Trauma-Informed Singing and Teaching

This past spring I had the opportunity to take a course with Dr. Elisa Monti, a trauma in voice specialist, through the Voice Study Centre at the University of Essex. Defining trauma is difficult as it encompasses physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual aspects of a person. Severe trauma causes an autonomic nervous stress response that requires intervention to be halted and healed, as the body absorbs trauma and keeps score (Van der Kolk, 2014). Traumatic experience can include abuse, violence and war, neglect, accident and injury, death of a loved one, divorce, and natural disasters. For every soldier serving on a war front, there are ten children who are endangered in their own homes (van der Kolk, 2014). This staggering ratio of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) have been found to impact people’s health into adulthood (Felitti et al., 1998) and voice quality in particular (Monti and Sidtis, 2018). People sense stress in different parts of their body, but vocal responders generally have childhood trauma, with evidence linking reduced vocal intensity in singers with childhood emotional neglect and insecure attachment (Monti et al., 2017; Becker et al, 2024).

Exploring the effects of trauma on the voice requires an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from the fields of trauma psychology, psychiatry, psychopathy, psychophysiology, speech pathology, communication, vocology, and acoustics. This is demonstrated in a study testing whether listeners high in psychopathic traits were more accurate at detecting survivors from hearing voice recordings (Monti et al., 2024). Findings suggest that when potential perpetrators hunt for a victim, they can make decisions from voice alone, highlighting the necessity to investigate the impact of voice in interpersonal violence and trauma. Survivors, particularly those with PTSD, often exhibit flatter, slower, and more monotonous speech patterns, reduced vocal intensity, increased irregularities in the acoustical signal, and heightened vocal tension in the neck and throat (Monti et al., 2024).

If voice has a role in violence prevention it would be important to find possible ways to mask those same cues through specialized voice training (Denardo Roney et al., 2018). Understanding these vocal markers allows for the development of targeted voice training programs to enhance vocal confidence, improve prosody, and reduce laryngeal tension.

• Enhancing Vocal Confidence: Techniques to increase vocal intensity and dynamic range can help survivors project confidence.

• Improving Prosody: Exercises focusing on pitch variation and speech rhythm can counteract monotonic speech patterns.

• Reducing Laryngeal Tension: Incorporating relaxation and breath control techniques can alleviate throat tension, leading to a more natural voice quality.

Such training not only aids in modulating vocal cues but also contributes to the overall well-being and empowerment of trauma survivors. One strategy is to encourage students to write about their life goals (King, 2001) and to involve emotional processing in the content (Pennebaker, 1997). Pennebaker poses the extent to which writing down psychological events into words can supplement or even substitute for medical and psychological treatments. Now with digital identities, self-disclosure on social media and chatbots, the potential strategies are endless, but do not always lead to internal safety. 

Encourage clients with severe trauma to work with a professional trained in somatic therapies (EMDR, OEI, IFS, EFT, or Sensorimotor Psychotherapy)  to get in touch with memories, emotions, or impulses that they have repressed or disowned.  Re-grounding a sense of self and learning emotional regulation skills are very important before confronting patterns that no longer serve the person and originated in the trauma. Not doing this preparatory work before delving into traumatic memories can overwhelm the nervous system.

Moving deeper, Jungian shadow work (Kroeker, 2019) helps individuals explore and reintegrate what has been repressed or exiled in themselves using Archetypal Music Psychotherapy (AMS). More than understanding and commanding one’s self-narrative, shadow work requires the integration of emotional and somatic content. It invites people to face uncomfortable feelings like shame, rage, grief, and guilt - emotions often deeply connected to trauma - and work them out through music. In this way negative emotions can process and drain from mental and somatic containers.

The brain is still the central processor of ALL interoceptive messages. And that is a highly variable process whereby the same signal can generate very different experiences within individuals. That’s where associations, feelings, and what we casually call "memory" come from. Even something as simple as an exogenously-generated elevated heart rate can invoke fear and anxiety in one person, and excitement and thrill in another. These feelings--and memories-- are created by the brain and they are not universal. The body may keep the score, but the brain is interpreting the numbers. THAT's the misunderstanding (Chen, et al, 2021).

A popular Linked in post by Jones (2025) announced that science just proved the heart holds memory—measured, peer-reviewed and biological fact. "The human heart contains an intrinsic neural network, emits a structured, coherent electromagnetic field, and demonstrates synaptic, biochemical, and geometric mechanisms for encoding information, comparable to memory centres in the brain." However, a nerve or a heart aren't making value judgements. In a facebook response neuroscientist and singer Heidi Moss (2025) cautions that we must be careful not to anthropomorphize biological phenomena as human-centric processes, "These things happen across species and we don’t use the same poetic imagery, despite its appeal. After all, pig hearts are used quite often in transplants. Do we talk about having pig memories? ... Correlation is NOT causation. The heart does not hold memory - the brain does. Muscle memory is about automaticity through myelination, but the heart muscle doesn't process poetic memories."

Summing up, trauma-informed singing is a careful balance between mind and body. Recognizing that the mind can reframe trauma is the key to understanding the process of healing the psyche. That points towards a worldview, a theoretical understanding of how things work and are integrally connected. This is where we will go next in exploring the singers mind and purpose, or teleology, if you will.

Sources:

1. Becker, D. R., Welch, B., Monti, E., Sullivan, H., & Helou, L. B. (2024). Investigating Past Trauma in Laryngoresponders Versus Non-Laryngoresponders: Piloting New Methods in an Exploratory Study. Journal of Voice, 38(6), 1334–1343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2022.05.011

2. Chen, W. G., Schloesser, D., Arensdorf, A. M., Simmons, J. M., Cui, C., Valentino, R., Gnadt, J. W., Nielsen, L., Hillaire-Clarke, C. S., Spruance, V., Horowitz, T. S., Vallejo, Y. F., & Langevin, H. M. (2021). The emerging science of interoception: Sensing, integrating, interpreting, and regulating signals within the self. Trends in Neurosciences, 44(1), 3- 16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2020.10.007

3. Denardo Roney, J. L. et al. (2018). Psychopathy and Victim Selection: Does Nonverbal Decoding or Empathy Impact Vulnerability Ratings? Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 36(3-4) 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260517742914

4. Felitti, V. J. et al. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.

5. Jones Christensen L., Embry E., Newman A.B., et al. (2025). If the body keeps the score, what happens when you bring the body to work? Exploring the health effects of trauma on human capital. Business & Society, 64(3), 558–592.

6. Jones Jr., L. B. (2025, approx. date estimated based on “8 mo” ago). Science just proved your heart holds memory—Measured. Peer-reviewed. Biological fact [LinkedIn post]. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lanson-burrows-jones-jr-49161651_neurocardiology-heartbrain-peerreviewedscience-activity-7331674765822226433-mHw2/

7. King, L. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(7), 198-807. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167201277003

8. Koriath, E. J. (Ed.). (2023). Trauma and the Voice: A Guide for Singers, Teachers, and Other Practitioners. Rowman & Littlefield.

9. Kroeker, J. (2019). Jungian music psychotherapy: When psyche sings. Routledge.

10. Monti, E., Kidd, D. C., Carroll, L. M., & Castano, E. (2017). What’s in a singer’s voice: The effect of attachment, emotions, and trauma. Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology, 42(2), 62–72. https://doi.org/10.3109/14015439.2016.

11. Monti, E., & Sidtis, D. V. L. (2018). Can childhood trauma impact the adult voice through the brain? Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, 3(1), 45. https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs.3.1.45_1

12. Monti, E. et al. (2024). Can perpetrators discern survivors from voice? European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 15(1), 2358681. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008066.2024.2358681

13. Moss, H. (2025, June 5). As a scientist who studied elements of cellular memory, it is my duty to clarify this post since it has been making the rounds… [Status update]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/mossheidi/posts/pfbid02YwA5VmUxGQAXpDzz12Ec7rAeV2ksPpuvG9w8VcDaaUv7UmBHQbqowc5kUyQwsPPol

14. Pennebaker, J. W. (1997) Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8, 162-166. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00403.x

15. van der Kolk B.A. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York:Viking.