“I Don’t Know How I Feel!”
How Somatic Songwriting Can Bridge the Gap When Talking isn’t Getting There
"Something changes when the task is expression instead of disclosure."
104655 The Roots of Rhythm and Somatic Songwriting: The Healing Power of Music
We are all connected, and rhythm is a thread that holds us and our world together. This workshop begins with an exploration of the power of rhythm as a tool for healing and regulation, particularly in managing the trauma response. Rhythm is universal. Participants will explore the origins of rhythm and its connection to regulation. Rhythm is deeply embedded within...
“How do you feel about that?” you ask in a talk therapy session.
Your patient responds with:
I don’t know”
“I feel good now”
“I’ve moved on”
“I feel like it made me the person I am today
They aren’t avoiding the question. They just genuinely do not know how they feel because they’ve suppressed their emotions their whole life.
The client can tell you everything they think about it, how it shaped them, but cannot identify the emotion.
Even after years of therapy, they understand how to heal, they have mentally moved on, they may even think that they have healed, but you know they haven’t really healed.
Why? Because they still lack the inability to identify an emotion let alone feel the emotion. This is what keeps them in a cycle of never really healing.
This is also where music enters the conversation.
Emotions are stored in the body
Traumatic memory is encoded sensorially. This is precisely why triggers are sensory: a smell, a quality of light, a particular tone of voice. The body filed the event through the five senses and it retrieves it the same way.
Which means a client can be entirely sincere in telling you they have processed something. They understand what happened. They can narrate it calmly. They have real insight into how it shaped them. And their body has not gotten the message, because cognitive resolution and somatic resolution are not the same event, and the second does not automatically follow the first.
So when we ask a client to explain a feeling, we are posing a cortical question about subcortical material. Sometimes it works. When it does not, the problem is usually not the client's willingness. It is the channel.
The Root is Rhythm
Hand a crying infant to almost any adult and watch what happens.
They rock. They sway. They pat in a steady pattern, at a tempo somewhere near a resting heartbeat, and nobody taught them that tempo. Every culture on record does some version of this and no culture skipped it.
There is a reason. The auditory system comes online in the second trimester, so the first environment any of us knew was rhythmic, a maternal heartbeat between 60 and 80 beats per minute, the rise and fall of breath, the muffled prosody of a voice. The brain lays that association down in its lowest, oldest structures: patterned, repetitive, rhythmic input means safe.
Bruce Perry's Neurosequential Model turns this into a clinical sequence that we would argue is not optional: regulate, relate, then reason. A person in a high arousal state does not have dependable access to the cortex. You can offer a beautiful insight and watch it land nowhere. Perry has even suggested pairing rhythmic activity to roughly 80 beats per minute, or its subrhythms at 40 and 60, because that range echoes the heart rate we developed inside.
The mechanism is called "entrainment", the synchronizing of neural oscillations to periodic external input, and it is not metaphorical. Even passive listening to a rhythmic pattern recruits motor regions of the brain. Menon and Levitin (2005) showed that music listening engages the mesolimbic reward system directly, and Levitin's recent work gathers what two decades since have produced, from endogenous opioid release to clinical applications in Parkinson's gait, chronic pain, and dementia care (Levitin, 2024). Fancourt and colleagues (2016) followed mental health service users through ten weeks of group drumming and found significant improvements in depression, anxiety, and social resilience, still holding at three-month follow-up, alongside a shift from a pro-inflammatory toward an anti-inflammatory immune profile.
It reaches the level where the material is actually stored.
102594 TIP 57-Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services - Screening and Assessment
This course discusses screening and assessment in trauma informed care. It includes: barrier and challenges to trauma-informed screening and assessment, cross-cultural screening and assessment, choosing instruments, and trauma-informed screening and assessment.
This course is based on the reading online article, TIP 57-Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services - Screening and Assessment created by SAMHSA in 2014.
How Can this be Applied if I’m not a musician or a music therapist?
This is where most clinicians stop, and it is a fair objection. Somewhere between infancy and adulthood, nearly all of us absorbed the idea that music belongs to musicians.
We knew it healed us and then we forgot, and we handed it to the people who are good at it.
So, the practical question is not whether music reaches trauma. It is what a licensed professional who does not play anything is supposed to do with that on a Tuesday afternoon.
Somatic Songwriting for the Non Musicians
The process is short.
Pick one memory and ask what the client saw, heard, smelled, tasted, touched. You can even set a 5 minute timer and have them write it down. This is to avoid scenario when a clinician says, "tell me about it.” By the time a narrative reaches us it is usually well-rehearsed and disconnected from the body. Sensory detail is neither. This step alone tends to surface triggers the client had never consciously named, because they are describing the exact channels through which the event was encoded.
Then thoughts. What did you tell yourself? What was the first sentence in your head? This can be spoken or written.
Then feelings. By now the client has something concrete to feel about, which is a far more answerable question than being asked to name an emotion cold. Again, spoken or written.
Congratulations the lyrics are already written! Your next step is pulling out what you already wrote using a simple verse-chorus-verse-chorus syllable method taught in the training that requires no music theory or training. The lyric writing is syllable-based rather than melody-driven, so the skill required is counting.
Now, here is where the breakthrough happens: they hear their memory through music. Their human written words, set to music. An AI music tool can do this in less than 30 seconds, which is what makes the whole thing accessible to anyone. The clinician does not need to play anything. When they hear the song for the first time, many may begin to cry and report feeling lighter.
Start to finish? About fifteen minutes.
The homework for the client? Listen to the song over and over until it no longer holds the emotional weight. Dance to the song. Sing along with the song. Maybe even learn the song on guitar and piano if they are already musically inclined. This is the practical to access the emotion through rhythm and sound.
103256 Somatic Therapeutic Tools: Unlocking the Neurobiology of Trauma and Awakening Our Body's Innate Wisdom to Care for Itself
Somatic and body-centered therapies are highly effective systems for working with mental, physical and emotional health from a holistic perspective. These cutting-edge methods support long-lasting change to behavioral health and well-being. With knowledge of how to track and map the nervous system, tools can be applied effectively to support ourselves and our clients with self-regulation and healing underlying patterns of...
How Does This Help In Your Session?
When the song plays, the memory is outside the person for the first time. It is no longer something they are inside of; it is something in the room they can look at and see for what it is.
Clinically, that buys you three things.
- It collapses the processing timeline. Weeks of circling a memory to get at what the client felt about it can compress into a single session, which means more of your remaining time goes to the healing work rather than to excavation.
- It gives you access to suppressed material. Once a client can say this is what I feel and this is what it is attached to, you finally have something to work with. That is the door opening. What happens after it opens is your work, not the song's.
- And it leaves the client holding something. A song is tangible in a way that a good session is not. Clients can return to it, play it on a harder day, and hear the distance between who wrote it and who is listening.
For someone who cannot yet feel that therapy is working, a marker of progress they can actually press play on is not a small thing.
How Expressive Arts Open Up The Quiet Hearts
Early in my career, I worked as a board-certified music therapist in inpatient behavioral health hospitals, and during my internship we had to create a new intervention. I was a songwriter and developed a method.
A pre-AI world, they would write their songs in a group setting, and I would collect the lyrics and improvise on guitar. Every single time, someone cried. People reported feeling lighter and more confident at one of their lowest points in life because they just wrote a really good song, something most people think they could never do. I did many other music therapy interventions, but this became a favorite.
The client I still think about though had been on the unit for months. Talk therapy was not reaching her. I began working one on one as a case study and during that time, she opened up up about a severe abuse that she had never told a single one of her therapists, or family.
It's interesting: something changes when the task is expression instead of disclosure. She was not being asked to explain what happened or account for how she felt about it. She was being asked to pick a moment and write a song. There is no wrong answer to that, and no pressure because her prompt each days was to just pick a happy or sad memory. It was her choice and by creating that space where she felt a little bit of power, in a powerless situation, she chose to share abuse. That was the catalyst to her healing.
Is this music therapy?
This is not music therapy. Music therapy is a credentialed clinical discipline with its own training, assessment protocols, and standards of practice, and no workshop confers it. What this is, is a way of using music therapeutically inside the practice you already have and a door into expressive arts for practitioners who assumed it was closed to them.
If you want to go further with us, we are teaching the full framework on October 16th: the rhythm and regulation research in the first half, the songwriting process in the second, with time for every participant to write one. That way you don’t just learn about it, you experience it so you can reconnect with the power of music. ◼
104655 The Roots of Rhythm and Somatic Songwriting: The Healing Power of Music
We are all connected, and rhythm is a thread that holds us and our world together. This workshop begins with an exploration of the power of rhythm as a tool for healing and regulation, particularly in managing the trauma response. Rhythm is universal. Participants will explore the origins of rhythm and its connection to regulation. Rhythm is deeply embedded within...
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References
Alexandre, A. B., Kasherwa, A., Balegamire, J. B. M., Tunangoya, J. Y., Mukanga, L. O., Buhendwa, F. Z., … Mukengere, D. M. (2025). Bouncing back after trauma: Music therapy, gender, and mental health in conflict-ridden settings. Discover Mental Health, 5(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-025-00137-1
Fancourt, D., Perkins, R., Ascenso, S., Carvalho, L. A., Steptoe, A., & p
Opinions and viewpoints expressed in this article are the author's, and do not necessarily reflect those of CE Learning Systems.
