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Graham Music is a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist at London's Tavistock Centre and adult psychotherapist in private practice. Formerly Associate Clinical Director of the Tavistock Clinic's Child and Family Department, he has worked extensively with trauma at the Portman Clinic and in the Tavistock's Fostering and Adoption and Kinship Care team.
Revitalization of the self is the subject of Music's latest book, Respark: Igniting Hope and Joy after Trauma and Depression (2022). He has chosen sparking (‘based on energy and electricity, which are central to all life’ [p. 3]) as his central metaphor, with a number of thematic derivatives which he explores and elaborates: ‘desparking’ - ‘seen in de-energized and less lively states’ (Part 1, p. 6); ‘resparking’ - after losing spark due to trauma and dissociation, learned helplessness and depression (Part 2); the ‘unsparked’ - those in whom spark has never come into being (Part 3); and the ‘mis-sparking’ - of those who use addictive means to avoid internal states of deadness and emptiness (Part 4).
These ideas, as his published papers and books (2001, 2009, 2014, 2016, 2019, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c) evidence, form the spine of his thinking and clinical practice, developed over the course of his 35-year career. Music describes himself as an innovative psychotherapist and, as his book demonstrates, he uses psychoanalytic, trauma, attachment, neurobiological and body informed approaches in his practice.
Whilst compassionate and understanding of the pull towards defensive stasis and fears of change, Music makes clear the rewards of turning towards life. Defences may be physical or psychological; ‘turning away, fleeing, fighting or numbing’ (p. 18), ‘quiescence and disconnection’ (p. 19), but problems arise if
these defences cannot be relinquished when danger and threat have passed. The risk is that what was originally essential to survival becomes a prison or tomb that prevents the person trapped inside from fully li