13. Music-Mind: “In the end, I just had to heal myself.”
Accompanying Musicians on their Health Odyssey
Neil Packer’s illustration of Odysseus battling the fierce cyclops
I often have the honor of working with musicians who have or had harrowing experiences with performance-impacting injuries and illnesses ranging from overuse syndrome to focal dystonia to mysterious and weird non-identifiable illnesses that get thrown into the pot of psychosomatic disorders.
These people shuttle between dozens of doctors, therapists, and other experts, and often have the feeling that they aren’t finding sustainably helpful answers in the traditional therapeutic places. Some of them look to pretty funky places for help, engaging in way-out-there (and also expensive) forms of therapy and wellness practices. Others give up looking for external help and find their own ways to deal with their health issues.
One violinist I spoke with took on the task of healing herself (biographical details changed to protect identity). This musician struggled with focal dystonia, a movement disorder leading to involuntary cramping of the fingers. She went through this in the 1990s, when treatment options for the disorder were much more limited than they are today. After countless visits to doctors/therapists who extensively worked with her, she committed to taking whatever time was necessary to retrain her brain, developing her own kind of therapy: she only played until the dystonic movement appeared, and then she stopped, even if it meant that she would play for only 1 or 2 minutes per day. She built up this zen-like practice ritual and eventually overcame the disorder. She later said, with some bitterness: “In the end, I just had to heal myself”.
While I have so much sympathy for the pain, loneliness, and lack of support inherent this statement, I also think…
Yes indeed, my friend. In the end, we all just have to heal ourselves.
Doctors and Patients
People tend to be involved in medical treatments in a very passive way. They go to a doctor, are examined, given a treatment and/or medications, and then violà, fixed!
Many times this works. We are living in a time in which we have so many excellent options for effective forms of medical treatment. At the same time, we are also living in a time in which the so-called “diseases of civilization” are increasing.
These diseases include cancer and diabetes but also a host of auto-immune diseases which often present in mysterious ways that are not easy for doctors to identify and categorize. This can destabilize doctors who may have been taught to project certainty and an indisputable aura of expertise in all medical matters.
Dr. Gabor Maté writes about the connections between the body and psyche in his book:
Maté writes:
“The medical profession’s reflexive discomfort with uncertainty immensely complicates life for patients... We expect people to present us with diseases that fit neatly into symptom categories and bear unequivocal pathological findings...One of the most difficult transitions for medical students is to accept the uncertainty that is intrinsic to medical practice. “
The author and poet Meghan O’Rourke has been providing insights into her mysterious medical issues, first through a 2013 New Yorker article “What’s Wrong with Me?” and more recently through her book, “The Invisible Kingdom”. She writes:
Trapped in a body that wasn’t working, I embarked on a complicated and obsessive quest for answers. I was met with both cutting skepticism and authentic concern from clinicians, friends, and colleagues. I tried many therapies and approaches toward healing during my search for an effective treatment, but in the meantime, the mysterious chronic illness I lived with got worse, not better, leaving me feeling almost entirely unrecognizable to myself.
If medicine can’t see or name the problem, it can neither study nor treat it.”
In moments of great uncertainty, we naturally long for an expert who exudes an aura of certainty.
I get it.
But I also really appreciate doctors who, when encountering some medical issue that confounds them, tell me that they don’t really know the answers. They might refer me out to another doctor who might have another kind of speciality or insight or intuition. It complicates my life, of course, to not receive quick and thoroughly satisfying answers. But it also just shows me that I have to dig deeper or dig elsewhere. This process reflects the complexity of our wondrously intricate and interrelated bodies and minds.
I recently read Stephanie Foo’s moving memoir of overcoming Complex-PTSD:
Stephanie Foo was a contributor to the NPR radio show “This American Life”. Her memoir goes deep into the experiences of a first-generation American of Chinese descent who experienced almost inconceivable abuse and abandonment at the hands of both of her parents. After giving a raw account of her upbringing and describing a major breakdown and burn-out resulting from her punishing work ethic, she describes, in colorful detail, the odyssey of treatment paths she went on: from psychotherapy to yin yoga to acupuncture, gratitude journals, eye-movement therapy, hallucinogens, and also to an excellent psychotherapist specialized in complex PTSD, Dr. Jacob Ham, to whom she gives much credit for her healing process. Foo’s early experiments in healing could be exhausting and draining:
“Soon my calendar was packed with trauma-centered activities. Sound baths, yoga classes, my support group, Buddhist talks, massages. I hightailed it on the subway to make a meditation class in Midtown after a yoga class in Brooklyn, then hustled back for a physical therapy appointment. On these hectic journeys, I of course made mistakes. I forgot to bring a healthy snack, or I wasted too much time huffing essential oils in a gift shop and arrived too late to a yoga class, where I lost my $15 deposit. Each time I fucked up, I chastised myself: You’re jobless and bleeding money! You’re living like an entitled socialite! Except without any of the fun parts! Like octopus carpaccio! Or yachts! “
Foo’s commitment to her health was admirable, but she was applying to her healing path similar patterns of hypervigilance and perfectionism that had previously complicated her professional and personal life. This is not uncommon for those living with a legacy of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). Complex-PTSD, also called “relational trauma”, often originates from ongoing early abuse or neglect patterns. Many musicians I work with seem to carry several symptoms of C-PTSD, but may be reluctant to call it that because they can’t identify the kinds of traumas in their own lives that one would normally associate with PTSD.
Some symptoms of Complex-PTSD are :
feelings of worthlessness, shame and guilt
inability to regulate emotions
difficulties connecting with others
long-term relationship problems
Stephanie Foo seems to be an intense person, like many of my musician-clients. Her intensive search for solutions may have saved her, but it also created its own set of obstacles. She applied to her healing the same vigor with which she drew herself out of her catastrophic family dysfunction. This vigor may have been her ticket out of the swamp of intergenerational trauma patterns, but it also made her life very difficult.
Foo continues:
“One day, I arrived at a meditation class five minutes late and had to step over crossed thighs, shuffling apologetically to my spot, where I stewed in shame on my pillow. Everyone thinks I’m an asshole! They can hear me panting! I’m ruining the vibe! And then it dawned on me: I was stressing out about not being perfect at my relaxation class… I was approaching “wellness” with the same obsessive, perfectionistic tendencies I’d brought to my job. This was no less disordered than being a workaholic, and the pattern had a distinct echo: moments of intense joy through achievement followed by anxiety over finding my next success. “
Foo’s memoir shows that healing journeys are never linear, passive, and simple. She committed to changing the bad hand of cards she was dealt in her early life, and did so with awe-inspiring and messy dynamism and a high tolerance for missteps and false paths.
Lone Rider?
The field of Musicians’ Medicine has made enormous strides in the past decades to understand the specific health needs of musicians. There are more and more doctors and therapists who specialize in Musicians’ Medicine and focus their research and practice on developing an ever-sensitized approach to assisting musicians. I don’t in any way want to give the impression here that musicians suffering from injuries or illnesses should turn their back on the medical establishment and become lone-riders of their own health destinies. I have encountered several musicians who discovered novel ways to heal from their health ailments. Many of these figures turn into ‘gurus’ who push their narrow health schemes: “Heal your Focal Dystonia with Celery Juice!” “Overcome Tinnitus with Kimchi!” (These are made-up titles.) If the remedy works for you, wonderful! But I’m not convinced that narrow solutions are helpful for others.
My message here is that the recovery of health is a very individual path. What might be a wonder cure for someone else may fall flat for you. But you might discover that your carpal tunnel syndrome is indeed alleviated by listening every day to the chanting of Honduran monks. Recovery is a mysterious process!
I’ve witnessed people healed by interventions that stem from the medical establishment, and I’ve witnessed people being healed by so-called alternative approaches. Mostly, I’ve witnessed people being healed by varied, individually-relevant, carefully-selected and multi-modal approaches.
On this individual path, you may find that you need help from many different kinds of people such as doctors, therapists, and traditional healers. You may find that an inward journey of reflection and individual experimentation is a helpful path. You might combine self-reflection and inward healing with a web of outside forms of support. I hope you are able to find the kinds of things that help you heal yourself. I also hope you have a tolerance for mistakes along the way, for what might feel like a dead-end or missed chance. Everyone I’ve witnessed who has gone through a major health journey has come out on the other side with a deeper knowledge of themselves and of their various resources. Some of them say the health issue was a blessing in disguise.
I'll leave you with Keith Jarrett, who suffered for two years from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, another mysterious illness that left him exhausted, incapacitated and housebound.
In December of 1997, after these years of illness, he went to the recording studio beside his house, arranged the microphones, and set out to make a Christmas gift for his wife, Rose. This offering became the album "Melody at Night with You", and marked Jarrett's return to health, to life, and to music. Keith Jarrett said about this album: