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In the fifth and final episode of our series ‘How Music Heals’ on the power of music therapy to help where talking therapies might be very difficult or impossible to access, author and psychotherapist Philippa Perry finds out how it can work in cases of complex trauma and childhood abuse. She goes to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in Central London, to meet Cerrita Smith, a lecturer on the music therapy MA there.

In Cerrita’s practise she specialises in working with clients in psychiatric wards and family therapy for adoptive families in crisis. She and Philippa listen to recordings from her sessions with patients and they discuss how music therapy can allow powerful feelings to be expressed and exist in a less confrontational way than language. She also describes one story of a child whose early childhood experience was of such abuse and neglect that she was unable to express affection with her adoptive family. Through music therapy with Cerrita, the child was able to play out her childhood experiences, and allow her mother to understand what she had gone through it a way that would have been impossible using conventional talking therapies.

In this moving and thoughtful episode of ‘How Music Heals’, Philippa Perry considers how and why music can be such a powerful therapeutic tool – and uses her own experiences as a psychotherapist to reflect on what she has learned throughout the series.