‘How Trauma Shaped My Piano Playing & How I Let Go’

by Tallan Alexander

I live with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) and have been playing piano for twenty years. My C-PTSD is from my childhood which was tumultuous and unstable. I first came to the piano in a very traumatized state and began practicing as an autodidact. While I have not experienced trauma caused by the piano or piano instruction, I have extensive trauma from other sources. Trauma sculpted and shaped so much of my playing, and was the basis for how I oriented towards the piano.

I have since begun working with a teacher and have made huge strides in untangling my trauma from my piano playing. I offer my reflections on that process and try to explain how I used to practice when I was very traumatized, how I practice now, and how I made the journey from one to the other.

I write in the hope that other traumatized people approaching the piano see some of their own issues in mine, and to act as a source of encouragement to seek out a real teacher and build music literacy, technique; playfulness and joy.

I discovered piano in adolescence and it soothed my trauma: by structured repetition I could slowly improve and build on prior skills. Piano was a vehicle for overcoming my past. 

I devoted hours and hours daily to the repetitious going over and over of a small selection of pieces, the sameness soothing me. I avoided sight reading at all costs and instead quickly memorized the music, often at the expense of noticing the composers’ directions in the score. I strove for many repetitions in a session of practice, and globally approached everything I was doing every time I sat down–or, that is, I did a little bit of everything every time. 

I briefly worked with a teacher early on but thereafter approached piano self-taught and unguided. I didn’t ever check in with my present moment state and rigidly followed a highly structured and exact guide of what to do when. 

My playing was characterized by rhythmic instability, a lack of coordination between the hands, tension and extraneous movement in the fingers, and seizing and shaking in the hands. The sound had few dynamics, lacked legato in phrasing, and had the aforementioned rhythmic instability. 

Piano was a vehicle for self soothing, and my playing suffered a lot for this traumatized orientation. This approach did a lot of damage to me, a lot of which I am still undoing. It could not have been more different from how I approach the study of piano now.

Piano study now is a gateway to a world of unknowns, a world as yet to be discovered. Most of my practice these days is focused on sight reading and building music literacy. I’m always playing new pieces and hearing music I’ve never heard before. 

I continue to work on a smaller number of more difficult pieces but now with a teacher who I meet with weekly and when I do practice those pieces it’s in a much less repetitive way. I may play through a piece to discover which areas are not working as well, and then hone in on those areas. 

If I’m working on a piece with multiple voices, say a fugue or invention, I’ll play each voice alone and then in pairs of voices before building up to the whole piece. I am specific and concrete in my targets and I don’t endlessly repeat anything, again honing in on problem areas instead. 

I listen to more music and am always discovering new kinds of music I enjoy. When I play through pieces now it is not to self soothe but to enter a dialogue with a composer and to discover new ways of playing. Because now I am playing the piano, and I’m sounding a lot more like an ordinary pianist would, my posture is relaxed and my hands floating in position and my issues with synchronization and rhythm have vastly improved. 

Piano is the door to an enchanted forest of wonder and delight, and my delight in piano has never been higher. I’m not so good at sight reading yet but what I can do thrills me and I’m so excited to fill each day with new beautiful music that I’m just now discovering. So much to play, and no need to endlessly repeat pieces; there are far more productive approaches. 

Maybe most of all my intuition guides more of my practice now: what is calling to me? What feels right to work on? Anything I’m scared of or should face? Involving the unconscious in decisions about practice has been a big help in coordinating my efforts and staying motivated. My felt sense of what I should work on often leads me into very productive sessions of practice. 

My big areas of focus these days are music literacy, technique, and playfulness and joy. Music literacy enables you to open any book and reveal music, technique frees you to do anything, and playfulness and joy infuse the music with the divine and help to delight and inspire others, too. Having discussed my prior and current approaches, I’d like to end with a reflection on how I made the journey between them.

My playing was at its most traumatized during the pandemic. Every day I would play the same few things for hours and hours. I was preparing for a piano exam. I consulted Dr. Daniel Ramjattan, a specialist in Music Performance Anxiety (MPA), about my playing ahead of my exam and he pointed out I should be working with a teacher and pointed out some of my issues like coordination of the hands. 

Following this I began working with Sandra Mogensen in weekly lessons and she began pointing out to me the inefficiencies in what I had been doing. She challenged the repetitive approach in general and expounded the virtues of  music literacy, which had been overlooked in my playing. 

I slowly began transitioning from my repetitive playing to more and more reading and focusing on specific targets. This took weeks and months and it was, at times, very difficult for me to do. My trauma fought this process and felt like I was losing the piano as a way of soothing myself. But I persisted and now when I make music each day I am so proud of myself and happy and it’s still very soothing in its own way.

This has been such a learning experience and has coincided with massive changes in other domains of my life. By not letting trauma dictate how I practice, I have taken back control from trauma in other domains, too. I don’t need to endlessly self soothe, but I would like to fill the world with beautiful music that I’m always freshly discovering.

I think it was the loving assistance of other wiser musicians that made the biggest difference in my journey. While I absolutely did learn valuable lessons working on my own, having Dr. Ramjattan help guide me to Sandra Mogensen made the biggest difference in untangling my playing from my trauma. And what most made the difference in that work was beginning to focus on music literacy, technique, and playfulness and joy.