I have wanted for some time to compose a musical work which expresses in some way the rich panoply of unexpressed emotions that I feel towards my mother. The rage, panic, resentment, disappointment, sadness, grief, anger, terror, sympathy… and perhaps even love. I have had a few unsuccessful attempts in the past, but so far, this white whale has eluded me.
Psychologist John Bowlby’s attachment theory suggests that infants learn to regulate their emotions via the non-verbal empathic bond with their mother. When all goes well, this relationship with their primary caregiver establishes a sense of trust and safety which forms the basis of the infant’s experience of the world, providing a safe haven to return to whenever they feel overwhelmed. When things go badly in this relationship however, it causes a traumatic attachment rupture which can lead to overwhelming feelings of panic and anxiety that last long into adulthood, such as I have experienced.
For as long as I can remember, my mother has seemed emotionally unavailable to me and dismissive of my feelings. However, the impact Bowlby describes on an infant’s nervous system goes right back to pre-verbal childhood experiences that I don’t even remember. I have had a tremendous amount of talking therapy in my life to help me overcome the inter-personal anxiety I felt and have even worked as a counsellor/coach myself helping other people with similar primal attachment-based issues.
When I imagine what I would have felt as a newborn baby looking up into the eyes of my emotionally avoidant mother, the word terror springs to mind. My earliest memories of her were that she was an unreliable source of safety at best, and downright hostile at worst. Stoically detached from her own emotions, this would have left little for infant Graham to connect to emotionally.
The challenge in healing early life trauma in talking therapy is that we don’t remember and therefore cannot describe what happened, even though the emotional imprint remains locked in our nervous system. These primal infantile feelings need to be accessed some other way, and self-expression in music is one possible therapeutic answer I’m currently exploring.
My vision for this piece is to capture how the experience of being nursed in the arms of a dangerous caregiver felt as in infant in musical form, using the layering and ABA’ structure from Cataplexy as a starting point. An instrumental work would best suit the pre-verbal nature of the experience, so there won’t be any lyrics. The working title is Insecure Attachment.
Complexity arises from the interaction of simple parts, so I started off by creating a simple kick drum and floor tom pattern, along with 32 bar markers for each of the A and B sections of the piece:
Kick and Tom Drum Pattern
I’ll post an update each day as the work progresses.
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