By Elly Scrine, Photo: Unsplash, Frontiers in Psychology, January 27, 2022
A broad sociocultural perspective defines trauma as the result of an event, a series of events, or a set of circumstances that is experienced as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening, with lasting impacts on an individual’s physical, social, emotional, or spiritual wellbeing. Contexts and practices that aim to be “trauma-informed” strive to attend to the complex impacts of trauma, integrating knowledge into policies and practices, and providing a sanctuary from harm. However, there is a body of critical and decolonial scholarship that challenges the ways in which “trauma-informed” practice prioritizes individualized interventions, reinscribes colonial power relations through its conceptualizations of safety, and obscures the role of systemic injustices. Within music therapy trauma scholarship, research has thus far pointed to the affordances of music in ameliorating symptoms of trauma, bypassing unavailable cognitive processes, and working from a strengths-based orientation. In critiquing the tendency of the dominant trauma paradigm to assign vulnerability and reinforce the individual’s responsibility to develop resilience through adversity, this conceptual analysis outlines potential alternatives within music therapy. Drawing on a case example from a research project with young people in school, I elucidate the ways in which music therapy can respond to power relations as they occur within and beyond “trauma-informed” spaces. I highlight two overarching potentials for music therapy within a shifting trauma paradigm: (1) as a site in which to reframe perceived risk by fostering young people’s resistance and building their political agency and (2) in challenging the assumption of “safe spaces” and instead moving toward practices of “structuring safety.”
Introduction
Within the behavioral sciences alone, conceptualizations of trauma have proven mutable, and the ongoing revision of diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder has invoked controversy and debate (McNally, 2009; Pai et al., 2017; Laurel Franklin et al., 2019). The fifth and most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association (2013) saw a substantial revision of the core diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). By relocating trauma from under the anxiety disorders category and into a new standalone diagnostic category, the changes sought to remove subjectivity related to trauma exposure, limit the types of events that qualify as trauma, and provide a more objective definition of what trauma is and what it is not (Richard, 2009; Jones and Cureton, 2014; Pai et al., 2017). Modern trauma theory identifies trauma as a complex series of bodily and psychological reactions in response to danger, typically pointing to events such as sexual abuse, domestic violence, war, torture, and interpersonal violence (van der Kolk et al., 1996; Herman, 2015). Within the dominant trauma paradigm, common goals for recovery and healing include addressing threats to the sympathetic nervous system, repairing a broken or fragmented sense of self-protection, building agency and resilience, and integrating the memory of the event(s) (van der Kolk, 2014; Herman, 2015).
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