I even became student body president my senior year. Like what? 

So there were these really great experiences, but underneath all of it, oh my goodness. I just, I missed my hometown. I missed my dad. I missed my friends. I missed everything. And it was this deep longing, a deep melancholy. It was a depression that The Cure tapped into.

Now remember what I said in that last episode that trauma isn't logical. Why would I have such a distinctly strong emotional reaction to listening to the songs of a band I never listened to in high school? I never listened to in college. I mean, yeah, they were probably on in the background every now and then.

They had to have been, right, but why would I have such resonance? And what it comes down to is that trauma isn't a one-to-one relationship. Trauma is about memory and association, even if those associations are distant, even if those associations are fleeting, even if those associations are to a song that you only heard on the radio a few times in the background, those associations still have power.

And like I said a minute ago, I didn't really listen to them. I was one of those kids who thought it was cool to listen to your own music that wasn't quote, you know, top 40. But the point is, these moments of listening or hearing The Cure in high school or college, they didn't have to last long.

That association was still there, and it was powerful because the music was so representative of my experience. Now, here's where I wanna draw a really clear distinction between this first point and the second point I'm gonna get to, and that's this. If we are experiencing sadness and grief, if we aren't feeling overwhelmed or unstable or anxious, it's really important to let that emotion, to let that sadness and grief wash over us if we have the space to.

And if you don't have the space, it's okay to give your body permission to grieve at some other time when you do have the space. I mean, it's just so important for all of us to grieve and let that sadness have its time and place. And we have to remember that it can come up at any time because the brain isn't logical and we don't always process at times that are convenient, right?

So it is okay to push it down and let it come back up later. But here's the thing, sometimes the experience of remembering a feeling or a sense of something traumatic in your past is not helpful. 

So let me tell you a little bit about this second experience that I had. My uncle, who is 75, is a well-known, I mean really well-known composer of computer generated atonal music.  What that means is it doesn't have melody 'cause no one note is more important than any other note. He has literally been all over the world performing his music for the past, I don't know, 40, 50 years. And as it turned out, not long ago, a major conference called, the New Music Gathering was in Portland and he was invited to perform.

So we, honestly, none of us knew what to expect. We just knew that his community of musicians doesn't usually play straightforward songs, right? So, sure enough, the first group came up and invited the audience to quote unquote play with them. The instructions were for us to close our eyes and start making a sound or a body movement that you could sustain or repeat, and then just listen to what was evolving around you.

Sort of a “be with the rhythms and spontaneous emergence of melody, or harmony or dissonance.” Just be with whatever came up. Oh, that did not go well. I closed my eyes and within seconds of everybody starting to make their sounds, all I heard was a cacophony of sound. Nothing really distinguishable, nothing predictable, and everything just felt chaotic.

It felt like there was nothing to hold onto, if that makes sense. And I found myself tearing up and again, remembering what it was like to be in high school, but this time it wasn't about longing and sadness and grief, it was about feeling completely overwhelmed, suicidal, and as though my world was falling apart and this was not good. I was absolutely shaken to my core in a way I never predicted.

Now, thankfully I knew what to do, and if you are getting triggered right now, I want you to do this. I noticed my breath, I felt my feet on the ground, and I rubbed my hands together. And this brought me back into the present moment of being in the room and out of my past. It's called a grounding exercise, and I think it's really important, that while we wanna let the brain do what the brain does, it is okay to put boundaries on our brain and give it structure when necessary and say, “I'm not going to go there right now.”

When we start to feel chaos, when we start to feel overwhelmed, when we start to go back down the black hole that was our trauma, that’s when we want to ground ourselves in the present moment. 

It is also really important that we let ourselves be human, because for a little while I honestly felt bad about the fact that I couldn't do the exercise. I couldn't take them up on the invitation, and then it hit me. It was just my brain doing brains do, and there was nothing wrong with me.

Now there's a third piece, right? The first was, I think it's important that we let ourselves grieve and process, and the second is that when we start to experience chaos and disconnection, we have to ground ourselves and put boundaries up to protect ourselves. The third piece is the importance of gratitude because one of the things I realized while I was crying in the shower while listening to The Cure was that I was incredibly grateful and lucky to still be alive to still have the next breath, to have found my way to the moments that represented that notion of “eventually it's going to be okay,”

Because for a long time it wasn't and I hope this for all survivors. I hope that all of us can find a way to gratitude because it's not easy. It doesn't come quickly.

At least it didn't for me. And I can tell you, for many years I was bitter and resentful and flat out angry. Now, in the words of David Byrne, how did I get here? How did I get to this place of gratitude? Well, for me, it had a large part of being invited into a community I never expected.  That community represents all of you doing what you do, helping victims and survivors, being victims and survivors, telling our stories, sharing and growing together.

So back in June, it was conference time for the National Crime Victim Law Institute, and that's the organization that my intimate partner runs. I started attending their conference long before I ever felt comfortable identifying myself as a survivor of trauma. So my guess is not many of you know this about me, but my trauma wasn't what I would call direct. 

Meaning, I wasn't the one who was sexually molested. It was my foster sister who was, she was my best friend as well. She was molested by my father. Now that tells you why we left the East coast. My trauma was in being the only person who knew, who figured it out, and then confronted my father, had him deny it and disown me.

And then when he was caught by law enforcement, he left the family. Now, to be fair, as I've looked back, he was also psychologically, let's just say, neglectful at the least, and abusive at the worst for my entire childhood, right? And yet it is still, even today, it's uncomfortable for me to record this podcast and say I'm a survivor, simply because I've, it took me so long to identify myself as a survivor, because I never identified myself as the victim, I always identified my foster sister as the victim. 

So I go to the conference that NCVLI has for the first time many years ago, and I hear survivors’ stories and I start to recognize my own trauma, and I learned a phrase from Helene Davis, a survivor who’s son was murdered and was for many years a board member of NCVLI.

And you know, to be fair, I probably had heard this phrase in the past, but for some reason when Helene shared this with me, it really hit home. And it was this notion of finding a new normal. Because after trauma, you know, nothing's ever gonna be the same. It never goes back to being normal. We have to find our new normal.

And so I really do. I wish this for, for all of you that are listening and have trauma histories and haven't yet found your new normal because it does take time. It's literally been 40 years for me and the layers are still peeling, the layers are still emerging. My new normal is still developing and deepening and it, it doesn't stop the sadness from coming up.

I mean, even as I've talked about it today, the sadness has emerged. Um, you know, and it comes up at really inconvenient times, you know, like when you're trying to record a podcast. Right? And you know, whether you call it being lucky or being in the right place at the right time or being blessed, I think for many of us to find a new normal, it's helpful to find community.

And by being brought into the community of the National Crime Victim Law Institute, and then the greater community of all of you supporting victims and survivors, and all of you victims and survivors who are telling your stories, that community has become a large part of my new normal, if that makes sense.

Now to be fair, right? Community is however you define it. I don't wanna define what your community is 'cause we all have our own sense of community. I will say this though, for me and for my clients, when I was practicing in clinical work, healing seemed to happen most often when we find community, however that looks.

So that's my wish for for all of you. For all of us, that you either. Find community or that you already have community, because I think from community comes the ability to feel gratitude and connection. Connection and gratitude. At least in my experience, it's through community that we can weather the storms of sadness and grief, weather, the storms of chaos and disorganization, and find our way to the warmth of gratitude.

So, That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I'm grateful, genuinely. So until next time, take care of yourself and keep building community.