Thu 24 Oct 2024 - Joy Gravestock
Adoption is one preferred form of family for children removed from their first family to grow up in. It is hoped that adoption is a means of such children finding stability, certainty, security and love, in order to grow. However, adoption is always a trauma for the adoptee who loses not only their birth parents, but all ties to family, culture and social life.
Statistics show that in addition to this trauma of separation, 70% of children adopted in the UK have experienced neglect and abuse. Early trauma can result in high stress levels in infancy which impacts on the brain, nervous system, and physiological development, undermining a child’s capacity to form attachments. The adoptee community want us to recognise that such impacts are lifelong and not all resolved by being adopted.
Often, adoptees may be diagnosed with attachment disorders and adoptive parents may struggle with secondary traumatisation. Evidence shows that music therapy is a therapeutic modality that can help children to begin a process of reparation. Adopters also need their own therapeutic support in order to be able to parent therapeutically.
Research of the brain shows that engaging in therapy might enable the development of new neural pathways. This is known as ‘neuroplasticity’. Music Therapy possesses specific qualities, which have been called ‘communicative musicality’. The elements of rhythm and repetition within music are similar to the ebb and flow of the rhythms in early life relating. Adopted children miss out on these. Working in moments of free, improvisatory therapeutic relationships, music therapists can open up attachment processes and enable an understanding of children’s attachment styles.
Music Therapy can meet and reflect awful early traumatic experiences and mirror painful emotions safely. It can enable processing and assimilation of the emotional impact of traumatic experience. By musically relating with a therapist, a child might engage in a new ‘dance’ of attunement, where early intuitive emotional communication can be made evident. In this experience of being held in the mind of a Music Therapist, reparation may begin.
Currently provision of Music Therapy for adopted children and adopters is uneven across the UK and families in need of therapeutic support are not always able to access what they need. Many more could benefit from music therapy if services were expanded. The Adoption Support Fund currently provides financing of Music Therapy, alongside local authorities. Since 2015 this has been an excellent source for long term work.
Pressures are always on Music Therapists to complete the work quickly, and it is incumbent upon us to argue for the length and depth of work that adoptees need. We know this from listening to the community of adult adoptees who remind us of the long-term, indeed lifelong nature of adoption trauma. We are advocates of our clients and therefore should ally with the adoption community and argue coherently for work into adulthood.
About Joy Gravestock
Joy is a self-employed Music Therapist in private practice. Prior to her Music Therapy training, she was clinical lead for a Nottinghamshire NHS Trust, (in adoption services, CAMHS (Nottinghamshire), having worked previously within the field of adoption for many years. She was also a member of both Nottingham and Leicester County’s Adoption Panels, offering both her professional and personal experiences to panel as she has lived experience of adoption. Now as a specialist Music Therapist in adoption practice, Joy is an identified lead therapist for Adoption Services in the East Midlands, as well as retaining links with adoption charities, working extensively with individually referred cases funded by the Adoption Support Fund. Her research and book (May 2021 with Jessica Kingsley Publishing) explore relational repair from trauma effects occurring via micro-moments of attunement within an embodied musical therapeutic relationship.