My voice started off meek like a mouse, wavering, faltering, trying desperately to hide behind the strum of the guitar. As the weeks passed and with each session, my voice grew stronger, louder, more confident and I began to open up about what each song meant to me and the emotions that came bubbling to the surface with the memories that they stirred.

"(Music therapy) can make the difference between withdrawal and awareness, between isolation and interaction, between chronic pain and comfort -- between demoralisation and dignity." Barbara Crowe, former president National Association of Music Therapy (America)

I had undertaken music therapy a few times before, initially when I was 12. Each setting was slightly different as were the goals and purpose and I found something worthwhile each time. Music has always been an integral part of my life and how I process emotions, traumas and the wall I’d built instinctively to protect myself. With each session, song and lyric the wall began to come down brick by brick. 

Music therapy is used in many settings- kids in hospitals, dementia patients, psychiatric wards, and adults in physical rehabilitation units, and all benefit from the gift of music. I was a combination of these things. My first experience of music therapy had been at the age of 12 in inpatient psych for the first time, then as a teenager spending 8 months in The Royal Children’s Hospital, then in emergency housing, and more recently as an NDIS participant facing physical and psychosocial disability. 

I had always instinctively used music as a processing tool every single day. In the car, shower and then later on in a choir. I felt it flow through my veins and knew its power. I have many playlists each with their own purpose and time for use. Sometimes I hear a song on the radio and it hits me like a wave, the wall comes crashing down and I feel the emotion run through me, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. 

It’s been good to have a more controlled setting where I can pick what songs to focus on depending on what I feel I am able to express or focus on. Each time I finish the session feeling lighter knowing I have been able to safely let someone else into the world I hold inside, in all its colours.

Now I’m at a point where I’m beginning to write my own music in these sessions. It’s taken 30 years to get here... the wall now has a gate that I can open and close, the words and melodies are now my own. I am truly telling my story and connecting with the hum of music that courses through my veins. 

•  Musictherapy.org. 2020. Definition And Quotes About Music Therapy | Definition And Quotes About Music Therapy | American Music Therapy Association (AMTA). [online] Available at: <https://www.musictherapy.org/about/quotes/> [Accessed 13 April 2020].

•   Bruscia, K., 1998. Defining Music Therapy. Gilsum NH: Barcelona Publishers.

About the writer

Jess Cochran is a 29-year-old from Melbourne. Jess lives with physical and psychosocial disabilities as well as chronic illness. Jess is a writer, performing artist, actress, model, and disability advocate. 

She hopes that her continued involvement with advocacy, writing and the performing arts will help break down the barriers that performing artists with disabilities face when trying to access work, training and performance spaces.