Ep 102 Tim Honig

This podcast is brought to you by the British Association for Music Therapy and produced and presented by Lou Canesley. For more information on BAMT, the website is www.bamt.org. Thanks for listening. [Music] In this episode Martin Laws talks with Tim Honeck. This conversation about guided imagery and music includes discussion about how the cultural context may affect practice, about the music's role as co-therapist and about the use of different types of music. The ongoing development of GIM worldwide is also considered where music and imagery M.I. methods are becoming increasingly important in Europe. Tim is a board certified music therapist and a fellow of the Association for Music and imagery. He is assistant professor and director of Music Therapy at Westfield State University in Massachusetts, USA. A practitioner of the Bonnie method of guided imagery and music, he provides depth-oriented music therapy in private practice and provides supervision for therapists in GIM training with the Appalachian GIM Institute. Tim's music therapy research and clinical practice have focused on music therapy in mental health care and acute settings and private practice. So here is Martin Laws's interview with Tim. So Tim, thanks very much for agreeing to have this conversation. And we met a couple of weeks ago, didn't we, and we were talking about what we might discuss, linked to your experience and interests and research in guided imagery music, GIM, or the full name is the Bonnie method of guided imagery music or the Bonnie method. And we thought we could talk about the music itself, which is such a huge topic, but also listening to music in a non-ordinary or altered state of consciousness, which is so central to the process in GIM, of course. That involved the client in lying down, eyes closed in a very relaxed state, was there listening to the music, having their imagery experience supported by the therapist, who is the guide. And then that led to you talking about the norms of GIM, as you call them, which are like the practices that facilitate the music listening experience in GIM. So maybe we could start with that, and perhaps you could say something about what you mean by these norms of GIM. So I love how you're asking that question, and Martin, thanks so much for having me on. I've been really looking forward to this conversation. We got to have a long series of conversations at a conference about three years ago, and it's just, I think, always really rich to have conversations with you about GIM, and all these areas that we think about, right, I've been doing GIM for a while, and you've been doing it for even longer than I have. So I'm always grateful for the chance to dig into ideas around the ways that we think about music, and the ways that we think about music in this process of becoming fuller in richer human beings. So you asked about norms of GIM. I mean, that's something that we think about a lot. I think every therapy process has this set of norms. I don't think there's anything surprising there, but there are a couple colleagues of mine, and I, who are GIM therapists, who have been thinking a lot about the ways that our cultural backgrounds affect the ways that we engage in GIM. GIM guided him and drew music started in the United States in the '70s. It was developed by a music therapist on the East Coast of the United States. By somebody with a really strong background in Western art music, Helen Bonnie. That was the music she knew, and also the music that she found as a music therapist, to be just really effective for navigating non-ordinary states in therapy. But not just the music, lots of parts of the GIM process just feel like they're very rooted in cultural norms of the United States, especially the United States in the '70s, '80s and '90s. And of course, the process is continually reinvented with every therapist. As we make it fit ourselves and our own cultural norms, but there's a certain set of things that make GIM kind of special. Now GIM is practiced on every inhabited continent. It's growing so quickly in East Asia, especially it's growing in Europe. There's a lot of GIM in the United States, but I'm not sure it's growing quite as quickly. The growth is sort of stabilized in the US. As it's expanding in these other cultures, we were wondering how meaningful these cultural differences actually are. For people who come into GIM as clients. So the research study that we developed was looking at, it was qualitative research working with folks who were actually being trained in GIM, asking them to reflect on their first few sessions of GIM. And trying to figure out what cultural factors might have been relevant in those first few sessions. Like what it took for them or what felt activated for them when they learned the whole GIM process. We found a number of things. We found some maybe not so surprising things that socioeconomic factors had a big impact on whether or not somebody could access GIM. Whether they were familiar with the norms of therapy. Psychotherapy is typically more easily accessed by people with higher socioeconomic status. So that was pretty meaningful. We found that professional background maybe wasn't limiting, but it was activated. I think most people that come to GIM already have a pretty strong relationship with music. Sometimes music therapists or music educators or musicians. And we didn't actually find that that was prescriptive of their experience. But whatever their professional background was, it influenced how they were engaging in different ways. We found that non-ordinary state experience with non-ordinary state therapies. Like meditation or with mindfulness-based therapies or with holotropic breathwork or deep listening practices. We found that if people came in with those experiences already that it made adapting to GIM a lot easier. It felt less weird to open up into non-ordinary state therapies. And I keep using this word "weird" to talk about the norms of GIM. I guess I can talk about that in a few moments. But these things so far have talked about our sort of micro-cultural factors, very individual. And then there are these macro-cultural factors that seemed pretty relevant for people when they were learning how to do GIM. In GIM, we become really sensitive to physical contact and we become really sensitive to how close a person is. And perhaps not surprisingly, that's also the case in various cultures, right? In some cultures, this is even regional in the United States. That physical distance for some people is really comfortable. And for other people, like myself, this is very Midwestern, Northern European. The physical distance feels really invasive. So the ways that people engaged with physicality, influence development of those norms of GIM. Social norms and expectations around therapies, influenced how they engaged in GIM, so did the ways that we use language. But so far I haven't really talked about norms of GIM. So these are baggage parts of personal identity that we take into the therapy context. But then in GIM, we have things that are characteristic of any therapy, like openness about our inner world that's such a vulnerable and intimate thing. But then we end up sharing our openness, our vulnerability, our really intimate spaces in music, in usually quite metaphoric language. In GIM, we're talking about ourselves without really talking about ourselves because we're talking about our experiences in the music, the experience that the music is bringing. So in some ways that becomes safer, and I think a lot of our participants in this research study experience it is safer. But it's also somehow way more intimate because you're sharing something special that's not accessed in any other way, really. Yeah, and having done this for as many years as you have, I wonder what your thoughts are about what norms people have to sort of begin to adjust to as they come into GIM? Well, it makes me think of a couple of things. The first is that when I trained in GIM, so that's going back 20 years now, we never covered physical interventions. So this is when the client is in a non-ordinary state of consciousness, and the therapist provides some kind of physical support for the client. And I remember talking to an American trainer where this type of intervention is a really important part of her practice and teaching, and it was absolutely fascinating to hear about that. However, when I trained, we didn't cover it, and I remember when we did discuss it, we were a little bit unsure about it, whether it would be safe, whether we would feel comfortable with it. And I suppose that's partly because we're Northern Europeans, our trainer was Danish. So that particular GIM norm is something, I guess, that, well, we didn't cover it. The other thing that this makes me think about is being a trainer, and how sometimes we have people with different cultural backgrounds, and how important it is to let people, for example, do their sessions in their mother tongue. So it might be delivering sessions in Mandarin, for example. I think that sort of thing is so important. But one of the things that you said that I was interested in was you mentioned that GIM norm is being weird, and I was wondering whether you could explain a bit about what you mean by that. Yeah, and I used that in a lovingly flippant way. When we come into a GIM session, we start with a conversation that's very legibly psychotherapeutic. We're talking about ourselves, we're talking about the present moment with a therapist in a very humanistically oriented way. I think for some people therapy can feel very foreign, and that's okay, right? And I think there's a certain foreignness to that way of relating to your therapist in that beginning of a session. But then part of the GIM process is moving into a non-ordinary state, where one-on-one context, your therapist is helping you become really focused and relaxed, usually lying down on a mattress or a recline. And there are lots of cultural associations with that, right? It brings up really problematic visions of traditional Freudian therapy. There are, I think, really reasonable ways that that scenario could provoke fear, lying down and closing your eyes in a room with a therapist. I don't think that anybody is actually experienced. I'm not aware of ethical breaches with GIM therapists, but given the cultural associations around, even something as simple as closing your eyes with another person, you know, it can be, there's something very different from what's normally socially acceptable, right, in a GIM session. And, you know, when we're relaxed and focused, the therapist puts on music, and we have a dialogue about what we're experiencing in the music. That's not something we typically do, right? We don't do that hanging out on a Saturday with our friends, right? I think maybe for most people. And so the whole process of what makes GIM work so well is really far outside most people's everyday experience. And that's what I mean when I say weird. And there's something beautiful and exciting and generative in that. But it's also different from most people's everyday experience, and that can take time to adjust to. Yes, and I think also it can take people time to get used to the therapeutic process involving the imagery in the music. Where when people have had a good few sessions, my experience is that often they express how amazed they often are by where the process takes them, often to something unexpected, something certainly that they couldn't predict. But yet somehow is just what they needed and makes perfect sense afterwards. So getting used to this surprising process, as it often is, that you have to learn to trust. Is something that I certainly think it takes people time to get used to? Yeah, I really like how you put that that it's somehow surprising, but it all makes perfect sense when it all gets put together. But something that came up in our research that we felt helped explain that is this idea that, so the GIM therapist works in a primarily non-directive way. We're very open, humanistically oriented, and maybe give ideas of possibilities, but are really non-directive in our styles of conversing and in our dialogue during the music. And every one of our participants in the research study mentioned something about the non-directive guiding, that that was really helpful for them to orient to non-ordinary states' therapies, and to orient towards this way of moving through the music for their psychotherapy. So something about that was a transcultural factor, where the non-directive guiding of whatever cultural background people were from, they found that really helpful for orienting to GIM. So the guiding being that the client is encouraged to say out loud what they're experiencing, the therapist supports that non-directively by sort of encouraging, affirming what the client is experiencing and the way their process seems to be going. Yeah, so now I suppose this is also to do with the music, of course. And, you know, Helen Bonnie, right from the beginning she encouraged clients to become one with the music, to open themselves to the music, to surrender to the process, these kinds of words. And she said as we still do something like let the music take you where you need to go, which is, to me that's a summary of what the whole thing is. It seems to be saying things that perhaps don't seem compatible if you're not used to the process, so it's saying let the music, so it's sort of suggesting to hand yourself over to the music. And that this is going to take you where you need to go, so in terms of your own needs, what you need to experience in the session. So how do you understand, how does this process work, this music taking the person where they need to go, what is that, what does that mean? And then there's a kind of a song question, which is to do with something you mentioned at the beginning, but using the western art music and questions around that. But how do you understand how this, how does this work, this process? Thanks for asking this massive question, how does the music work? And I'm thinking a little bit about folks who might be listening to our conversation right now, and you know where they're coming from, probably a lot of folks listening are coming from the perspective of music therapy, but maybe not, maybe just people who have strong relationships with music. And at some level, I think there's something really intuitive about being able to take the music, let the music take you where you need to go, right? There's a certain kind of deep listening mode that I think it's a human prerogative to be able to access, to really let the music in and let the music speak and let the music act upon us. I think that's something that we don't only have in music therapy, although we have some pretty specialized ways of navigating that. In some ways, I think that that's pretty intuitive for people when they're able to let go and let the music in, but one thing that I think, and I'd be really interested in your thoughts on this, one of the ways that I think G.I.M. is optimizes the way that we can let music take us where we need to go, is the way that we think about the music as a co therapist. So in G.I.M. we kind of take it beyond just letting music in and having this full rich open experience of the music to thinking about the qualities or the ingredients in the music. Maybe I can just say this instead of aside for a bit, but there are some really particular qualities within Western art music. I don't know, make it sound like Western art music. When we listen to Western art music, we can typically identify it as such because it has these certain kinds of characteristics. There are certain kinds of harmonies and melodies in the ways that melodies are developed, certain kinds of form, certain kinds of instruments that make it allegedly Western classical music or Western art music. There's something about the combination there that I think if we think of music as co therapist, that music ends up being a certain kind of therapist. And there's no right or wrong kind of therapist if we just think about psychotherapy. We have countless different kinds of therapists that act in different ways, and those are all really useful. A therapist who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy will function really differently from a therapist who's really strongly rooted in psychodynamics or union therapy, for example. One's not better or worse, but one is really great for moving into deep spaces. I think it's useful to think about music in that way. It's not the only way that we should think about music, but what ingredients of a therapist are there in the music? The music that works so well for the transformative, deep, transcendent process that is G.I.M. is music that's going to take you into these really well deep or transformative places. Yeah, so how is the music functioning? I don't know. Yeah, go ahead, jump in. I mean, I think we both agree that not all western art music is going to work. So I mean, I was wondering whether you could give what do you think would be an example of a sort of classic piece, if you like, of music that really works well in G.I.M. Maybe one of the pieces that anybody use, what would be a kind of a archetypal G.I.M. piece? Sure, yeah. I don't want to rough any feathers in the G.I.M. community about what's like, you know, quintessential Helen Barney, but you know, what when it comes to mind is movements eight and nine of Elgar's enigma variation. So that's the beginning of her positive affect program, one of her first music programs. So we should maybe say for the listeners that Helen Barney devised these sort of music programs, 30 to 45 minutes in length, usually four to seven or eight pieces. But all different composers. And so this is the beginning of one of our earliest music programs called positive effects. So yeah, how would you characterize those two variations? Yeah, so just a little bit of context building on what you said. This is one of her first programs and it's based on her work when she was at the music therapist on a team of folks doing LSD assisted therapy, psychotherapy research in Maryland. And for this program, she didn't design it for LSD, but she designed it to loosely follow the sub phases of an LSD session where she she pulled pieces that were sort of ideal pieces that she would use in each of those phases within this eight to 12 hour LSD session. So this first one that movement eight is called WM. It's a little bit lighter. There's a lot of movement and it's quite inviting. It's a therapist that allows a little bit of wandering, a little bit of energy where we begin to find a bit more focus. And towards the end, we start to settle and deepen just a little more. It's saying, hey, welcome. There's all this beautiful stuff happening. And now we can start to turn our attention inward and see what the work is to come. And then Nimrod comes, which many listeners will probably be familiar with that there is a lengthening in it. We hear one one musical phrase over and over. So there's safety security recognition in hearing that theme over and over as it's varied. But each time there's something a little different. The music is saying, here's this thing that we know there's this home base, but we're going to transform it just a little bit. There's something new. There's something deepening or lengthening or growing. And that music, something really beautiful in this movement that it allows movement downward. We could say that's downward into deeper, more difficult emotions or downward into reverence. Or there's movement upwards to and to joy into maybe not quite ecstasy, but something really bright and maybe even spiritual. And the best psychotherapy, I think to my mind, the best psychotherapies are ones that allow work in both directions, work in the muck, but also work in the transcendent places. You know, both of these movements together are about what maybe six minutes. And already we have this kind of establishment of safety, of return, of security, of home base, but also here, you can actually let go into these big places. Yeah, yeah, so the music has this transformation. And I think also in this particular track, there is a steady buildup leading to a peak. And of course that's true in quite a lot of the GIM music, including others in this program, Barbara, Dargeo, the end of Strauss, Stefan, Transfiguration, things like that. So the transformation and this build to a peak, that's definitely a key aspect of this music. So in terms of this idea of music being the co-therapist, what would you say are the qualities of this Elgar co-therapist? Oh, I don't know. I wonder what qualities of the co-therapist you hear. What the music is, you know, if you're going to scribe Nimrod as a therapist, what are you hearing in it? Yeah, well, I suppose what I immediately think about when you ask that is how the client's relationship with this co-therapist is such a personal one so that in a sense the client creates or experiences the music that they need to experience. So the qualities of the co-therapist, the music that they hear, that they engage with relate to their own needs and so it's very personal in this way. So, for example, if I'm connected to my deep feeling and I hear the music and my feeling state affects how I hear the music, what I hear in the music, what the music does as the co-therapist. But then the music affects my inner state and of course the imagery process is a part of this as well so that there's this deep intersubjective interplay between the client, the music as the co-therapist with the imagery as well. So there's something about this intersubjective interplay with the music as the co-therapist I guess is what means that the music can take me where I need to go in terms of my own needs so that the co-therapist can be the co-therapist that I need it to be in that sort of sense. And I think that that's something fairly characteristic about what we call Western art music, that there's a certain kind of complexity, not that it's more complex than other music, but there's a kind of complexity to it where in subsequent listening, we're going to hear it in totally different ways. Like there's a lot going on so that we can, our inner world, our psyche can create a different experience based upon where we're at and what's active for us each time we hear the same piece of music. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was thinking if I listen to the Elgar now and then I listen to it tomorrow, I know for my inexperience, it might sound slower or faster or lighter or heavier, all these kinds of things, all depending on my kind of inner state. So, there's another question here as well and this is about using Western art music and I was particularly thinking about the early literature where you have Helen Bonnie, for example, talking about this is the music of the great creative geniuses, it's the best music we have. I guess a controversial topic these days, but I was wondering what you thought about that and what it might mean. I mean, what is genius? I'm laughing because, yeah, I'm having such strong negative reaction to that wording, right? Music by the geniuses, by the great masters because. Yeah, but what meaning does it have, if any? I know it's tricky for us these days because attitudes have changed, but what does it mean if anything, that it is great music? So, the music in GIM is written by an extraordinarily small subset of masterful composers. And there's so much amazing music out there, there are so many musical geniuses that have been recorded, that have been cataloged, that's not even to start thinking about the geniuses who performed or composed music that was never canonized, that was never recorded. So, I'm so resistant to this idea that GIM is music of the masters or the genius composers, because that's just straight up false. I would say that the composers who wrote music for GIM were extraordinarily composers, extraordinary composers, but boy, there are way more extraordinary composers than the ones whose music we use. I'm not sure we've got any Thelonius monk in GIM programs, right? Like, across genres, there is so much genius, right? I think that's going to be obvious to everyone of the listeners to this podcast, but let's just say it, right? We in the GIM community don't think that Western art music is necessarily the best music, but I think it is important that we use really high quality music. So, this is something that I've been thinking a lot about in conversations with a GIM trainer named Lisa Summer. I've been doing some work with her. Right now, she's doing some work as a therapist and music programmer for psychedelic assisted therapies, and I've been doing some, having some conversations with her around that. In our conversations, it's had me thinking about different modes of listening. I think most people are pretty well able to listen to a piece of music and decide for themselves whether they think it's good music. That's a very personal, or relativist way of thinking about what good music is. And I'm quite sure, Martin, that some of the music that I love that I think is really good music, you might not think so, and vice versa, right? And I love that. I think that's so beautiful. But if we have a different kind of listening mode, where we think about the possibilities, we think about the ways that music holds, but also challenges, the ways that music can provide a certain degree of focus, but also some ambiguity. The ways that music can function to help us become a little bit more altered into an ordinary state, but also maintain focus with something maybe beautiful, but maybe difficult that comes up. Those are the questions. Those are the kinds of ears that we need to listen to when we're deciding if it's going to be good GIM music. And when we have those ears, you sort of intuitively can hear if this is music that transforms moves, that brings us to something knowing or something archetypal, and music that doesn't, right? And I'm not sure if there are specific, yeah, we could talk about specific musical qualities, but I'd spend probably just as long talking about the exceptions to those rules as I would be talking about the rules. Music for GIM tends to be pretty predictable, tends to not have big jump scares, it tends to have instruments that aren't played with so much extended technique, tends to have a certain degree of constancy balanced with transformation. Now, all of those things that I just said probably wouldn't be the ways that we would describe something like Wagner's death march, secreted death march, that's the beginning of death and rebirth. Right, so that would be a big exception to these, you know, quote, rules that I've just sketched out that make music typically pretty good for GIM. Yeah, so that's interesting. It makes me think about a music program I've been researching, which is one of Helen Bonney's earliest ones, it's called Cosmic Astral, and it's a music program that she withdrew after a few years. And she had some feedback from colleagues that led to that, but also an experience of her own with a client where really difficult material came up that the client couldn't work through and she really struggled to bring him back at the end. So it's interesting to see what it is about the music that might make it perhaps board a line suitable, perhaps unsuitable, although it's interesting, I've travelled to it a lot and I've asked colleagues to travel to it. And it's certainly the case that people have been able to do that and have a meaningful experience, a very meaningful one. And I mean, the music, it certainly is challenging from a GIM perspective, like the poem of ecstasy by Squierbin, which is the main piece in the program. So it's possible to identify things about the music, like the way jobs and changes, so it could have a slightly augmented quality, the intensity of the music, and things like this. But even though the music is challenging from a GIM perspective, it also in that challenge provides a certain kind of opportunity that's different to other music. And so this makes me wonder about the music suitability and whether it's to do with somehow the kind of thing the music does isn't suitable for GIM, or whether it's to do with the type of experience that it can potentially open up. But that is too much somehow to deal with, like it was for the pen and body's client. And then this makes me also think about music programs using other music that people have created, such as, for example, the Chinese music programs created by a colleague in Hong Kong. And so that music, very different to Elgar, very different to Squierbin and a lot of the other GIM music, so providing a different kind of opportunity. And there's something about how we need different kinds of music and different kinds of challenge, different kinds of opportunity for the process to work. So I'm not sure this is answering your question, but as you're talking it, speaking we think of your comment earlier about how the GIM traveler, we call the client the traveler because they're on this inner music journey. The traveler creates their own experience of the music, they hear the music or they create the music that they need, they hear the music that they need, which is true as long as the music is close enough to where they are, as long as the music is good enough, you know, we think about the good enough mother, as long as it's close enough to their experience, their inner experience, their inner world, their inner activation, then they can hear the music that's needed. And that works when the music matches us, it doesn't work when the music is trying to take us to some kind of therapeutic outcome, which, you know, to you to a GIM therapist that would be obvious, but I think that's actually a really different way of thinking about music than many, many people are used to, that we're not using music to take us to a particular place. We're not, GIM therapists aren't trying to pick the music that, you know, that's medicine, that's going to be a certain kind of therapeutic experience, but rather one that matches us so that we are inner psyche can bring us to that therapeutic experience. Maybe the difference is subtle, but I think it's quite meaningful. You know, it's not music as a therapeutic prescription, but music that matches us, that listens to us, that's the right kind of therapist that allows us then to do the work, right? The best kind of therapist is the one that let the client do the work they need, not the therapist that does the work that the client needs. And that's, I think a really useful way of thinking about GIM music that maybe isn't so surprising to a GIM therapist, but, you know, for example, I think that's really different from the ways that I've heard people in psychedelic assisted therapy talk about music, or, you know, in, in growth style, breath work, I think there's a little bit less conversation about music that matches us, rather music that's, you know, trying to bring us a particular kind of experience. The Chinese programs, I think, are really interesting. We, on my course, we listened as a group on one occasion to one of the pieces, one of the programs, which was from a violin concert, actually, really nice piece. And there were several people in the group who had a Chinese or Hong Kong stroke Taiwanese background. And they said afterwards that, for them, the music was very familiar because they knew what the melody was. It was a very well-known melody that the music was based on, which, of course, the rest of us had no idea about that. So that was interesting in terms of a cultural aspect of the music. And I know that in the research into this, that some of the Chinese people who travel to it, who may have struggled to have imagery with Western classical music, Brahms, and so on, that they had a much richer imagery experience with the Chinese music. So that was interesting, that the music also had associations with the cultural revolution for them, for example, that it wouldn't have for me. Also that the colleague who devised these music programs, he had in mind the Chinese Ying and Principal. So that informed his construction of the programs. So there's a lot of differences with the music, and completely different to what Scriven does or what Elghar does, for example, using the Chinese orchestra. So with different instruments to a Western orchestra, for example. So what that's bringing up for me is thinking about the different layers of things that we're hearing in the music. You know, there are the cultural codes that we're hearing in the music. Like, you know, the melody that these Taiwanese or Hong Kong folks are hearing in the music, that's a certain kind of cultural code that I wouldn't recognize. There's a certain kind of cultural code in hearing in Arhu instead of a violin. You know, there are cultural codes in, you know, from the jazz program, from Awakenings, certain kind of cultural code in hearing a saxophone, playing a certain kind of way or hearing Miles Davis, you know, playing his muted trumpet in a certain kind of way. So we have these different layers of cultural codes, but there's also this, you know, we might call it an archetypal level. I, another way of saying it would be the psychophysical properties of the music, but that feels a bit too objectiveist to talk about it. It's like what the music itself, rather than our cultural codes around the music, I like to think about it in archetypal terms. Like, if we, if we take away, yeah, something, something maybe something that's inherent in the music, something that, that we're hearing in the music, that's the music itself apart from the cultural codes. I think there's a really good argument that those are inseparable, that cultural codes and the music itself is inseparable. I think that's, there's a really good argument for that. What I've experienced, what I think a lot of GIM clients have experienced is that when we go into deeply non-ordinary states, often, those actually are a little bit more separable than you would think. I think what most people experience is that the more altered you get, the further away from typical waking state ego-consciousness you go, usually the cultural codes of a piece of music become less salient. I'm not going to say that they're not important, right, especially if we're working on a therapeutic issue that is deeply tied to culture or to oppression or to belonging or to difference. Those will always be relevant, but I think the cultural codes in the music might actually be a little less salient. So what does that mean for you in terms of, you know, GIM started off using Western art music. People have an art exploring using other music. How do you see that it needs to develop so as to be most accessible and useful across cultures and continents? Well, I'm foreusing as, you know, researching and then as we find that it works, using music of as many different kinds of genres, cultures, traditions as we can, if it works. The question to me is how it works, not whether it works. I think any music can take us somewhere, but, you know, different kinds of music are going to be doing different kinds of things. When I say how it works, I mean, like, what are the capacities within that music? What affordances does it allow us? Not, yes or no, whether or not we're allowed to use it for GIM. This is a terrible example, but, you know, let's just say, for example, a GIM therapist and a client decide that they're going to work with, they're going to do a very contained music and imagery experience with some low-fi hip hop instrumental low-fi hip hop track that I think typically music from that genre, of course, this is a huge generalization, but typically that's like pretty holding. There's a slow reflective quality to it. There's often a bit of nostalgia to it, but it's quite holding, you know, it's really good at keeping a client. A bit on the surface, in a slow, quiet place, without really going in a bunch of different directions. It's not music that stretches or pushes or challenges typically. So that music, there are a few things to say here, that music is going to be really good for keeping somebody pretty close to your typical everyday ego state. In part, that means that the cultural codes of it are going to be more salient, because we're not that far away from typical ego state. And it's going to be really good at holding us in one place. And the cultural codes may make it more accessible, at least initially for clients. Well, somebody who loves low-fi hip hop is going to think, "Yeah, this is cool. I like this. This is socially acceptable. This is validating of my identity." Right, because they're more salient, it's even more useful. Yeah, but it sounds like you're saying we kind of need the Elgar as well. Yeah, because that music is not going to be really effective, and this is just one example. It's not going to be really effective at taking somebody into deep transformative, challenging places. So it's not a substitute for the Elgar, but it might be really useful for somebody who needs to be held, whether they're a new client or a very experienced client. And it might also help somebody who's not familiar with this style of opening up to music as a co-therapist, experience that, to help them let the music in and see what the music's going to be able to offer them. And I wonder the ways that you navigate this in your training, working with different kinds of music that take clients to very different layers of consciousness. Yeah, well, I think maybe one of the answers to that brings us to think about music and imagery, MI, and in the music and imagery methods that we teach. It's slightly different to the Bonnie method of G-I-M, because the client is in perhaps what we call a minimally altered state of consciousness, not the same deeply altered state or non-ordinary state of consciousness as in the Bonnie method. And the imagery process involving the client in art making was there listening to the music. But certainly the music in a different way can take people into all sorts of different places and connect with all sorts of different levels of consciousness. And importantly, the process of choosing the music in the Bonnie method, the therapist would need to choose music. But in music and imagery, it's a collaborative process and it's the client who chooses, supported by the therapist, the idea of being the client who's really connected to their inner experience, their feelings that they want to work with is supported to really find what music best matches that feeling, what really connects with them. And that process could involve some music that the therapist has suggested, possibly music that could also be used in G-I-M. But it could also be music that the client has suggested, which means it potentially could be music from all sorts of different genres and traditions. And of course, we're not looking for music that does what the L-Gar piece does with that transformation of the musical material that takes the client on a kind of inner journey. We want music in, music in imagery that's more holding somebody in a particular emotional area to explore that, but without going on a journey in the same way. So this makes all sorts of music suitable, as I say, and I mean a song for example, which probably has a repetitive structure, but that would be very suitable. And so to listen to a song that really connected for the client with their felt experience and to listen to that song repeatedly could work really well, and it could, as I say, be from any tradition really. You mentioned that a lot of times the client and therapist will select the music together and it will often come from the client's music. And I think that's one piece of that is, you know, of course, it allows the client to bring their own sense of identity and their own relationship with music into the therapy process, which is, I mean, we know this is music therapists, that somebody's own relationship with music is so important. It's so core to who they are. And of course, we want to use that in the music therapy process. And, you know, that that lets them really have agency as they move into this inner work as they get used to non-ordinary states therapies. And I think that having that sense of agency is really important and really useful. I will say on the other hand, when a client is able to let go, when they're at a place where they can let go of needing agency, when they can sort of offload that agency to the therapist and let the therapist trust the therapist to see them to hear them and to pick music that really does match them. Sort of offloading that agency onto the client, but then also onto the music that my experience is that that lets clients let go a little bit more that lets them go to places that they couldn't go otherwise somehow letting go of control and trusting the therapist in the music to do that allows them to go deeper than they ever could have. So both are really important and both are really validating right to have these, you know, receptive music therapy approaches like MI that really tap into the power of client agency, but also see how, you know, there are ways that, yeah, we can shift that dynamic to be able to move even further, which is not to say that the client doesn't have agency in deep to GIM. But it's maybe a different part of their psyche, right, they're moving away from conscious ego states letting, you know, one way of saying it is they're the inner wisdom of their psyche, we have lots of different theoretical frames for how to describe that, but some interknowing of them has the agency, not their conscious ego state. So I don't mean to suggest that somehow the client has no agency in GIM with totally not the case, but it's maybe not that, you know, every day you go consciousness in choosing the music, that's not the way the agency manifests for the client in GIM. Yes, absolutely, that seems such a helpful way of thinking about it, these different levels of agency. So going back to the beginning of our conversation, talking about the way GIM is developing, you said something about the way you thought the development had stabilized in the US. Yeah, I'm not sure if that's a comment I would stand behind. I think relative to how quickly GIM is growing elsewhere, it feels like, you know, there are a few different training programs for GIM in the States, but it's not proliferating really quickly. I think there's maybe consistent growth of GIM in the States, where other places like in Japan and China, for example, in South Africa, I see it growing really quickly. So yeah, I wonder what piece of that caught you. Well, yeah, I was interested in what you meant by that, but also it made me think about how my mentioning music and imagery, I think that's typical of European practitioner. Certainly in Europe, that's probably the main area of development in music and imagery, and that's because it's for many of us, whether we've just trained in music and imagery, or done the full GIM training, it's music and imagery and other GIM adaptations that we most practice. And this makes me then think about a conversation I had with Mowlin Clark a few years ago, so Mowlin Clark is a US GIM therapist, retired trainer, one of the first people to train in GIM with Henning Bonning. And we were talking about how GIM is developing in Europe and the differences with Europe and the US. And she said that she thought it was to do with the way that in Europe, many of us who train in GIM and music therapists and our work is typically in schools and hospitals and other settings of this type, where the full Bonnie method wouldn't be suitable. But music and imagery and other adaptations have worked really well. So that sort of makes sense of that, and then she contrasted that with how in the state she said that many of the GIM practitioners, you know, counselors and psychotherapists say who train in GIM, they're working in private practice. So for them, the Bonnie method is going to work really well. So it is quite impressive in many ways how GIM is developing in Europe with music and imagery training and all the research that's being done and sold. I do think also that it's quite widely known within the community that there are some problems with some quite serious ethical issues having come up. Issues with standards and organizations and in particular with systemic oppression. And I know that many of us really hope that these issues can be properly addressed at some stage. So it's quite a complicated situation in Europe and thinking about our wider conversation about how GIM is evolving. I do think in Europe that there are questions about the future of the Bonnie method in terms of its suitability for the work that many of us are doing. So I was wondering what are your thoughts about how things are evolving? Yeah, interesting question. So I think the development of music and imagery training and music and imagery techniques, we have a really rich constellation of different adaptations of GIM that we could collectively call music and imagery. I think that's just of enormous usefulness. I think that's really important. It's not a substitute for GIM. It's not a substitute for deep transformational work. And I don't think anybody would say that there is substitute. I think that maybe the question of whether somebody's a music therapist or a psychologist or a counselor, to me that feels a little bit less like it's the issue to me, it feels a little bit more what level of work is somebody doing in their practice. That would be the case for a counselor or a music therapist or a psychologist or I think anybody regardless of their profession. I worked in a acute care and patient psychiatric hospital for years. And I never did the Bonnie method there. I did a lot of music and imagery there. I wasn't useful. But in private practice, there were people who were ready for sustained long-term transformational psychotherapeutic work. And that was the right setting for it. I think both are really relevant. And I think when trainers in the GIM or music therapy community can offer these approaches to clinicians, we only benefit from it. And I think to my mind, it's less useful for people to seek training and then think, okay, how can I implement this in my practice? For me, a more useful perspective is for people to be in their practice and really consider what kind of work they want to do, what level of work they want to do and then get training for that. Because if somebody is only doing short-term psychiatric work, they're probably not going to have a good place to develop their GIM skills. But is that the level of work they want to be doing? If that crisis intervention work is where they want to be, then am I training is going to be really useful. So to me, it's a little bit less about, you know, what the person's profession or setting in is and a little bit more about what work a person's ready to do. I don't really want to go down the psychedelic as a therapy rabbit hole, but I will say, I think in our culture, there's a moment right now where people at a maybe wider level are recognizing the importance of practices that bring us into these non-ordinary states for a deep transformational healing for certain kinds of spiritual experience, for different ways like experiential ways of contacting parts of ourself, for working through memories or traumas or experiences that we can't really access in our typical everyday linguistic rational mode. And GIM is not the same as psychedelic as to therapy, but we are really good at that kind of work. We're really good at facilitating that kind of deep transformational work that we can't do in our rational linguistic mindset. So my, I don't know if this is my prediction, but my hope is that we are more and more able to take these offerings to the folks that are really going to benefit from them. I don't think one is more useful than the other, it's kind of like different kinds of music, right? Different kinds of therapeutic approaches for different, for different levels for different purposes, and ideally we can integrate them because they're still related. Yeah, sure, but I do think though that in a way it's something of a myth that music and imagery is somehow surface level work or any method is depth transformation. I mean, I think my colleagues who are involved in the training with me, we would, all of us agree strongly that music and imagery can certainly affect depth transformation. We see that all the time, I mean, even when people have just trained in supportive music and imagery, and for example at the end of the training day presents some of the work they've been doing. And it's almost always the case that not only is the work very impressive, but it's got real depth to it. It's real psychotherapeutic work that's taken place. And it's not only the therapist who say this, but also the clients who remark on this. And then with the addictive work, which is working more deeply on the issues and the underlying issues affecting the clients mental health, this certainly can really go deep and get to the core of what people need to address. And incidentally, for the therapist, it's certainly as demanding as facilitating the Bonnie method of GIM, and I think in some ways even more demanding. So that in the indicative music and imagery, for example, the therapist really does need to be able to sit with the client with their feelings that might be quite painful, anxiety, sadness, anger, whatever it is. The therapist really needs to be able to be with the client in those places and without trying to say rescue the client or without trying to solve the client's problem, so that the client through being able to really experience their feeling with the music can creatively process it. And so this is where the creative imagination comes in through the art making process. I mean, it's that that can lead to the transformation. So, for me, it's not so much that MI is more sort of surface level work. It can be depth transformations as well, but it's more about the different kinds of therapeutic experience. And what we've been talking about with the Bonnie method, the journey in an altered state, in an non-ordinary state of consciousness that the client goes on with music that has this ongoing development and transformation. I mean, that is a different sort of therapeutic experience, meets different type of need, you might say, or meets need in a different way. And can certainly take us to those surprising places that we need to go. So, I think it's about, yeah, certainly different levels of practice, but also different types of therapeutic experience and what the client needs. And then, as you mentioned, that different methods, different levels of practice can of course be integrated in the work. Yeah, yeah, thanks for that. And it's, you know, it's making me think of the metaphor that Lisa Summary uses about music and imagery versus GIM, where one is a photograph where the other is a film. And boy, photography can be like every bit is moving of an artistic medium as any other, right, that sitting with something really difficult in MI context can be really deep and transformative and difficult. So, I appreciate that. Hmm, yeah. And interestingly, you're mentioning the psychedelic assisted therapy. That is where the body method of GIM started, of course, back in the 70s. So, it's fantastic that things are sort of returning full circle. So, it's really great that some of the GIM community become involved in that. And I think it's interesting as well to see how other professions are also really developing practices to do with imagery, whether it's sports, psychology, or neuro rehabilitation, or CBT, for example, including depth practices, like with metaphorical imagery or working with dreams, kind of stuff we do. So, it's great to see how we in GIM seem to be part of a wider and quite exciting development, I think. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to see pieces of it popping up in professions that in some ways feel really far apart from where we are like sports medicine, but actually no. In some ways, it's a reflection of how people in many professions are deeply engaged in figuring out what it means to be human, and how we access these parts of ourselves to become more human or the human that we want or need to be. [MUSIC] Thanks to Martin. Thanks to Tim for that fascinating conversation. And that was episode 102 of Music Theory Conversations. More to come, watch this space. Thanks as ever to BAMT, the website www.bant.org. Thanks to Jim Howard for the music. Thanks to you for listening. Bye for now. [MUSIC]