Children and adolescents

As a mother of two children, and being confronted with special needs in the family, I know how beautiful, fulfilling and enriching it can be to encourage children in their uniqueness and accompany them on their way to adulthood. How beautiful, but also exhausting and challenging.
We adults grow with our children, at least as intensively as they grow with us.

I offer music therapy support for the following issues in children and adolescents:

Behavioural problems (e.g. AD(H)D)
Emotional disorders (depression, anxiety, etc.)
Trauma
Special needs
Difficult social or health conditions

It is very important to me to support children and adolescents together with their family environment. Regular discussions with parents are therefore a natural part of the therapeutic process.

Adults

Being an adult is and remains a challenge!
When is someone an adult: when they have reached a certain height, a certain age or simply the age of majority? Some people seem to have not yet grown up at 60, others seem like "old souls" in a young body.

In any case, adulthood involves the ability to take personal responsibility for one's actions, feelings and thoughts. For this, a person needs a strong connection with all his levels: the mental, emotional and physical. Music therapy can help as a bodily experience to connect with oneself holistically and to be moved.

I offer music therapy support for the following issues in adults:

Personality development
Life crises and trauma
Acute or chronic mental disorders (depression, anxiety, personality disorders,...)
Special needs and illness

Seniors

Older people nowadays mostly live alone, they are no longer part of an extended family system. Unfortunately, they themselves often forget their very special value, which consists of life experience, wisdom and availability of time. In the past, when grandparents, parents and children gathered in the evenings to sing songs and wind down the day, seniors were still a real part of the community: they passed on the old folk songs and the wealth of experience they contained.

Dementia can exacerbate the feelings of isolation that are typical of today's world. That is why we music therapists work with familiar music, especially with people in this area: nowadays, this no longer consists mainly of folk songs, but the question of preference for the Beatles or the Rolling Stones is also becoming quite topical.

Music therapy can have a meaningful and connecting effect and, depending on the application, be calming or activating. It promotes the preservation of remaining cognitive abilities. It is therefore not uncommon to hear a person suffering from dementia sing whole verses of a song, where usually no verbal exchange is possible any more. The long-term memory is activated and this enables social communication.

I offer music therapy support for the following issues in seniors:

Longing for a meaningful present / a meaningful review of life
Loneliness, depression, anxiety
Dementia or other illness
Aphasia and/or apraxia after stroke
Grief

As a family carer, I am well aware of the practical stresses and the ongoing grueling process of grieving for a loved one with dementia.

What is music therapy?

The goal of music therapy treatment is the prevention, healing, alleviation and aftercare of mental and/or physical suffering.
We understand music therapy as an expression- and experience-oriented psychodynamic method in which all conceivable forms of musical expression and experience form the core of the treatment.
Beyond music, verbal reflection can be of great importance, but does not have to be, since music addresses our preverbal level, which we used - to communicate - before we acquired language.
No prior musical experience is required for music therapy treatment.
As a practice-oriented science, music therapy incorporates the latest findings from the natural sciences and the humanities.

My main instruments as a singer-songwriter are the voice, the piano and the guitar. Of course, I use many other melodic and rhythmic instruments in music therapy. As a music therapist, I have enjoyed a very eclectic university education and am thus guided - depending on the needs of my clients - by various music therapy approaches, such as Nordoff-Robbins' Creative Music Therapy, Gestalt music therapy, or music therapy and Focusing, to name but a few. My music therapy work is always culture-specific due also to my multilingualism and multiculturalism. Songs, canzoni, chansons, Lieder or cançiones are not foreign tools to me, but meaningful repertoire, shared with my clients. Since the university where I studied (Michigan State University, USA) had a behaviourist tradition, my critical observation of behavior and situations was particularly trained. This helps me now very much to illuminate my depth psychological work and not least to find words for it in my reports, which health insurance companies, social welfare offices and other financing authorities or institutions can well understand. It is very important to me to separate the factual (real events) from that which neither allows nor needs objectification.

Why music therapy?

CAMEOS - The music therapy acronym

C - Communication: COMMUNICATION WITHOUT LIMITS
Music therapy can support and encourage people also on a completely non-verbal way. It can therefore be used where other therapies reach their limits. Ideal for accompanying premature babies, children, people who are tired of talk therapy or who tend to over-control and rationalize, people with special needs, with speech/language disorders e.g. after brain injuries, palliative (end-of-life care) and with people who speak other languages, e.g. refugees.

A - Academic: LEARNING, COGNITIVE SKILLS
Learning, recognizing and remembering are easier for people when they are in motion and making music. Whether a child learns the ABCs thanks to catchy melodies, or a person suffering from dementia is able to regain and maintain its language repertoire by singing familiar songs: music promotes cognitive fitness.

M - Motor: BODY ACTIVATION
Music is a physical phenomenon (waves) and stimulates resonance processes in the body as well as on a mental level. Musical experience simultaneously activates different areas of the brain, regulates - when used in a targeted way - physiological processes such as breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, causes the release of so-called happiness hormones such as endorphin and dopamine, reduces the release of stress hormones such as adrenaline (short-term effect) and cortisol (long-term stress) and stimulates motor activity. Neurological music therapy uses these effects for rehabilitation after damage to the central or peripheral nervous system as a result of accident or illness to help people regain movement and cope with cognitive difficulties.

E - Emotional: EMOTIONAL PROCESSING
Music strongly affects and can change our mood, and is therefore used by music therapists in a targeted way - taking into account the biography and preferences of each individual - to counteract depression, anxiety, burn-out and other affective disorders, which can also arise from a life crisis. The musical experience as a bodily experience connects the person with his or her whole being and being-in-the-world. Through this holistic method of treatment, the individual's body, mind and emotions become directly perceptible at the same time. This happens in a playful, non-threatening and non-judgemental setting. Psychological resistances can thus be gently softened.

O - Organizational: STRUCTURING, INNER-PSYCHIC CONSOLIDATION
Music has structure. It has a beginning, undergoes a development and finds an end: just like a human life, it moves in time. Music is shaped according to certain rules and indispensably requires - if not always a plan - presence for its execution. Music therapy is therefore also aimed at people for whom the transfer (generalisation) of structured action from the therapeutic setting to everyday life is particularly important, such as people with autism or personality disorders.

S - Social: SOCIAL COMPETENCE
Musical pieces can have different tempos, dynamics and forms and the performers need to agree on their execution. Should the verses be sung by a soloist and the chorus again by the whole choir? When does one instrument come in, when the other? How do the musicians want to communicate in order to alternate their own improvisation with that of the other? Making music together requires understanding and promotes social competence. Children and adolescents with behavioural disorders, for example, find it easier to find social autoregulation through music.
Making music together promotes feelings of connectedness.

Cameos acronym from: Wanda B. Lathom-Radocy "Pediatric Music Therapy", Charles C. Thomas Publisher Ltd., Springfield / Illinois (USA), 2002.

Dance / Movement

Through my 20 years of dance training (ballet, jazz dance, street dance, ethnic dances and expressive dance) I always feel inspired to incorporate dance / movement elements into my music therapy work.

Our society has become incredibly sedentary. On the one hand, people basically move too little - which is of course detrimental to their health. On the other hand, they have become so detached from their physicality that they are usually no longer able to move without shame or feelings of indisposition. What a pity!

Body-oriented therapies, such as body psychotherapy, body-oriented trauma therapy and precisely artistic therapies, according to which body and psyche form an inseparable unit, have gained in importance thanks to the neuroscientific research results of the last 20 years, obtained by means of imaging techniques. Our body stores life experiences (building up and breaking down certain neurological networks), and only by involving the body can these be processed.

The use of movement and dance can have various indications: from the creative exploration of one's own (living) space to trauma processing to the recovery of normal movement in the case of a neurological illness. Only the moving person can get his or her own life moving again. For this - as in music therapy in general - no previous artistical knowledge is needed, because a human being naturally already has all the basic prerequisites.

Stories, poetry, songwriting

Our life is a fascinating story!

We are born, grow up, (perhaps) find our destiny, lose ourselves, find ourselves again, question ourselves, doubt life, experience anger, sadness, despair and also miracles and happiness, we are reborn...

Each and every one of us is a unique gift to the world!

As a passionate storyteller, poet and singer songwriter, it is my pleasure to accompany you on the path to perceiving and capturing your unique life story and dealing with it creatively. It doesn't matter if it's about a certain attitude towards life, a certain period, or the big "script of your life".

I love reading stories with children in which they can experience themselves through the protagonists with their weaknesses and strengths.

By the way, I have written a novel about compassion, interpersonal relationships, ethics in a changing society, self-discovery and love. It is called NAH! and was published by Thesis Publishing in June 2022: