Healing through music

Featured CHOC expert

Amy Maureen Calderon, MT-BC

Amy has been a Board-Certified Music Therapist for almost 7 years. She is currently working on her Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy at USC. Amy currently works in the Cherese Mari Laulhere Mental Health Inpatient Center at CHOC and CHOC’s Pediatric Intensive Care and Cardiovascular Intensive Care Units.

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Transcription

Melanie Cole, MS (Host): Welcome to Long Live Childhood, a pediatric health and wellness podcast presented by Children’s Health of Orange County. I’m Melanie Cole, and today we’re talking about healing through music, and joining me is Amy Calderon. She’s a Music Therapist with CHOC. Amy, thank you so much for joining us today. Tell the listeners, what is music therapy?

Amy Maureen Calderon, MT-BC: Thank you, Melanie. Music therapy is used to help others in several different types of goals, such as physical, social, emotional, and we use music in order to work on these goals. So this can be done individually or in a group setting. There are music therapists who work in a variety of settings, like the hospital, prisons, in hospice, in schools, and that spans from birth until the end of life.

Melanie Cole (Host): Well, as somebody who just really loves music, and for me, it’s therapy no matter what I’m doing, or cooking or exercising. It’s therapeutic. Now for you, this is an actual modality for helping people, as you just described. Amy, you can use music in both healthy and unhealthy ways. Can you explain a little bit about that?

Amy Maureen Calderon, MT-BC: Yes, definitely. Especially when you’re listening to music on your own, you want to make sure that you’re not using it in a way that will inevitably then make you feel worse, right?

Sometimes we do need to listen to that music to let our emotions out and feel the anger, feel the sadness. But the problem is when we use it to the point where then we’re stuck in that state. We want to be able to use the music to then get us out of it. So maybe changing the music to something more uplifting, to help us get out of that mode, because you don’t want to stay stuck.

That’s kind of the most important thing when you’re using music on your own, when listening. Music can also be used in healthy ways of coping by learning to play an instrument or maybe doing songwriting, and just interacting with other people making music. Those are all great ways to use music in a healthy way. And as a music therapist, I help facilitate that with a group or a person and I am board certified.

So I’ve gone to school. I had to do a six month internship and then I took a board examination. So it is a degree that you have to get in order to become a music therapist.

Melanie Cole (Host): Do you have to be someone who’s musically inclined to benefit from music therapy?

Amy Maureen Calderon, MT-BC: No, that’s definitely not something you have to be good at. Everybody has rhythm, right? Like our entire bodies are made of rhythm. Our hearts are beating. When we’re walking, we’re walking to a rhythm. Our lives are leading in a rhythmic way and rhythm is music, so you don’t have to be amazing to be able to tap on a drum or to listen to a song or sing along to something.

And even just trying these things can be very rewarding. So if you feel like you can’t sing, that’s not what matters here. It’s about expressing your emotions and truly doing it for yourself. It’s not about performing or anything like that; it’s more for your own well-being and satisfaction.

Melanie Cole (Host): Well, certainly, and as you said, it can be healthy and unhealthy, and so many of us use music to change our moods from sad to happy or angry to get it out, whatever the reason that we do it, but it can exude so many emotions, and music can take us back 50 years to something that happened in our childhood.

It’s really an incredible modality. Now, I would love for you to tell the listeners what a music therapy session looks like. When you’re working with these kids, Amy, what are you doing with them?

Amy Maureen Calderon, MT-BC: It really depends on who I’m working with. We tailor everything specifically to each child. So I might have a baby that I’m working with, so then I’m using very relaxing, calming lullabies to help them relax because they’re in a very stressful environment. With a toddler, I engage them and let them make choices, as the hospital takes away many of their options.

Toddlers usually don’t have a say in what others do to them. So giving them an opportunity to make a choice, to decide whether they even want to engage in music therapy, is something that’s very important. Just giving them that strength to be able to say yes or no. And then in those cases, they might be playing an instrument. It could be singing along.

It could just be listening to me sing. So it just kind of depends on who I’m working with. With an older child, maybe like a teenager, maybe they want to learn how to play an instrument. We lend several guitars, keyboards, and ukuleles to patients while they’re in the hospital, allowing them to keep the instruments in their room until they’re discharged.

So then, when I come in, I kind of help them learn to play the instrument, or if they already know how to play, then maybe help them advance their skills a little bit, or get just materials so they can learn on their own. I might do songwriting with them, just allowing them to process their own emotions, just with the stress that comes with being in the hospital.

Melanie Cole (Host): What great work you do, Amy. How can someone engage with music for their mental health, because as we’re seeing a mental health epidemic, and certainly among our youth today, how would you advise them to use music to help their mental health, whether it’s in meditation, or yoga, or soul searching, or however you want to speak to these teens and tweens? Let them know how music can really help them to have a more positive mental health.

Amy Maureen Calderon, MT-BC: Yes, definitely. I am a huge fan of creating playlists based on like mood and I feel like a lot of teens already intuitively do this, where they have their different playlists for different things, but making sure that we’re focusing more on those positive, uplifting types of songs.

And maybe it’s something that maybe the song is like, a rock heavy song, but it makes you feel good. Then that’s what you want to put on your playlist, right? You want to be monitoring how the song makes you feel. So if you’re feeling worse, maybe you just need to switch to another song. But if you’re feeling good, then keep listening to it, right?

That’s the most important thing when you’re engaging and listening with music and as I’ve mentioned before, learning to play an instrument can be so rewarding. It kind of gives you some minor successes and like learning how to play a chord on a guitar or learning to play a simple melody on a piano can be those tiny successes that can make you feel really good.

Melanie Cole (Host): Yeah, this is such a great topic and not everybody really knows what it is. So where can they find out more about music therapy, Amy, and what you do at Children’s Health of Orange County?

Amy Maureen Calderon, MT-BC: You can find more information at musictherapy.org. Our national organization provides a wealth of information on the different ways music has been used. They have conducted extensive research in music therapy and published numerous resources. We have the Journal of Music Therapy and the Music Therapy Perspectives.

Those are all research based, and we’ve been around for a very long time. Maybe like 1950s, I want to say. So there’s definitely a lot out there. It’s just, people just don’t know.

Melanie Cole (Host): Well, thank you for informing us today, Amy. Thank you so much for joining us. And for more information, please visit choc.org. Thanks for listening to Long Live Childhood, a pediatric health and wellness podcast presented by Children’s Health of Orange County. Together, we can keep kids happy and healthy.

We’d like to invite our audience to download, subscribe, rate, and review Long Live Childhood on Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Spotify, and Pandora. Please remember to share these shows on your social channels, as we’re all learning from the experts at Choc Together. I’m Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for joining us today.

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