Everything is WORKABLE! With Matthew Tomatz, LPC

Clark Lovell: Whenever we're talking about injury, I think it's really important to meet it with respect and compassion. I was doing well as a music administrator, but there was something about talking to students, particularly when they were having difficult summer experiences that was really rewarding to me. When I started, there was very little known about performance psychology in the domain of arts particularly. Like it was a rising field in sport. And what's happened over the last... few decades is really quite remarkable, I think, in terms of what we know can support people in their music making. Significantly, I think if you think of the word healing, it comes from the root of restoration to wholeness. I'm trying to restore a hole. But it starts to beg the question of was I whole before I was injured? Or was that just a certain model of who I was and how I operated in the world? There's a truth that I tend to try and tell students a lot, which is your body whispers before it screams. Okay, Yeah. 100%. Yeah, but the thing about a whisper is it's easy to ignore, and it's really easy for ambition just to kick it to the side. One of the important parts is don't only look at the mechanics of what you're doing, like, have I learned all of my scales might be something that it says, but look at your mind. How is your mind functioning? Are you beating yourself up? Are you thinking critically and implementing new strategies that help you move the music forward? If we can really be curious about our experience, then there's some way for it to be more workable. Hey, welcome back to the show everyone. Today, I get to talk to somebody who I got in touch with through a couple different channels. ⁓ I worked through the ⁓ International Trumpet Guild Conference as a staff member and also, I'm always looking for new people to talk to you when it comes to the things that lead to injury for musicians and also how to help us psychologically rehabilitate through injury and through those. studies and that research that I've done, I have had the opportunity to connect with some really amazing people that I love getting to share with you today and throughout the course of the show. ⁓ Today's guest is somebody that I got in touch with through the Colorado University College of Music. I'm stumbling over my words today, but he is a licensed psychotherapist, embedded therapist within the CU College of Music. ⁓ and works with musicians there and within their actual, their whole musician wellness program that we're going to talk about today. When I heard about this program, I knew that I needed to get the people who had this program up on the show. This person is also a trumpet player, so naturally I wanted to talk to him and has worked as an assistant dean at the Aspen Music School. He's created lots of things surrounding group therapy. ⁓ and just as a nice person to talk to. So I'm so excited to welcome Matt Tomats to the show. Welcome. Hi, Clark. It's really great to be here. I'm happy to have this conversation with you and think about musicianship and injury and healing. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we had connected on a couple of weeks ago when you were just kind of talking shop was just this, obviously like the prevalence of musician injury, but also the need for ⁓ psychotherapeutic resources within these schools of music in the form of embedded ⁓ practitioners. And so I'm curious if you want to just share with the audience of how you came about that position, but also like going from a musician to psychotherapy. I'm curious if there was any musical experiences that you've had. I know we've talked a little bit off camera, but. ⁓ the musical experiences or otherwise that led you towards the path of psychotherapy. Yeah, well, it's a pretty meaty question. There's a lot in there. So let's just start to unpack it. But ⁓ to start with, I just want to ⁓ think about the Olympics since they're coming up. And ⁓ over the last handful of years, when we think of and hear the interviews with athletes, there's this team approach. And athletes have coaches, but they also have trainers and they have physical therapists and they have psychotherapists or sports psychologists that support them, wrap them in this sort of ⁓ envelope of services that help you perform your best. So I think the model that we're trying to develop at the University of Colorado Boulder is a program that has wraparound services so students can be supported in trying to perform their best. role of- embedded therapist is sort of an evolving program across colleges, not just for music, but to have therapists move into colleges so that it can sort of break down some barriers around seeking therapy, as well as the therapist can specialize in working with the population ⁓ of a particular college or program. that's the model of embedded. And I had been working at the college of music many years prior. to the embedded program being formalized. But what that's given me the opportunity to do is to learn about what affects music students, to base that on my own experience as a music student, and to develop methods that would be supportive to injury, injury recovery, and probably more so just being very successful in learning and performing. Hey, real quick, sorry to interrupt the episode, but if you are a musician who's going through an injury right now, and you feel like you could use some extra help or some extra coping strategies to help you get through this really sucky, difficult experience, head to musicianonchain.com backslash let's hang to see if a coaching relationship would be right for you at this time in your recovery. Okay, enjoy the rest of the episode. Yeah, it's something like you said, it's an evolving science. And I think ⁓ I've had people on the show who have helped develop, ⁓ you know, musician wellness programs and things like that, you know, within the College of Music ⁓ that they are either like an instrument specific professor in or otherwise. What do you think ⁓ led to that ⁓ development for this specific program? what led to the Musicians Wellness Program at the College of Music? Sure, yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, it started years ago by James Brody, who was the oboe teacher, but he also had ⁓ a deep passion in skills and training as an Alexander Technique teacher. And as he started to share skills of the Alexander Technique with students, ⁓ people were interested in that and wanted to seek out his services. It grew out of that, ⁓ basically people's interest in wanting to work with their bodies in different ways. And when I started and prior to that, there was a colleague of mine who would do some work over there in terms of mental health and psychology. He, he started to wrap other people into the program as well as physical therapists and some of our medical team. And. So that's just grown. It's become more substantive. There's more relationships with campus providers. And then my role is embedded is, it just allows me to be there, you know, a lot more. And then there's a new director, Dr. Emily G. I think you're going to have her on your show coming up and she's a physical therapist. the program is evolving through that lens and incorporates courses. Students can take courses in musicians wellness as are four credit courses. And then there's all sorts of ways people can get connected with support services and treatment to work with injury, their mental health, their psychological process around music making and ⁓ other things too, nutrition, hearing health. We're trying to cover many, many bases. Comprehensive as possible, right? What ⁓ kind of pivot back to kind of your own personal experience, what made this field so personally important to you as a musician specifically. Well, I'll just say I'm really delighted to be in this role. ⁓ My history ⁓ after going to work at Aspen, which is after music school, was I supposed to be a young guy and kind of restless and I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do. And I was doing well as a music administrator, but there was something about talking to students, particularly when they were having difficult summer experiences that was really rewarding to me. And I had always had a an interest in psychology and through some of my own healing processes, one of which I can talk about, ⁓ I decided to go back to school and became a therapist. So I didn't really go with the intention of working with musicians. I went with the intention of doing this work of, ⁓ I guess, serving people through the ⁓ craft of psychotherapy. And then later I was hired at the university because of my background in music. ⁓ really natural fit for me to start to work with musicians. And so that's sort of how that occurred. And it's also just really interesting when I started, there was very little known about performance psychology in the domain of arts particularly. Like it was a rising field in sport. And what's happened over the last few decades is really quite remarkable, I think, in terms of what we know can support people in their music making. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's what I'm currently studying right now. Like I was mentioning to you a couple of weeks ago and I'm just, I've fallen in love with it because of my own, obviously my own experience as a performer, but just the, the, before I was like hugely into performance psychology, was a music education major. And, this is kind of the part where I feel like is if we can inject this kind of work into music education as like a just integrate it from the get-go, then it would fill a lot of missing links, I think. But you had mentioned a personal experience of healing. I wanted to give you a chance to share that. What was that process like and experience? Yeah, thanks. So I guess I just want to start by saying, and since this show focuses on injury is, whenever we're talking about injury, I think it's really important to meet it with respect and compassion. Yeah, absolutely. It's so personal and ⁓ it's difficult, it's challenging. It's not what we want. It's not when we want it. By definition, it's painful. It's an injury. And I think a lot of times people can meet that for themselves with ⁓ kind of a harsh attitude or with a wish for it just to be over. And so as we... kind of slow down into actually thinking about that. It's important just to set the framework that this is very powerful work and can be transformative and ⁓ deserves a lot of respect. So injury, I can tell you about if I was thinking about it and leading up to this conversation, the different types of injuries and this isn't written and I haven't seen this, but it made me think there's sort of levels or types and that helps us think about what healing can look like. So I'll just give you a few ⁓ simple examples or examples from my life that'll help understand, think underscore that. And then also give us something to talk. So what I'm getting at is there are sort of what I'll call simple or clear injuries. the instance that came up to mind for me was just as COVID was happening and everything was locked down. I hit my toe against the bed frame, which is wood and it hurt terrible over about the day. Emergency alert. the toe turned black and blue, was bruised. And I didn't know. I couldn't go to the doctor because it was COVID. So I didn't know if it was broken or if it was sprained. And I called the doctor through video health and they said, it doesn't really matter. We wouldn't really treat it if it's like that. Just let it heal. And it did. It took about six weeks. Didn't feel great. So it was probably like a little broken or something. Um, and then I went on with my life and I haven't felt that since. So that's this kind of, uh, very straightforward kind of injury that I think people want. It's linear. So there's a, injury, there's a healing, it's over and we go forward. Okay. So that's ideal. hopefully a linear injury. Yeah. We can find a way to work with that. I've had two significant, going on to the next type, I've had two significant whiplash injuries in my life. One was a ski crash and one was a car crash where I was a passenger. That one happened when I was in Aspen and it became, I wouldn't say a process of healing more than transformation. There was something about the way that injury affected my spine that it took a great deal to seek treatment, to move through that. and I wouldn't ever say it was healed in the way of like a linear, okay, it's now done. It's actually, ⁓ a part of my body that if I'm in distress or if something happens, my neck can flare up and I now know how to sort of work with that. ⁓ so this is maybe akin to chronic pain or, ⁓ chronic illness, which is another kind of injury that people might be working with and can affect their making of music. So. But I wanted to get out there is that this shifts it from a method that is linear over. then you go on with your life to a practice in the same way that we practice our instrument. And we may have to learn how to work with our minds and our body around a particular part of our body or an injury so that we can be effective in what we do. ⁓ so that, that, that's where it can also get. pretty deep in terms of, know you've talked about identity a lot ⁓ or transformation in terms of transforming how we understand our body or significantly, I think if you think of the word healing, it comes from the root of restoration to wholeness. We're trying to restore a whole, but it starts to beg the question of was I whole before I was injured or was that just a certain model of who I was and how I operated in the world. So most basically for musicians that could look like, ⁓ I wasn't injured, but I actually wasn't playing very well. My posture was pretty off and it's like a good thing that I hadn't gotten injured earlier. So we could say it's not quite whole. So there's a lot in that that we could think of, but basically wanted to get into. There's this difference between a linear model and ⁓ a kind of healing as a practice. of life, which is to say also how we live our lives. Sometimes that's been described, not linearly, but as a spiral or tornado, a funnel that gets bigger as you heal. And at the bottom, it's just, that's all you see, you know, it's just the pain, it's just the injury. And as we go and maybe 10 years later, you do something's like, ⁓ there it is, you know, we're in that. And then we work with it. ⁓ And then I think there's another type of injury that I want to point toward, which is maybe about mindset. which was an injury I had. One of the ways I learned to deal with my neck was yoga. I became very serious with a yoga practice and started to teach yoga. And when I was doing that, I met it with my typical ambition and I was deep in a pose and tore my hamstring. that was way up at the, yeah, it was a painful one. And it was way up at the attachment point. And what that taught me was how much injury can teach us. Because I think I knew enough at that point from yoga that I could shift my mindset from just getting treatment and healing to really learning about my body. And that became cool. So I learned to fascinate in a sense on the injury and how to heal it. In a hamstring tear like that, you don't want to do straight legged bends. because you'll just exacerbate the injury. It's paradoxical because it feels good to go into a straight legged bend, but it's just not helpful to your injury. So it took about two years, I'd say, for that really to fully feel like it was healed, but it was a fascinating time. And I learned about my body in ways that I don't think I ever would have. I learned about how to work with my hips differently. I worked how to address my spine differently, but mostly I learned how to hold my brain differently in a very receptive, opening, listening kind of pattern. So I could learn from this injury. So to me, that feels more ideal that we might have a injury as teacher and it can help us do things in a more effective and better way. Yeah. Which requires us to sort of hold it that way. And then the last kind of injury I want to talk about is a psychological injury. And that happens. ⁓ a lot in music as well. I've seen that with many clients who have had very, ⁓ kind of tyrannical teachers or school systems, or maybe even just their own ambition that gets in their head in a certain way. That's, ⁓ like a very critical voice. ⁓ so that can also happen in terms of like, ⁓ a performance gone bad and can be hard to get over. I. I remembered one example of being, I think I was in seventh grade and I had a memory slip on a piano recital and I didn't know what to do. know, nobody had taught me about that. I didn't know. It just felt terrible. And, know, I think I went on with my life, but I still remember it. Like it was a deeply embarrassing experience to have that happen. So, ⁓ I think that probably informed performance anxiety for me too, going forward. And I just want to bring performance anxiety in because I think it can be a form of injury to people if they don't play their best. And to me, after sitting now with hundreds of students who are thinking about performance anxiety, that is a giant iceberg. And just by that, mean what we call performance anxiety, what shows up on the surface can uh, be really vast as to what informs that and what's underneath that. Right. Yeah. In of somebody's history or, uh, their past experiences. Yeah. Hey, sorry to interrupt the episode yet again, but I wanted to tell you that if you are also a music educator of any kind and you feel like this is a conversation that needs to be had for your program, please reach out to me at clark at musician on chain.com and we can talk about how we can. collaborate together to bring these topics to bring these strategies to your program to help your students stay as healthy and as happy as they can while pursuing their passion. Keep on keeping on and continue watching the episode. Yeah, well that actually is a good good place for me to jump in because one of the things I wanted to ask you about is something that I've noticed a lot in my conversations with other podcast guests with some of my own mentors ⁓ and music education is this this topic of like trauma aware teaching or trauma based education or those types of practices. ⁓ And it's something I've observed in the lived experiences of these musicians I've talked to that have experienced injuries. ⁓ Especially when it comes to, I'm glad you mentioned performance anxiety because not only is that a psychological injury in and of itself, but also if left untreated can lead to physical injuries just through how our body handles stress, how it handles that anxiety. ⁓ I'm curious as far as what your perspective in your work has been is that how do traumatic experiences like that lead to performance anxiety? ⁓ How have you seen that lead to kind of these other ⁓ either performance anxiety related experiences or injury related experiences? ⁓ And also if you want to just add a little tag onto it of what would you say to maybe somebody who's listening who's experienced like a music related trauma? that could be a source of their performance anxiety or injury. Yeah. So there's a few different threads there. One is if there's music injury that is contributing to performance anxiety or just, it doesn't only have to be that. think it can be the way one goes about practicing or the attitudes that people bring into it. There's that piece. The other is if there's trauma from other parts of life. ⁓ which maybe wasn't so related to music or wasn't related at all to music, but that can show up in a musical setting. So for instance, if this was some sort of trauma with an authority figure, and then you go to take an audition and you're essentially being evaluated by authority figures, your body might respond in a certain way, in a way that we could label as performance anxiety, but it might be very distinctly a traumatic. a reenactment, ⁓ traumatic experience. So this is also why I wanted to start with respect because when we start going into the body and we start going into people's experiences in past, it deserves a great deal of respect. And also I do think it's one advantage to having therapists involved in some of this treatment because some people wouldn't want to talk about some of those things with their music teacher or something in that realm. So, and it just can take a lot to unpack that. Absolutely. And if you were to kind of see an audience member on the other side of this screen that maybe has experience, I know everybody's experience ⁓ with their trauma or whatever is different based on the source or whatever, but what's something that you feel like would be helpful for them to hear right now? ⁓ It's totally workable. it's workable and it's an investment. It's a real like tender, compassionate investment in learning about yourself. And I think that's really workable. like that word, workable. You had mentioned the body. ⁓ go ahead, please. Yeah, it can just feel so ⁓ unworkable, so frozen and also so immediate. You know, in other words, because of our history or maybe because of the trauma that the reaction to that when we are faced by some situation can be so immediate that can feel absolutely unworkable. ⁓ but, but it really is, I think there's, there's tremendous methods out there to, to move through our, our past and to be effective in our lives. ⁓ but this is also one of these sort of. nonlinear methods, you know, it's if only there was a magic pill that could sort of take it away, but it, really is a deep learning and a transformation of learning how to be in our lives in different ways and more robust ways, more flexible ways. ⁓ And, and I would, I would say probably leading the way is curiosity. If we can really be curious about our experience, then there's some way for it to be more workable. Yeah, I like that. I like that. ⁓ That's one thing that I feel like I have not done as good a job about talking about on this show. And it's something that's a very sensitive topic, obviously. ⁓ But I'm grateful that it came up so early on in our conversation because the more I experience ⁓ just working with musicians or either just hearing their experiences, the more I just realized that those experiences are ⁓ often rooted in trauma. So one of my biggest mentors in my life, he's been on the show as well, ⁓ did a lot of work researching trauma and kind of he's kind of gone from more ⁓ music education and ⁓ trumpet related stuff to towards navigating this ⁓ kind of body and mind and soul and how they all interact with regards to trauma and also how that can intersect with our musical experiences. And so I love talking about it. It's something I just don't know a lot about. And so I really appreciate you talking about that. ⁓ Kind of in staying in that vein, ⁓ you had mentioned how these things manifest themselves in our body. I'm curious in your experiences with these students, ⁓ how has your perception of how the mind and body and how they work together to kind of help our musicianship in a healthy way and how can our body and mind work kind of against each other to hinder our musicianship. Sure. Well, it's just such a big and beautiful question to think about the body. And a couple of things come to mind. One is ⁓ this medical intuitive and author Caroline Mase talks about our biography becoming our biology. And the reason I wanted to bring that in is just the sort of depth of what can happen in our body and how our bodies store. experience and store memory. And important for music educators to think about that too, in terms of what does touch do for a body and how might we want to be aware of what's in someone's body with this quality of respect as we move into doing the work of teaching and helping people. There's a truth that I tend to try and tell students a lot, which is your body. whispers before it screams. Okay. Yeah. And, yeah. ⁓ yeah. the thing about a whisper is it's easy to ignore and it's really easy for ambition just to kick it to the side or our responsibility. So quite concretely, like, ⁓ my wrist is a little tingly, but I got to keep practicing or I got to get ready for this. We'll come back to that side. I'll come back to the wrist. it's like, at some point. ⁓ at some point it'll scream and screaming injuries. That's not a good deal requires a lot to, to, you know, to come to get through. So I just want to encourage people in their body to, ⁓ to listen for subtlety. And so this is really getting to the heart of your question. What is in the body? How do we work with it? It is working with it with our mind and that requires a very deep listening. And this is where I think things like mindfulness skills, meditation can be supportive to musicians because it not only teaches us ways to regulate and work with our body, for instance, if we're anxious, but it also gives us this ability to listen and to listen for the subtleties of how you're using your body, what's in it, if there's potential injury, mostly just being aware of our posture and how we're moving in space with an instrument in our hands. ⁓ So the ⁓ method of working with the body begins with deep listening and that's a skill that can be trained. Yeah. And then the antithesis of that when you're not listening to it, that's where the mind and body can really kind of start pitting themselves against each other. feel like at least in my experience, I can recognize that. And in so many musicians I've talked to. ⁓ And that's something where I feel like it's not, may, I mean, I haven't read the DSM cover to cover, but I don't know if I would find musician over like over practicing or compulsive practicing ⁓ as something that would be in there. But it's definitely something that I see a lot, you know, that kind of compulsive practicing or that need to practice. And that's, you keep using the word ambition. And I think it's a very seductive word. It's a very seductive concept, ⁓ especially for anyone who is working on a skill, right? That has personal meaning to them, right? ⁓ So I guess my question would be, what would be your take on how musicians can recognize the line from like healthy ambition and unhealthy ambition where that compulsive practicing ⁓ may come into play and what that would look like, you know? Yeah. Well, I'm so glad you used the word seduction because you can When we get into that, start to get into the emotional and psychological basis of what moves us. And these things aren't linguistic. We're trying to put words to phenomena that are happening in our mind and they're driven by so many things. And we might wonder what's driving somebody's ⁓ pursuit. And that brings in all sorts of things in terms of ⁓ culture and what you believe, ⁓ history, standing in. groups or families. And it's just like the depth of that is profound. know, whether we call it seduction or attachment or, and in some ways, very good ways, motivation and goal, goal, pursuit. That's all, all a part of that. So what, what I think is helpful in terms of listening and your question of what's the line is a generally there aren't lines. It's there's like these There's problem and there's good and there's like this huge gray area and we're hopefully operating in that area. And that's why we'd want to step back and ask, I'd say routinely, whether that shows up in terms of journaling and practice journaling or just a reflective process. Or that's partly why I do group work, because we can do some of this with other people. ⁓ And what I'm getting at is stepping back and asking, how am I doing? You know, am I pushing too hard? I approaching this with tremendous urgency? that's, know, urgency is going to make us tense. So, one of the ideas I have is like a sculptor and it's chiseling away at the marble. And at some point the sculptor is going to step back and look at it and say, you know, how does it look? Are the, are the eyes the same? Do I need to change the nose a little bit? And then you can go back into it. So we need to be able to do that. And one of the important parts is don't only look at the mechanics of what you're doing. Like, have I learned all of my scales might be something you assess, but look at your mind. How is your mind functioning? Are you beating yourself up? Are you ⁓ thinking critically and implementing new strategies that help you move the music forward? So we can ask questions of our mind and our process. ⁓ and also learn methods that are supportive to good practice. ⁓ And then it gives us some more opportunity to implement those things. So our world is very urgent right now. I just want to put that word back out there. I know working with lot of music students, folks are super busy. Plus we've got a lot on our phones that we want to attend to in terms of ideas and we can get bombarded. with things and that all shapes our approach to what we do. And just our state of mind, we might go into something with a very urgent state of mind because we've just been reading news for 20 minutes and things feel really bad to us. And then you've got an assignment and you've got to get to work and you've got this gig. And so you go to practice and you're entering it that way. And that's a way we're not listening to our bodies probably. We're just kind of going into it with. the sense of urgency and to me that's, that's kind of raw ingredients for potentially getting injured. Yeah. Yeah. The more I get into this world of performance psychology, specifically around, you know, the, antecedents to injury and, and overuse injury specifically, the more I realized that it's, it's attunement to your body and to your, and to your mind's needs and, your, the state of both and how those are either competing with each other or aligned. It's not, ⁓ I love how the word linear keeps coming up in our conversation because us musicians we love, it's the most ironic thing in the world to me that us musicians that are artists, which is not linear, still somehow prefer linear thinking, know, and linear, you know, put this in, like if I do this, this and this, I'm gonna get this result. That's just not how it always works, you know, and, Well, I we would love to be in control. Right. Of course. But that would feel great. Yeah. And I think that's an important thing to think about in terms of healing injury too. We'd love to be in control of that, but you know, I laid out these sort of different ideas of injury. We don't always know what it is until some time goes by. Right. ⁓ Yeah. So this goes into curiosity and learning and and being with our experience instead of trying to dictate what actually is out of our hands. That can show up too in terms of, of course, learning on a musical instrument. We want it to be linear. You know, I actually do this exercise and workshop sometimes where I have people walk in at the pace of different speeds. So in other words, like walk like you're on a sidewalk in New York City. People just walk very fast. Their heads are down. Everybody knows how to do that. And then I say, walk like you're in a park on a Sunday afternoon and people kind of leisure around. It's very nice. And then I walk, I say, after we do some of these exercises, is, walk at the pace you wish musical growth would be. And it's very steady and straight. And then I say, walk in the way that musical growth is. And people know this intuitively. It's walk two steps forward, take a step back, run forward, stop and stand there and walk in a circle. so what's interesting to me about that exercise is we know intuitively that it's not linear, but we so want it to be linear. And there's a tension point there. And I think that's the kind of tension that can fuel urgency. ⁓ Instead of saying, this is just not a great day. I'm going to do what I can do in my practice. I'm going to learn, and this is one of these days it's kind of like a sluggish. That's okay. You know, in the arc of three years, that's expected. Right. But trying to force it would kind of, it would be disrupting that natural process, you know, and, and think so. also takes us out of the moment. Absolutely. Control is very much about trying to forecast the future and prepare for that. You know, music can only be in the moment. That's why it's so amazing. It's this shared momentary experience. And we can help ourselves by learning how to be in the moment, which isn't a decision. That is a practice of paying attention to present moment experiences, like what we hear and what we see and what we feel. So some of these things we can, we say, I mean, students say that all the time, like I need to be more present, but. It doesn't actually matriculate into a practice of the thing that we want. So then we end up fighting with ourselves and being anxious because we're so focused on the future outcome. So I just kind of want to highlight the need to do the practices that are fully available to support the things that we actually put into words. Right, right. Man, that's just a great line. This has been so enlightening for me. I've done. almost 100 episodes of these and I just keep learning and that's what makes me keep doing them honestly. ⁓ And so you mentioned ⁓ your group work. I know that's something that's personally meaningful to you in ⁓ your profession. ⁓ What have you seen have been like the biggest impacts or things that have created the biggest impact from a group standpoint ⁓ that you see like the group aspect of like wellness impacting these students, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. I think the genesis of the group might help answer that question. when I started working with the College of Music, ⁓ I was doing individual therapy and I would do some workshops. The workshops were generally like one session, an hour long, how to do performance anxiety or something like that. try to work with your mind. ⁓ and as more information came out, because the science is growing and the understanding, was like, ⁓ we need two hours, right? can't fit all this into a whole week. So let's do that. And when I started to expand it and I'm doing exercises, what I witnessed is that students really like to talk to each other and share their experience that was coming out of the exercise. And because I have, ⁓ this experience of leading groups and therapy groups. just had the thought like, well, what if we just did that? What if we got people together and instead of focusing on the skills, what if we focused on the interpersonal elements that, and we'd put some skills in there too, you know, to give us some things to talk about. And so that's how these groups started. And I think of them fully as therapy groups. And that's important because there's a context of confidentiality and security in these groups. but what that really does, there's a number of elements to it is it creates a community that people can work with all that is stressful and difficult and challenging and glorious about being a musician and a musician in training. So some of that is as simple as like, ⁓ I'm so glad I'm not the only one. didn't know. Yeah. ⁓ Part of it can be that music is inherently isolating because we spend so much of the time by ourselves in our own mind in the practice room. And so getting people together to think about being musicians is, think, is deeply valuable. ⁓ It can be just really important too to have students strategize together, but how do you navigate music school? How do you work with this? Or a lot of time that's how to... kind of move through disappointment and that, you know, losing an audition or, ⁓ or just trying to figure out like, how do I work and work my job at the restaurant when I'm supposed to be here practicing. And then I have this assignment and this assignment's a 15 page paper. I don't know how to do all this, but people have had those experiences. They can support each other and these sorts of things. So that's sort of the surface level of it. There's a deeper level to the work, which is I think ⁓ more of a therapeutic process, which is exploring how people ⁓ show up in the group and how does that presentation resemble or mirror maybe how they do other things in their lives, whether that be interpersonal or musically, how people go about things and then working with that as part of the therapy of the group. So as an example, if someone ⁓ apologizes before they say something. Like, I don't know if this is right, ⁓ but I don't know, maybe it's this. I might wonder if I know that person a little bit, like what would it be like not to apologize? What would it be like just to say what you're going to say? And that can lead into kind of interesting conversations too, like when do we apologize on our instrument? Do we sort of put the stand in front of us? rush our presentation on stage, maybe we don't really know. Or maybe sometimes people even say like, well, I didn't warm up today, which is different than saying, here I am, here's my music, this is what I have today. So that's a very simple example of sort of the depth of these groups. And then I think the other piece is that people get to meet each other and meet each other in ways that they might not normally. In other words, you might have somebody who studies opera and they tend to hang out. in the opera theater and opera realm. then you have a tuba player and maybe they're even different by grades by some years or something or graduate student in the undergrad. And then they make this connection and they know each other and people are really like that within the college of music, having intimate connections with their fellow students. Wonderful. That's awesome. I had never thought about the apologizing aspect of it from a performance standpoint. I think that's a whole nugget that we could spend a whole podcast episode on, I think. And I really, I'm glad that you went as deep as you did on that subject because it's not a very common, mean, another irony of what we do is that much of what we do in music school, but also just as musicians is with a group. But I don't know how often we actually harness that, power that. that's within that structure of being in a group, right? Facilitating ⁓ the connectedness and relatedness that can ⁓ inherently have. Well, I wouldn't even say inherently because you kind of have to work at it. It has to be more intentional. ⁓ That's one of the things that I'm learning in my own studies is that power of the team in the sport world, but the group, there's this... Excuse me everybody will I nerd out for a second? But there's this theory that I just kind of really Sunk my teeth into called self-determination theory. It's it's a construct that helps us understand how we are motivated as human beings and as performers but a subset of that theory is is they identify ⁓ three basic needs that we have and One of them is competence. ⁓ The another is relatedness and another's autonomy ⁓ and that You know, when all three of those are firing in all cylinders, that's when we're very highly intrinsically motivated, right? By that love that we have for something or how it makes us feel, all those types of things. I, just, that theory has helped me understand the importance of, of community ⁓ that, you know, I've strived to create with this, with this platform, but also ⁓ the other aspects that, that tend to be deprived when we go through injury. ⁓ When you're going through an injury and you don't have a diagnosis or your recovery is not going as well, you don't feel like you're in control, you don't have that autonomy. And when you are unable to perform, you don't feel like a competent musician, right? And so it shows just how those basic needs, it's just helping understand the experience of injury from a new light. ⁓ Have you seen- me- Yeah, please. Add to that a couple things. One is just go back to the group and the- The idea of relatedness in self-determination theory speaks to relating to purpose, relating to community, relating to our engagement with the world. And I think it's a part, we can focus so much on the individual and what's happening in our mind, but that's part of the reason for groups. And even if it's not a therapy group, for doing things socially as musicians and social practice, I think is really important. Because it is a social endeavor, ultimately. ⁓ absolutely. And people aren't coming into me saying, you know what, I get really nervous in the practice room, but when I go on stage, it's so great. Help me be less, people don't say that, right? It's like, can do great in the practice room, but I get on stage and I'm anxious. Now, why is that? is the social component, which is what is affecting our minds. ⁓ okay. Okay. Yeah. We don't diagnose it. This is important to consider at least current DSM. We're not diagnosing it as performance anxiety. There is not such a diagnosis. The diagnosis is social anxiety in a performance context. Right. Okay. So we need to think contextually. Wow. Environmentally, what is it that's happening and why does it generate that feeling in us? Which is, ⁓ I actually trained on this model of group to some colleagues of mine. And one of my colleagues said, ⁓ I see what you're doing. You're doing vulnerability training. And that really illuminated something for me. was like, that's right. I'm trying to help people in a vulnerable setting, which is group therapy, learn to be present, speak what is on their hearts and minds and be effective in the context of that group in their communication, which is applicable to them being. ⁓ functioning well when they go to play their recital. So that's a bit more about it and the importance of thinking, I think a lot and not only thinking, but trying to put ourselves in situations that help us to feel ⁓ vulnerable and working effectively with that. The other thing that you brought up at the end there around injury and how isolating it can be, I think. A lot of times we tend to isolate. Sometimes we might need to just cocoon a little bit. ⁓ yeah, absolutely. Don't want to get locked in our cocoons. ⁓ Right. I just want to suggest that when we do get injured, that it's really important to establish routine and to maintain it. Because a lot of times the routines that we had are based around the endeavor of practice and performing. And if we can't do that, then our routines change. So that's when things can go off the rails too. And, you know, worst case situations, people might pick up behaviors and things like that, that just aren't serving themselves very well. there's a real need to sort of settle our bodies. That might be things that are soothing to our bodies as well as then establishing routines that are helpful and, you know, pointing ourselves back to curiosity. So this is this learning model. can't play the violin today, but what can I do? And, you know, there's, there's a way that people could learn that you typically might not. Like you could do rhythmic studies or score study or all these things that can make you a very much a better musician if there's willingness ⁓ or workability in that situation. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. The isolation. I'm glad you mentioned routine because that's, I think a lot of us musicians tend to thrive on it. There's some people who thrive on the improvisatory, I guess. opposite side of routine. ⁓ one of the things that I really wanted to make sure I asked you today, because it kind of mirrors my experience, but also I feel like it could mirror a lot of experiences of those in the audience that have experienced injury is, ⁓ is this this term I learned, and a unit I recently had on psychopathology. And it's something called adjustment disorder, right? And I think we had talked about a little bit in our first meeting. There are some people who prior to their injury may not have experienced like depressive or anxiety type symptoms. ⁓ But you know, here comes this injury and they're very depressed and they're like what in the world is going on? Obviously they can tell like I'm depressed because I'm injured or something like that. But I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit of someone who is experiencing these types of emotions, these really deep heavy emotions for the first time and ⁓ what's key to being able to navigate and understand them. You're pointing to the, really the seismic impact that can come from a severe injury or significant injury. This is in my mind, not a linear injury. This is a transformative injury. ⁓ so what I want to start with is where I started, which is to say, really respect that. That really deserves a lot of compassion with like, this is significant in my life. Human beings don't really like change. We don't like radical change. It doesn't feel good to us and it takes more energy. So there's also a piece of like, maybe our mood is dropping, our energy is dropping because we're having to recalibrate. If it's truly transformative ⁓ and we learn and listen to our bodies, it might take us into places that we've ignored or just really have never known about. This is sometimes how injury can be quite a spiritual transformation and process. people as well. So what I want to say, if we honor it, then we can go into it. And it's not something to be afraid of or to fight. It's also not a place we want to get stuck in because that's usually not helpful to us. And it may mean as we go into it, we need someone that can help guide us through that. That might be a therapist or a coach or, ⁓ you know, somebody who's been there or just sort of understands this process. Right. So, but if we fight it and we don't want that, then we wouldn't seek out the support either or the methods within ourselves to do it. ⁓ So I think it starts with respect. This did happen. And there might be a grief process in that. There probably will be. Then if there can be a willingness to move into it with respect and acceptance, then we can start to work with where we are. And that... moves into transformation, needing resources, being curious and kind of coming back alive. And it's not necessarily, this is something that people often do. I just want to get back. I just want to get back to where I am. And when I hear that, I'm like, ⁓ I know you do buddy. I really know it. And this is something else. You're actually going into something new that is yet to be formed. Right. Building the airplane as you're flying it. That's scary. It's disruptive and can cause our moods and minds to do different things. But that is workable and we can move through it. And hopefully, ideally, it's going to just be something bigger and more robust and better. Last interruption. I promise you before we get to the rest of the episode, I just want to let you know that if you're a musician going through an injury and you need a community to help you get through it, if you need a sense of support, some people you can ask questions to just gain a pick me up whenever you need it. The Musician Unchained support group formerly known as the Trust the Process Podcast injured musician support group on Facebook. The link is in the description below for you to join. You don't have to go through this alone. Keep on keeping on and enjoy the rest of the episode. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So many people I've talked to, they've said that after, you know, as they recovered from their injury, they, like you had mentioned before, they discover things about their playing that they weren't operating 100 % before, you know, that they weren't even aware of. And then after their injury, they're able to come back. I mean, you know, as a cliche says like even stronger than they were before and ⁓ stronger music from a music standpoint, from a pedagogical standpoint and technical standpoint, but also from a more grounded spiritual, internal mental standpoint of, of like that self discovery and that transformative experience. I mean, that's what, that's what I'm, shooting for with this show is, is helping people recognize that through their own experiences, you know. And I think there's some real methods there that can help us. One is to, ⁓ as I've said, really learn to listen. And that's listening to what people share, but also taking some of that with a grain of salt and not always looking to a provider to cure you. You're taking all this information so that you can go through your healing process. that's clear. think it's really important to learn how not to catastrophize or ruminate. And there's, there is method to that. I just want to keep pointing. Like we can say that I'm not going to catastrophize, but we need to learn the method to work with our mind to soothe what is a very natural tendency, which would be to catastrophize. I think it's really important if we focus on what we can do instead of what we can't do. And that can lead us to doing very cool things, which might invite us to fascinate on something that you never would have fascinated on before. ⁓ Maybe because of the nature of an injury, you can learn how to be super subtle and you develop subtlety in your musicianship in a way that you never had available to you because you never had to be so subtle. You could just sort of charge through it. Sometimes people ⁓ respond well to making things into games or gamifying something. And so ⁓ maybe you can't do something with your injury, but maybe you can like. figure out something with your other hand that you can do really well and make that into a game. But that kind of keeps things alive to have some challenge and something to motivate us toward instead of always focusing on the injury. So those are a few methods that I think are worth thinking about. That's wonderful. Fascinate, use fascinated as a verb. I think that's the first time I've heard that. I kind of like that. That's cool. Yeah. Learn to fascinate. Yeah. Right. That's wonderful. Get into it. Yeah. I'm going to start fascinating on that. Yeah. The, ⁓ the thing that in my own experience, I kind of, ⁓ recognize that was helpful, ⁓ was a little thing I called Balmo because you have fear of missing out. This was the blues of missing out. It's not, it's not grammatically correct, but ⁓ well. and, ⁓ it just was, I recognize this when I was watching my friends perform, right? Which is a common experience. potentially for a lot of musicians when they're going through their recovery is being in the audience for the first time, right? And that can be ⁓ a pretty sad experience sometimes of seeing your friends doing something or your colleagues doing something that you're not able to do at the time. And to respect that, ⁓ that's kind of that first step is honoring that and respecting it, being aware of it. ⁓ What I realized was that in that moment that the reason why I felt that way was because it was something meaningful to me and it was still something meaningful to me. And to be completely transparent, meaning still is there for me personally, you know, three years after my injury and I'm not currently performing. But there's an element of that that's no longer there because I've just been so far removed from it, which is something that I'm still working on. But my point in saying that is that this ⁓ experience of feeling that sadness or that loss is a ⁓ sign of that this is something that is still meaningful to you. And to be kind of recognize that with a feeling or a sentiment of gratitude of like, hey, this is something that I still really want in my life. And I can still use that as a motivator to get through recovery, to strive through recovery or ⁓ find ways to make meaning through music or find meaning through music in meaningful ways. ⁓ I think that type of construct and that exercise for me was really helpful early on in my injury and navigating those feelings that I hadn't necessarily felt before. And just kind of moving through and moving forward through that. yeah, I mean, that's kind of my thought with that. There's a lot of love and grief. Yeah. And ⁓ it really asks us when we're in the pain of grieving to open our heart, to approach it with a very big heart. because the feelings are big, as you say, and this is part of this nonlinear model of like, you may be doing fine, but then you go to a concert and it's just the right kind of concert or the right, maybe it's a piece of music that you really loved and You didn't expect it, but it just hits you hard. Like, oh, I can't do that. So that's, that's just on the wave of this process. You can work with that. That is workable. But grief is, you know, imbued with love and we can really think about it. I like what you're saying. Think about, okay, how can I find meaning in music? And maybe it's becoming a very good listener or, you know, could be doing music in different ways. ⁓ ultimately, it might be just finding meaning in other things too. Absolutely. Yeah. This has been a wonderful conversation, Matt. I mean, this is, I really have just been a student here and ⁓ I know that people on the other side of the camera will be appreciative of it as well. ⁓ I do ask a couple of final questions before, before we close up. And ⁓ the first one I actually call my time travel question. ⁓ It's usually geared towards, you know, the musicians that I have on the show that have experienced an injury. ⁓ But I'm curious with your experiences with injury and just this whole journey of becoming a psychotherapist and the roles and the positions you now hold within the School of Music, Early College of Music at CU Boulder, ⁓ has it all been worth it? The injuries and the things you've learned from those experiences and would you go back if you could and take those experiences away or would you leave them there? ⁓ Yeah, beautiful question. No, I wouldn't take it away. ⁓ I'm grateful for my experience ⁓ throughout my life and I'm particularly grateful to be able to support and work with musicians, ⁓ student musicians, professional musicians, the whole gamut. It's just wonderful to be a part of people's lives when they care so much and want to make beautiful art. And to be able to try and support that in a way I can is a delight to me. And part of my own pain ⁓ is, you know, part of how I think about it, as well as my learning and, you know, now years of experience. Right. Right. Yeah. You're causing me to reflect on my own experience too, which is a good thing. ⁓ And the last question I usually ask people is, ⁓ if you had somebody that came up to you and had listened to our episode today, our conversation and said, Hey, heard you on this. podcast, I think it's called Trust the Process. I'm a cellist, I'm a percussionist, trumpet player, whatever that case may be. And they are just like, they just found out like they have an injury or they were just diagnosed with something that's impeding their ability to play. ⁓ Regardless of what that situation, specifics of that situation may be, what's one piece of advice you would give them or counsel? Yeah, I would, I think the central thing is stay very curious. keep your mind mobile. And that's not only curious about the things that sort of are like shiny and bring our attention to them or that we wanna fascinate on, they are curious about the depression. It's curious about the feeling of glue in the body or the mind. In other words, what is this? What do I need? Right. So stay curious. Otherwise we get fixed and stuck and ⁓ that's not so healing. curiosity is something we can continue to work and work with to our, to our asset, you know, as an asset. Yeah. That was a huge game changer for me when I flipped that from trying to control to being more curious. in my injury recovery and experiences I've had since then. So I appreciate you ending on that note. This has been wonderful. Clark, I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. If there's anybody who wants to reach out to you who has more questions, how can they, how can they hit you up? Yeah, probably just my email at the university, Matthew, two T's, m-a-t-t-h-e-w dot tomonts, t-o-m-a-t-z at colorado.edu. Awesome. Awesome. Well, definitely I'll put that in the show notes as well. And to everybody out there in podcast land, thanks for joining us today. It's been a wonderful conversation we've had and I hope you get the chance to listen to it in full and like and subscribe to all those podcasty things like sharing it and making sure it gets out to as many people as possible. And like I always say, keep on keeping on until next time. And thanks for tuning into this episode of Trust the Process, the official podcast of Musician Unchained, the newest coaching program dedicated to helping musicians navigate and overcome injury. Before you go, I have a few quick ways you can stay connected and support our growing community. If you found value in today's episode, consider making a donation to support our mission of empowering musicians worldwide. Every contribution helps us create more content and resources for you, so visit link number two below to support the mission. If you decide to donate, I'll send you my newest resource, the Injure Musician Toolkit, which is an ebook designed to give you tools to help you get through your injury. Subscribe to our newsletter to get exclusive insights, tips, sneak previews of episodes, and announcements straight to your inbox. Act now and I will send you free gift. So sign up at www.musicianonchain.com forward slash newsletter. And if you or someone you know would like to go deeper with me in the topics of injury and mindset, head over back to musicianonchain.com and check out the Let's Hang tab. As always, I want to thank Daniel Baldwin, my audio engineer, and my sister Dana Lovell for her help with the promotional materials. There is no podcast without them. But before I go, I want to tell you how much I deeply appreciate your time and support. You are not alone on this journey. There are musicians and educators out there who need this resource, and we need to get it to them. Together, we are breaking the chain of old habits and thought patterns that don't service any and unchaining the potential within ourselves to face each challenge with strength and resilience. So, as I always say, keep on keeping on and keep trusting the process. Until next time.