Season 7, Episode 3, Dr Graham Music on How To Stay With Trauma Without Shutting Down

Join Dr Lisa Cherry in conversation with psychotherapist Graham Music about why trauma-informed practice cannot be reduced to training badges or compliance, and how real trauma work demands presence, humility and emotional stamina. We explore how helpers can stay close to pain without shutting down, over-identifying, or turning hope into a shallow performance.

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Transcript

Welcome And Series Purpose

SPEAKER_01 0:04

This is the Trauma Resonance Resilience Podcast. And this is for you if you are interested in compassion, connection, and relationships and how we can all work together creating services that do not add to harm but rather seek to support recovery from it. I'm your host, Lisa Cherry, and this is your time to sit back and listen in on conversations that make a difference.

SPEAKER_03 0:32

Welcome to the Resisting Dilution series, which is going to centralize the statement that being trauma-informed is not a tick box. And you'll remember that quite recently I did a series on liminality. So this is another series because for me there's something really lovely about doing series where we can have a number of episodes that really focus on one thing in particular. And I wrote a three-part piece for Substack on Trauma Informed Is Not a Tick Box. And I thought, you know what? Let's do a podcast series. So that's what we're doing here today. So welcome, welcome. It's really lovely to have you listening in today. And you're gonna absolutely love today's guest. Um, and in fact, I'm just gonna let him introduce himself. So, hello, Graham Music.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Hello, Lisa. It's lovely to speak to you in our first ever conversation.

SPEAKER_03 1:36

I know, and we've been connected for years.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:41

It's really weird, that isn't it? The whole kind of living life online where you're connected to so many different people, but actually you might never have even had a conversation, but your paths somehow cross all the time. And I think that's the experience we've had, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Yeah, absolutely that. Yeah, yeah. I've been so aware of you and had so much respect for what you've been doing and always interested in what you've got to say, but we've never met for some reason. So this is nice.

SPEAKER_03 2:09

It's lovely. And if anyone is interested, Graham Music does a rather long newsletter, which is absolutely full of so much content. So you must go and find that. In fact, I might pop that a link for that in the um show notes for you. It's one of those newsletters you remind me of, and now I'm not going to remember, but it's the midweek newsletter that a writer does on a Wednesday, and she has books and poetry and all sorts of things, and your newsletters are like that, which I love. But look, let's get straight into

What Trauma Informed Means Here

SPEAKER_03 2:47

this. Tell me, Graham. When we say the term the trauma-informed, and you're a psychotherapist, which we're going to get much more deeply into, but what does that term mean for you?

SPEAKER_00 3:01

Well, if I'm honest, I think probably I haven't fully embraced it as a concept because when I trained as a psychotherapist a long, long time ago, probably four decades or so ago, and it was before that concept was commonly used. And it and I trained in both humanistic and integrative adult psychotherapy, and then um at the Tavistock as a child and adolescent psychotherapist, my interest has always been in this thing that has begun to be called trauma. But actually, at the time there wasn't that much written or talked about in relation to trauma. So it probably wasn't until the 1980s, 80s or 90s that trauma was taken seriously. And it was pioneers like um Valerie Sinison in my business, you know, at the Tavistock and other places. Um, obviously, there's a long history going back a long, long way. And so I found myself being interested and always working with trauma. I my first one of my first jobs was working in a residential adolescent unit before I trained as a psychotherapist. And long before that, I was working with homeless people. And so that's always been part of what I was interested in and worked with, but it hadn't been properly conceptualized. So when this thing called Trauma Informed came along, I sort of looked and saw it coming along. I thought this is interesting, but I've never been fully part of it. And so I think anything that increases people's awareness of the very profound, powerful effects of traumatic experiences on individuals, on their bodies, on their lives, on their health, on their psyches, but also on organizations and systems and society as a whole is a good thing. But of course, there's we might come back, come to some of the questions and worries about how it's being used as well.

Books That Map Trauma Across Life

SPEAKER_03 4:49

You're quite well written, aren't you? Tell us a little bit about some of the books that you've written and how they kind of connect with your thoughts about trauma.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Okay. So I wrote a little book called Affect and Emotion a long, quite a long time ago. But the the the my first sort of biggish book, and it is a big book, is Nurturing Nature's, which is a kind of a textbook around child development, neuroscience, attachment theory. And I think it had the term trauma in the title. And that's now moved into its third edition. We're playing around with a fourth edition. Can I do it? I don't know, because it's a lot of work. But um I suppose in that central, and even in the very first edition, um aces were absolutely in there, trauma was absolutely in there, attachment was absolutely in there, the effects of experiences on the brain was absolutely in there. So that's always been profoundly important to me. Um, then I've written other stuff to do with. So some of the clinical books include Nurturing Children, which actually I wish I hadn't called it that now, because actually it's a clinical book about working with traumatised children. And maybe that should be what it's about. And I've written quite a lot of papers about trauma and the body as well. And I wrote a book called The Good Life, which is not really a therapeutic book, but it's about how bad experiences turn off empathy and can give rise to more hard, tough, unkind behaviours. As a species, of course, we've got the capacity for both being incredibly kind and generous and cooperative, and just completely nasty, psychopathic, and horrendously aggressive. So I think and the balance of that gets tipped by trauma, I think. Recently I've written a book called Womb Life about um for some reason I got interested in it in prenatal life. And there's a bit about trauma in there, particularly around the way in which trauma gets misdiagnosed as postnatal depression, particularly birth trauma, for example. And Reese Spark, I think, is a little book that I really, really pleased with. It's about the different psychological and bodily and emotional states that we get into, which are more numb shutdown, not just associated, but also a more kind of numbed shutdown state, like including after severe neglect. And so that book's about those different forms of the ways in which numbness shutdown, dull-downness not not being very alive, physiologically, emotionally, psychologically, or in Panxep's terms, in terms of the seeking system, how how that happens and why and how we work with it. I'm sure there's other things, but anyway, th those are the main books, I think. Also, I I co-edited a book about um working with trauma, about working with um the people who offend against children. And I was at the Portman Clinic. So that's all and it's called From Trauma to Harming Others.

SPEAKER_03 8:05

A slight digression, but I'm very interested in the idea of our capabilities as a human because lots of people are not really very connected to the idea that they could do bad things to people. Yeah. Like it's really challenging, isn't it, to think of yourself as being able to do bad things to other people. But in the right circumstances, of course, as as you said, we're all very capable of doing very bad things to other people.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:37

It's quite a difficult conversation to have, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 8:40

It's a really difficult conversation because there's so much posturing around taking the moral high ground in whatever side of whatever political spectrum on whatever issue there is now. And so it's really hard to stay with the nuance and to bear the complexity that we are all really, really complicated human beings who don't know ourselves as much as we would like to think we are, we do, and who were capable of doing incredibly awful things as well as incredibly loving things.

SPEAKER_03 9:13

I read something the other day, uh, and it was something along the lines of if we want to understand, and it was written, man, if we want to understand what man can do, look at what man has done. And I think it was I was on a flight to Chicago and it was a film, and I was watching the film uh Nuremberg. Oh wow. Uh the quote at the end of that film, and I just thought, Yep, it was just so powerful. Um, as a quote, you know, if you want to understand what we're capable of, have a look at what we've already done.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 9:53

Very powerful stuff. Anyway, slight digression there, because of course your work is so interesting, Graham. Um, but where do you notice? So I've heard what I've heard you say is that you are very, very much um, and I don't know if you find this word as uncomfortable as I do, but the word expert, but we'll use it just because you clearly have a massive expertise around trauma across adults and children, um, which I guess is what makes you a little bit special because lots of people specialise in adults or children rather than having the life course view which you have. Um so what I've what I'm what I'm very aware of is your expertise around trauma. But what you're saying is that the terminology trauma-informed is not something that you feel necessarily um has come into your work or what you're thinking about. Um so I suppose I guess I want to ask you something about have you heard that term being used at all in psychotherapy? Do you think it's pointless when it's used in psychotherapy, when you're working with trauma anyway? What are your kind of thoughts about that from your perspective in your profession?

Resonance Countertransference And The Worker

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Okay, well, to start with, I mean, it's not that I don't use those terms. And I recently did a pro it did a an intervention over about six months with a local authority near where I live around around understanding and working with trauma. I didn't call it trauma-informed, um, but I it could have been. But for me, it was me trying to use my psychotherapeutic hat, heart, mind in order to try to convey the complexity of working with with trauma. And that was um so that was trying to help people. In particular, the thing that gets missed out, I think, a lot, is how do we bear inside ourselves what gets stirred up in us by hearing about traumatic incidents, by working with people who've come who've perpetrated traumatic acts, who um this concept of the counter transference, which is central to psychoanalytic psychotherapy anyway, this idea that actually we inevit but it doesn't really mean that much more than we are a resonant species as a as humans who really pick up fine-grained nuances out of consciousness of in the person that we're with or the people that we're with, and that that will stir things up in us. And that that it's so, so important that people can be helped to bear with that. And I think for me, for in psychotherapy, in my work, I mean I I don't think I ever worked in a in a place which didn't primarily work with trauma. Although in the olden days, as it were, when I was training as a child therapist and child guidance, it it wasn't it wasn't a term that was top of the agenda, but we all knew what we were working with. And I worked in the Tavers Docks fostering adoption and kinship care team for about 10 years or so, and that's all we worked with. And I, well not all we worked with, but that every case had trauma in it. And then at the Portman Clinic where we worked with perpetrators, and again, I never met a perpetrator of that kind who hadn't had some kind of trauma. So it's always, always there. And I'd almost wished the term wasn't used in psychotherapy because I can't I can't conceptualize the idea of doing psychotherapeutic work with somebody which wasn't without an understanding of trauma and the effects of early experiences. And and it it for me it's almost inconceivable. And but what I feel I'm working with just about all the time is the ways in which people's lives have, in their kind of language, I suppose, gone wrong because of early experiences and adaptations to their experiences, which means they see the world and experience the world in a completely different way to people who haven't had those kinds of adverse experiences.

SPEAKER_03 14:16

I think very experienced older social workers would have the same view that having the terminology in a way is a bit pointless because, of course, you're working with trauma, and of course, you need to be aware of you need to be informed about what it is to work with the legacy of trauma. Um, maybe I wouldn't hear that from more uh younger or newer social workers. I don't think it's something that's I think that might be a training issue depending on where you've been trained, when you've been trained. But certainly older social workers, social workers in their 50s and 60s would definitely speak in that way about many would definitely speak in that way about trauma-informed as a concept.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

Yeah. Don't you miss? I do, I mean, I'm I know I'm an old bloke, but I do miss good old-fashioned social work, and they absolutely knew what they were working with, and they stayed with families for years and stayed with families between generations, and really knew what those families had been through and what some of the people in those families had done, and understood the importance of property holding over time.

SPEAKER_03 15:29

Oh, Graham, God, I I I think as well, and this is before my time, um, but social work was so rooted in activism, which is such a long, long way away from where it is now, I think I feel. Um and yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it? There was

Bearing Pain Without Bypassing It

SPEAKER_03 15:52

something that you said that I think is worth making explicit, which was thinking about what working with trauma awakens within us, what it does to the inside of us. And I wonder, could you make explicit what you mean by that and what it is that experience has taught you what happens to us when we are exposed to being around a lot of trauma?

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Well, as a species, and we're not the only species probably, but other species don't have a word for it. As a species, there's lots of things that will give rise to, for example, distaste, contempt, um we we there's all kinds of things we don't want to let in because we see them as dangerous, but also we see them as we we know that we'll feel them, we'll experience them as overwhelming. And so just hearing a story about something really horrendous can be absolutely overwhelming for maybe your average contemporary social worker or teacher, or and so they often there's a wish to shut things down, close off, not really take in what this child in front of us might have experienced. Or interesting, you mentioned activism. I think activism is important. I've been an activist most of my life, but on the other hand, there's a kind of activism which is a um which is a kind of bypass against experiencing pain as well. So it can activate activism, but it can also be a way of not genuinely deeply experiencing the painfulness of a situation. Um one of my first earliest memories was was probably over 45 years ago when I was working in a residential unit for adolescents, and I did a Christmas morning shift. And the only ones, even kids who'd been abandoned by their entire families, would often would nearly always find somewhere or someone to take them in for Christmas Day. But there were a few who weren't, and who were left in the home, you know, maybe half a dozen to a dozen. And I cannot explain, well, I can it, because you would you would understand it, just how painful it was to walk in to this place with these kids who no one in the world wanted, and no one was really, really thinking about them. And what struck me was these very kind, well-meaning colleagues, and I didn't know about this stuff then, but the very kind, well-meaning colleagues were trying to cheer up these kids and giving them nice, giving them presents and trying to let them play party games, but nobody asked them what they felt about being left in this home. And it was because they couldn't bear it.

SPEAKER_03 18:57

Yeah. I think that's um a wonderful example, actually. Um, and you also talked about um activism as avoidance, which is a whole other podcast. We could do like a whole podcast on activism as avoidance because that there's just so much to explore there. But I think that's a really good example of how much can we bear, how much can we tolerate, and how conscious are we? And there is a lot being spoken of at the moment about what happens for people if we're not going to say what's going on, if we're not going to acknowledge the complexity, the particular complexities, because I think every generation has its complexities, but the particular complexities that we're living now, the aftermath, you know, if you like, of COVID. That no, we've never spoken about that. We've never had a public conversation about that. But there's all sorts of things that we've never had public conversations about. And I think it speaks to what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

I think it does. Well, we still live in a culture which has the legacy of stiff upper lip, Britain in the middle classes, upper middle classes and upper classes, and a pretty tough working class culture very often as well, where you just had to grim and grin and bear and get on with life was tough, and you didn't want there wasn't really that much space for for vulnerability. And so a culture which has that as its almost that it's infused with that almost as its primary ethos, that we don't go there. You know, we send our children away to school at five years old because we think it's good for them and they'll they'll then be strong and run the country, or whatever it is. It's the same culture that when you take your child into nursery at 14 months old, and the nursery staff s suggest that you leave quickly so they don't notice, because the nursery staff can't bear the crying and they think you can't bear the crying. That's the same kind of thing, really. How can we open up to the painfulness of the situations without wallowing it, without just staying in it, but knowing that if we don't bear it, we can't help people come through it.

SPEAKER_03 21:23

And I'm tempted to say, tell us all how. You know, how do we how do we do that as a as a culture? How do people do that individually? You have to have quite a high level of tolerance, don't you? You have to, and within that, you also have to know that you have a strength that means that you can you're going to recover from it.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

Yeah. But it's what therapists so in a way, it's what a mother does or a father does, a parent does, a teacher is that if your child is in agony, Is crying like crazy because something awful has happened. Our job is to stay with them in that pain, but somehow communicate that there's something outside of the pain so that we are, so that we are somehow processing, metabolizing their pain for them and with them. We're not overwhelmed by it completely, but we're touched by it still. And so it's a bit like a Hegelian dialectic. You know, I'm with you in your pain. I'm completely deeply, deeply with you, but I'm not overwhelmed by it, so much so that I can't process it with you. So there's a bit of me outside of that. So I'm I'm lending you also my processing capacity, if you like, my metabolizing capacity. And again, there's no easy answer. People can write as many manuals as they like, but you've got to have you've got to go through difficult human experiences in order to be able to do this and provide this for people.

SPEAKER_02 22:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:00

When

When Trauma Informed Becomes A Brand

SPEAKER_03 23:02

in your profession, and you must have seen this because I've seen trauma-informed everything. Like trauma-informed Crisps, right? Trauma-informed trauma-informed fish and chip shops, you know, like there's absolutely trauma-informed everything. So you must have seen it in psychotherapy as well. What risks do you think arise in the profession when trauma-informed practice is used as a brand rather than a commitment to actually working with the legacy of trauma?

SPEAKER_00 23:38

Well, in some ways, I think I think it's a way of avoiding trauma, paradoxically. Because when it's used as a tick box by organizations that want to do the right thing and want to be seen to do the right thing, which makes worries me more, then it's easy to bypass the actual experience of being present with trauma and really, really deeply knowing what it is.

SPEAKER_03 24:06

Yeah, a compliance. When when uh I wrote about this in the pieces that I wrote, when something becomes about compliance, and so it needs to then for be measured, which is why we might describe it as a tick box because it's the thing that needs to be shown has been done. Uh, but we see it with all sorts of language, you know, we see it with therapeutic, you know, therapeutic, you will have seen this along your journey. Therapeutic children's homes that have nothing therapeutic about them going on.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Oh my God, how shocking. I mean, there are ways of getting local authorities to pay these and pay huge fees for very, very little, with very, you know, often sadly, not no fault of anybody, but often sadly very poorly trained, trained staff. So yeah, I completely agree. And it's it's partly virtue virtue signalling, it's partly wanting to be on the side of the good and the right, and who doesn't want to be. But there's also a danger in, for example, trauma-informed schools. If it's not done well, then the model of learning w is primarily, I suppose, cognitive. So people know in their heads a bit about trauma, but they don't know it in their bodies and beings and hearts. And actually, there's no knowing. Psychotherapy is about knowing something in your heart and body and being. It's not about knowing it in your head. Well, there has to be some of that, but that can so easily be used as a defense. As the great Donald Whiticott, who really knew about this stuff, knew, you know, that we can move into a head in order to move away from feelings. We all do it, I do it, but it's not that's not staying with trauma.

SPEAKER_03 25:54

That's really interesting. Let's just expand upon that for a moment. So, because there has been there is resistance to it as well, particularly well, uh yeah, particularly I would say in education, the word trauma is often replaced by the word relational because it's much more palatable and much easier for people to sit with. But actually, what you're saying suggests that maybe that's not a bad thing, that actually trying to even think about all of those things is just not even conducive to the way that a school is set up. I mean, how do you stay in the heart and the body when you are engaged in the business of the cognitive? It's quite a big ask, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 26:39

It's a huge ask, and it's you know, and it's unfair in way of therapists to ask that, but I think we can contribute. And so you can go into a school, you know, if you've got 33 kids in front of you and you've got to get through the national curriculum and you've got offset coming, and you've got people breathing down your neck, and you've got, especially you've got aspiring parents and that kind of thing, then the last thing you want to do is think about the child in the corner who hasn't said a word for three weeks, who's maybe been profoundly neglected or worse. And taking in what they're going through is not what you want to do. But I think we as therapeutically informed and trauma-informed human beings and therapists, we can help schools in those kinds of ways. We can help people think about it. In some ways, it's easier when we go into schools and help them. So, for example, most teachers want help with the kids who are kicking and screaming and throwing things at them, you know, because that they make them feel awful. And so, and they make them feel and and because these poor teachers are putting their heart and soul into this work and they're it's been rejected. It's a bit like a mother who's been cooking dinner all day and the kids reject it. You know, it's just feels painful. And so, in that kind of situation, we can help teachers by, for example, asking them how they feel when the kid does that, and um that nothing I do is good enough, and then think, well, that's probably how that kid feels at home, you know, knowing what's going on with this this family. So, in a way, they've communicated to you very effectively something of their inner world, and you have received it, and so this is brilliant. Now we can begin to think about this kid.

SPEAKER_03 28:18

Yeah. Yeah, no, I love that. Um, I love that.

Hope Compassion And The Ditch Metaphor

SPEAKER_03 28:26

So I kind of want to move into um a final question. So, what gives you hope? I mean, that's a big question already. What gives you hope, but also what gives you hope that authentic trauma-informed work is possible, whether that's in education, whether that's in social work, whether that's in psychotherapy?

SPEAKER_02 28:48

Where is the hope?

SPEAKER_00 28:52

Well, for me, the hope is both in my own personal journey, which doesn't ever stop, even though I'm in my late 60s now, but also um in the work I'm doing in the consulting room, in this room I'm sitting in now, where I see people shift and change, and sometimes it takes a very, very, very long time. But you see defenses come down, you see hope arise, you see people beginning to live a life instead of fleeing from life. And so I absolutely know that change and transformation is possible, but it always requires staying with and being with and not bypassing the difficulty as well as holding on to the hope. So you can't just stay with the difficulty, but you can't just be superficially hopeful. And I think that we can take that understanding out into whatever context we're working with, whether whether it's social services departments, psychiatric training, schools, and in psychotherapy training, but we have to know in ourselves that this is not an easy journey for any of us. And this is partly why I don't think that any that I've never developed a manual or um a five-point plan or anything like that, because I just don't work like that, and that's just me, probably, but there's a way in which it has to be a deep personal journey in order to meet other people on their deep personal journeys and help them along the way. So the hope for me is the fact that change happens, it absolutely happens, and it's the it's what inspires it, what g it's what gives rise to getting up in the morning and looking forward to seeing somebody. It's and the interesting is the difference between there was this great study that was done at the Max Planck Institute where they looked at the difference between empathy and compassion. You probably know the study, and they trained these kind of Buddhist adepts who train who meditated for 20,000, 30,000 hours or something, to um in emp in a particular empathy protocol where they had to feel with the other person, and they watched these videos and the um and they watched videos of, I don't know, refugees with arms cut off, and all of the systems in the brains of these meditators went completely skew-if and all over the place because they were just feeling the same as the other person. But when they were when they were doing the kind of classic compassion um exercises that many of us are also trained in, where you're where you really are with the other person, but at the same time you have another part of you outside of that experience that is wishing the other person well, and the cares for them from a slightly separate but not a distance place, um, all their reward systems find fired up and it made them interested and made them care in a different kind of way because they weren't overwhelmed. And I think there's something in that. So for me, the therapeutic thing, I I use this metaphor, I think, in nurturing children, I'm not sure, of um one of my earliest, earliest teachers was a guy called Dennis Hyde at the Minster Centre, sadly long deceased. And he said, Well, in your therapeutic work, what you have to do, Graeme, is you have to um if a client imagine the client's in a ditch, you have to put one foot in the ditch. It's a very simple metaphor, but you put one foot in the ditch and have one foot firmly out of the ditch and and and offer a hand down to the person in the ditch, and they feel that they're not on their own and they might be able to come out with your help. But if you're too far up above the ditch, waving down at them, like some kinds of therapies, then you're not going to reach them. If you get in the ditch with them, the two of you are lost. And so you need to have that some kind of balance, but also that's what gives the hope. One of you's on the back, a bit of you's on the bank, and a bit of you's in there. And I think getting that balance right is always one of the big, big, big, big challenges of anything in life, actually, relationships, but particularly psychotherapy.

SPEAKER_03 32:54

I think what I heard you say there was that hope actually reduces overwhelm.

SPEAKER_00 33:01

Yeah. Hope as well, both hope and the capacity to feel hopeless with somebody to an extent. Yeah, it's it's like it's a kind of peculiar tightrope.

SPEAKER_03 33:12

It's yeah, it's a bit of a dance. You made me laugh when you said you're not a five-point person, because at the end of my um keynotes, I often say, I'm gonna give you like 10 top tips. I said top tips. I wish I could do it. There's no top tips in this work, but because this is a keynote, I'm gonna give you some top tips. Um, but yeah. Anyway, it's been fantastic to talk to you, Graham. You've brought so much wisdom. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 33:42

Liz, it's been a complete pleasure, and I wish we could go on for hours. And so and so great you're doing this amazing stuff and holding your holding up this light as a kind of beacon, despite all you've been experiencing and going through for us all. So big, big gratitude, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

You've

Closing And Listener Invitation

SPEAKER_01 34:02

been listening to the Trauma Resonance Resilience podcast with me, your host, Lisa Cherry, brought to you straight from the heart of the knowledge that high quality relationships are the cornerstone of learning, healing, and growing. If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing or reviewing. Until next time.