Therapy for Musicians – How to Stay Sane as a Classical Music Professional

How to Stay Sane as a Professional Classical Musician with violist and therapist Lina-Marie Däunert

IG: As musicians, we're incredibly busy. Often, we don't have time to deal with our stress, anxiety, and burnout. We just go through the motions. 

However, this often leads to problems that manifest themselves in physical or psychological issues. If we don't get a handle on these issues, they can have a detrimental effect on our careers. 

For example: imposter syndrome can keep us from applying for auditions we might have won, or stage fright keeps us from performing our best.

My guest today is Lina-Marie Daeunert, a successful violist from Berlin who is training to become a therapist to help musicians overcome these issues. Lina aspires to become a liberated musician and help others find their way to a better and healthier life. Let’s dive right into this conversation

 

LM: So my hands went numb on stage. I couldn't really feel my fingers anymore. I could no longer use them in the very specific way that it takes to play the viola. Even the viola :) So I went to a doctor and he said, "It doesn't look like you have a physical problem, so try psychotherapy. So that's what I did, I had a kind of behavioral therapy for at least 2 years, and I enjoyed being able to talk to someone every week or two.

But I didn't really manage to cure myself of that problem then but I knew then that at some point in the future I wanted to help people who might have the same problem that I had then.

I'm sure every musician suffers from some kind of stage fright or mental illness. Some have burnout, some come very close to it.

I studied at the Hanns Eisler School in Berlin and I was surrounded by some of the best musicians in the world. One of my problems that brought me to psychotherapy was that I felt so out of place there.

I got the spot, I auditioned but I thought, why me?  I didn't feel like I belonged, and I wasn't someone who had already competed internationally or anything like that. I think I got in mostly because of my talent, and I'm very passionate about music, but I really didn't feel like I was like all the other rising stars around me.

I also noticed that most of the musicians there have severe mental problems and they are mostly not taken care of. Probably also because there's no one to turn to... There's no door in the school that you can knock on and say: " Hey, I've a problem, can you help me?" 

There are some people in every school, who take care of the students. For example, they do body or mental awareness exercises. I think in every school nowadays there is an Alexander Technique or physical therapy program. But I didn't feel like there was something that was accessible enough that anyone, even if they're not sure if they have a problem, can go there and do something to prevent them from actually having a problem.

So I decided even then that at some point in the future I'd like to learn something that would allow me to help other people who are studying music and want to become professional. 

I actually found a technique that helped me with my hand problem called the Chinese Quantum Method.

I stumbled upon it quite by accident. After almost eight years of trying to find a solution for my hands, I happened to find a coach who uses the Chinese Quantum Method. I had two sessions with her and for 12 months I no longer have the problem.

Before, I had the symptoms about every three weeks and then I had these two coaching sessions and it just went away.

Because I really wanted to learn a proper technique to start a coaching career, I chose the Chinese Quantum Method. Since this technique has helped me, I'm 101% convinced that it can help other people. 

 

IG: That's fantastic. I think it's so important for musicians who have experiences like this to take the course and then be able to do therapy for musicians.

As musicians, our stress and problems are very specific to our profession. And sometimes it may be difficult to relate to someone who has never been a performer or an artist. It may not even always be possible to explain why you feel stressed out when you're practicing, for example, right? It's easy to explain the reason behind the performance anxiety when you're on stage and there are 500 people in the audience. But why are you stressed when you're in the practice room? All of these mental health issues occur also when you're alone, and like you said, we know that a lot of music industry professionals have one problem or another, but we often don't even recognize it in ourselves.

As musicians, we're so busy focusing on playing and practicing. That's why we often don't even notice the moment we start to feel burnout, develop injury or mental health issues. In your experience, what are the most common problems musicians face?

 

LM: Well, I think most of us are just not able to rest. That might sound very simple and like something that's not that relevant, but I think it's very relevant. 

I used to practice every spare second of the day and. As a result, I was super tense all the time, had the worst headaches, pain, and had no space left in my head to even notice how I was doing today.

So, I never asked myself the question, how am I actually doing, for fear of the answer. For example, during my bachelor's degree as a music student, we had these tiny practice rooms with glass doors. You could close a curtain in front of the glass. But most people didn't do that because the rooms were so small.

So when you walked through the room, you could see all the people practicing intensely and you could see how engaged they were with the music and how focused they were. And you always felt guilty walking down the hall because you thought, "oh, maybe I don't look so focused when I'm practicing, and why am I even walking so slowly because I could already be in my room unpacking my instrument?"

I almost didn't rest at all for the first five or six years of my studies. I realize more and more every day that I don't have the freedom that I'd like to have, because I've so many guidelines in my head that I've been given over time by teachers, colleagues, mentors and others.

For example, one of my dearest teachers used to tell me, "The more stress, the better". And at the time, I just accepted that because I thought, "yeah, that makes sense. If you train yourself in stressful situations, it can only help you".

And to a certain degree, I think he's right, but to what degree exactly? And how personal is that degree? How do you find that balance and how do you find out if you're as resilient as your neighbor? 

How do you deal with it when you realize that you're not as resilient? Someone can practice for six hours and they're fine afterwards and you yourself can maybe only practice for five hours. How do you not feel like a loser or like the worst musician when you realize that? 

How can you actually feel like a confident musician?

If you can say: "Okay, I know how many hours a day I can work, and I know that I want to do three hours of yoga every week as a balance to work. I want to meditate for an hour every week. 

These things, in my eyes, are the real achievements we need to make in our lives, during our studies or in our first years of work, because after that it might already be too late. 

When you start studying you should take some time out where you're dealing with these issues and really allow yourself to find answers and deal with them.

 

IG: We don't often want to open that door. Sometimes we might feel like something is wrong. Maybe we feel like this job or position is not for us, but then we are often almost afraid to bring it up and look for counselling or emotional support. We just keep going. 

It's hard to go deep. 

 

LM: Yeah, that's what I meant about choosing the right time. There's a saying that I really like, "the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago and the second best time is today". So whenever you feel like something is boiling up inside of you, you should just check it, because even 24 hours later, it could be worse and you could have prevented the worst. 

I've been lucky enough to have had a lot of people accompany me on my journey through the music world. Usually I tried to get in touch with people who taught some kind of body awareness, therapy and so on.

They're usually musicians who then got to what they're teaching now, and I want to hear their story and why they thought it was important to do something other than just play in an orchestra. Why they chose their particular technique has always been of great interest to me. 

There should be an easy way for anyone to find someone who can help you. And if you don't even know what your problem is, you just feel bad, you're depressed, frustrated, you can't work, you can't concentrate, there should be someone you can just go to and say exactly that, and they'll help you and try to find a solution.

And there should be no resistance or bureaucracy that keeps you from taking care of yourself. 

 

IG: Absolutely. I think sometimes it's also the financial aspect that stops creative professionals. If you have to take private sessions with a therapist you might think “can I afford that”?

But, like you said, the best time to deal with something is today, because tomorrow everything can be different. 

Tell me a little bit about the therapy that you're learning. It's great to hear that a music student can have two sessions with a therapist and deal with some things that have persisted. That's fantastic. How does this therapy for musicians work? 

 

LM: First of all, I want to say two things. The first is that, of course, not every problem will be solved after two sessions. There is no guarantee of that. I was lucky that it helped me so quickly, but there is no guarantee.

The things I'm going to say might sound a little bit like some kind of magic potion, and I don't want it to sound like that because there's an idea behind it.

Let me give you an example of how a coaching session might go.

So you come in with a problem, let's say someone really wants to be a professional musician, but they feel like something is holding them back and they're not realizing their full potential. They're afraid on stage and maybe they're afraid to go to class, and those are just normal things that a lot of people suffer from.

In a coaching session, there is a system that we can use. It can also be a very free conversation, but there's also a system that you can use to find the source of resistance in a person's energy field that's preventing them from living the way they want to.

The reason it's called the Chinese Quantum Method is because the idea behind the coaching technique is that we all have a quantum field. That's not an idea of the technique itself, it's just quantum physics. We're all made up of atoms, which are made up of electrons, and they create this electromagnetic field around our body, so every living thing has such a field. 

Quantum physics also says that this field stores information that can be good, bad or neutral. If it's good, then leave it there and be happy. If it's neutral, then you can just overlook it. But if it's bad energy stored in your electromagnetic field, it can keep you from being the best version of yourself.

To give you a little example, someone says, "I want to be a professional musician," but for some reason it doesn't really work out in different areas of their life. They feel like something is holding them back, and when we talk to that person, we might find out that their parents kept telling them when they were kids – "You're not going to be an orchestra musician because you're never going to be able to be financially stable". 

And when you hear something like that it gets stuck in your head. You might feel like you don't accept that kind of premise from your parents or you think, "I'm already making money and it's just not true".

But the thing is you just don't know what kind of information is going to be mixed up in this field around you. So you can't pick and choose what's included up there and what's not. You can't say, "Okay, I reject this information. So it's not in my field. If you say you reject it, it'll probably come even closer to you, because the resistance is what causes the mixing in your energy field. 

When you talk to someone in a session like this, you can detect this blending of energy and neutralize it so that the energy can flow more freely and you don't get in your own way on the way to your favorite future or whatever you want to achieve.

And I think the idea that you're holding yourself back with certain patterns or leftover information from the past is something that everybody can accept, and if you have a big problem like I had with my hands, there's usually more than one thing holding you up.

There's more than one energy mix up and you have to find them all and neutralize them to solve the whole problem. But of course, since I had a coach who is also a musician, she very quickly found the right points and asked me the right questions to find these blockages and neutralize them.

 

IG: Is all the treatment done during the session or are there techniques that you have to come home with and do something yourself? 

 

LM: There are some exercises that you can just repeat after a session. But it's not like you go home with some kind of homework. Usually you do the work during the session and then usually something happens afterwards as well.

One time after the coaching I felt like I was on drugs because I was so happy, so relieved. I felt like I was floating on a pink cloud because something had opened up inside of me. This was when I did a session that was about my family and my ancestors – I tried to take back some energy that I had stored in other people, and return the energy that other people had stored in me. And when I say energy, you can also say ideas or premises or whatever. You can find your own words and ideas, how you can think of it. During the session, when the coach was helping me return the energy that was actually mine, it really felt like a couple of rocks floated out of my chest and it was.

I don't know, it was a process of at least a minute and a half and I felt so much lighter afterwards and couldn't stop smiling. It was really extreme. So there can be an almost physical process that you can really feel that starts during the session and continues afterwards, but you don't have to control it or take care of it anymore.

 

IG: Yeah, that sounds great. Now I want to do a session with you so I can have that experience. 

I started playing my instrument when I was 14. So I was already too old to have any musical training, and I didn't really have much to do with music before that. So I feel to this day like I've been an imposter my whole life. When people tell you things like that, do you give them advice or do you guide them? How do you help people deal with it and move past it? 

 

LM: The idea behind the Quantum Technique isn't to give advice. It's really just about freeing people from stressful thoughts that are holding them back.

Maybe after that they're able to give themselves really good advice because a thought that was holding them back is no longer part of their thinking. As a coach, the most important thing for me is to neutralize my system before I go into a coaching session.

 

So I correct my field of all personal thoughts so I can fully engage with the person I'm working with and tap into their field to find the resistance in their thinking, because otherwise I'd be stuck in mine.

So, for example, I check to see if there is any resistance to the concept of "I can never be financially stable as a musician". Then I really have to check if that's a problem for them. Whether it's a problem for me doesn't matter in a coaching session. I've to plug into their system and check if there is a problem for them with this concept. And if there is, I'll just neutralize it.

So it's not about advice, and I shouldn't try to find the reason why this person might have a problem beforehand. I'm just going to look and ask questions. I'm going to put forward some ideas, like you can never be financially stable as a musician, and then I'm going to check to see if that's a problem for them.

And if it is, then maybe it's something that's hindering them in their career path, and then I'll just neutralize it. And of course, there's always many facets to the concept, right? So you're trying to find different perspectives on the same problem, like, for example, financial stability, and then you try to look at it from every possible angle to find any resistance that might still stand in the way of the concept. There are no quick fixes.

 

IG: How do you deal with when you go to an audition and you don't get the job? How do you deal with rejection or when you feel the imposter syndrome? How do you deal with the job, the work environment that is driving you crazy and the competition that's around you?

Is there anything you can suggest? 

 

LM: Well, I can suggest something for a specific person that I'm working with, but not in general, because we don't always have the same reasons why we feel stressed at an audition.

Some people might feel stressed because their dad was a great musician and when they go on stage, they feel like they have to be as good as their dad. Some people are stressed because they think even if I win the job, I'll never be financially secure. Others may think I was never as good as the people in my class and that's why I'm stressed.

And because the reasons come from the same pool, it's very easy to make a general statement about that. But I don't think it's that useful. You have to look closely at the person in front of you and explore their story to find out how they think and what they're most influenced by.

And CQM is, I think, the quickest way to get an idea of how a person's mind works. Like I said, it's not magic and if you go to a regular psychotherapist, they'll try to do the same thing. But I think the idea of a two or three year therapy program is that you take your time.That's a really good thing because going somewhere every week is really nice and I'm doing that again right now and I'm really enjoying it. 

But if you have something that you really want to fix, like let's say in a month and a half there's an audition for an orchestra that you really want to be in, and you want to do your best and be authentic and free and musical, and you just want to show the best version of you, then you need to find a way to do that in the next month and a half.

And you can't say, 'I'm going to find a therapist and do a three-year program' – then your audition is over. Right? So I think this technique is something that can help you. It can help you find the quickest way possible for a problem. If you have another problem that you want to look at after that, there will be a new process.

It's not something you do once and then your whole life is a miracle. 

For example, if someone tells me that when I'm on stage, I'm no longer connected to my body and I'm no longer connected to the music itself.

I then ask, 'Okay, how do you want to feel?' And then they might say, "I want to feel the floor under my feet. I want to have an idea of the space and the air around me. I want to be able to look into the faces of the audience and just enjoy the music and be happy about every note that I play". And then we start the process and try to connect what is today with the performance that they wanted to have.

That's what we do. 

But I think that it's also this, um, this insecurity about who you're as a musician and how good you're is something very common that you can't even really avoid.

I think you can really learn to deal with it, but it's impossible to avoid it. 

For example, you already know that I won an audition for a permanent position a year ago. I started in January and I played in an orchestra.

I played in a tutti position and even though I was the one who decided to leave after six months, um, let's just say that in their eyes I didn't really do my job very well. That's okay. They can think that.

I'm in another orchestra now as a principal violist, and I just started playing there in September and during my first big project there I was a co-principal violist. After that first project they asked me, "Hey, can we ask you to do the next project as a solo as well? And I was really happy, because I wanted to try and I felt very welcome in the atmosphere of the orchestra.

And now I've played many different projects there as a solo viola. About six months ago, let's put it in black and white, I got kicked out of an orchestra from a tutti position, and now I'm working as a solo viola.

So how do you deal with that discrepancy? You experience it every day. For example, if you want to get into an undergraduate program, you play for three or five schools and maybe two take you and three don't take you. 

In two schools they tell you, "You have the world in front of you and you're going to be great".

And in three schools they tell you that at your level you can just go to law school or something. You can't really avoid those very different voices being part of your life.

Of course, none of us musicians are stubborn enough to just ignore all the negative feedback. And that's not what we should do either. We should always listen and try to filter out what we can learn from it to become a better musician, not to please anyone, but just to develop ourselves.

If you really want to say something with your music, it's even more likely that some people will really like you and some people won’t.

On Instagram I call myself @theliberatedmusician, which is something I want to become rather than something I already am. But I can say that I'm creating a lot of space in my life right now to become a liberated musician.

The more I look at my life and the last six years, or even the time before that when I was in school, the more I realize in how many areas I'm not free and there are hundreds of reasons why I can't really be myself or why I've even forgotten who I'm or who I want to be.

To say that I want to become a conscious musician, I've to stick to that process and be really honest with myself and put the energy that I usually put into practicing and working for hours and hours and hours into my own process. And that's a lot of work, by the way. 

Some people might look at my life and think, "Oh, she's doing a lot less and not making as much progress. She's not auditioning or anything." 

But I'm doing a different kind of work, and I think it's very brave. It's so much easier to go to the practice room and practice for an extra two hours to play the excerpt a little bit better. But I've been doing that all my life and now I want to do something different and yeah, it's not easy.

 

IG:  I can believe it. I think it's very brave – to go and do your own thing. It always takes a certain dedication and conviction to be yourself and make music the way you think that music is.

Like you said, whenever you're a little different, there's always going to be a lot of people that like it, but there's also going to be some that are going to criticize you. The problem starts when we listen only to the negative voices. It's a lot easier to hear those negative comments and respond to them and stick with those comments than it's to hear all the good and positive feedback that you have.

Somehow we often prefer to stay with the negativity. And no matter what way you find to deal with that, whether it's therapy for musicians, Alexander Technique, yoga or meditation or some other technique, it is an incredible tool that helps throughout the career path, to live a better life and actually end up having a more successful career. Because it's very hard to evolve and improve if you're in pain.

 

LM: Exactly. So it's very good to have those kinds of tools and I think I've become very aware of how exactly we need to look at our personal concept of success. 

I think when we start studying, we have a very clear idea of what success has to look like. When you start studying and you want to be an orchestra musician, the goal is to win an audition. 

Unless we have physical or mental health problems, we don't really look at the definition of success. The definition of success and all the super important things that go into it are never considered. 

For example, yesterday I had an eye-opening conversation: I'm playing in a big orchestra in Berlin this week, and they knew that I started working in this orchestra in Hamburg..

I told them about my worries and now they found out that I quit there. So, this one colleague from Berlin, he talked to me during a break and asked me if I was auditioning again. And I said, “well, I'm taking some time off. I'm trying to focus on other things and find a new balance in my life”.

And he looked so concerned. He was trying to give me advice so I could get back to auditions quickly and find a new job quickly. And he really didn't get that's not what I'm looking for right now.

I'm looking for something that will sustain me for the next 40 years as an orchestral musician or whatever kind of musician. I'm not even sure who exactly I want to be, but it was really funny because I really felt like he thought I had a problem because I wasn't going to the audition.

I'm trying to solve a problem so that I can decide whether I want to do an audition or not. I want to put the energy into my process instead of preparing for the audition. But, yeah, it was really fun for me to talk to this colleague because I realized that when you tell someone, "No, I'm not going to the audition," they think there's something wrong with you.

And if you're not really committed to a process, to a path that you want to go, then you're always going to be persuaded otherwise. You're always going to go back to what was before. So if you don't really commit to the change, there's always going to be a lot of people around you who are going to make you feel bad about the change that you want to make in your life.

 

IG: It's really nice to talk to you and hear all that, because I think we can all relate to that.

By the way, I wanted to say earlier that I think it's very admirable and brave to give up jobs that don't satisfy us. Playing somewhere where people aren't so crazy about you, you have to ask yourself: do I want to play in an environment where I don't fit in?

Working for a long time in an environment that doesn't satisfy you isn't a good way to live. It's always better to leave it and look for a place where you're appreciated and loved for who you're.

You should create a nice environment for yourself where you can be the best version of yourself.  We're also a product of our environment and when the environment is supportive, when the environment is friendly, and when the environment helps us grow, it's just a lot easier than when we're fighting everything. 

It's great to have that goal: I want to be in the best school and I want to be in the best orchestra. But at the same time, you have to remember that sometimes you have to check if you're comfortable in the best school or in the best orchestra.

And if not, there's always the possibility to look for something that's better. Because otherwise you might need too much therapy. 

 

LM: At least once in a while, you should allow yourself the experience of being in a loving and supportive environment. And then just observe yourself. You don't even have to draw conclusions. The first thing you have to do is observe yourself and see how you feel in different situations. Then decide – do I want to do it the hard way? Do I want to go to every performance and be scared and stressed every time? Okay, then it's your decision, but you probably don't want that and you probably just need to experience the alternative and then you can choose that or a mixture of both. 

 

IG; Yeah. I think the conclusion of this whole conversation is that it should always be a conscious decision about how you want to live and how you want to feel and how you make your choices. And that you should be aware of yourself and your state of mind. If you feel that something is wrong, the best thing to do is to deal with it in that moment and seek help or self-help, but never to think, 'Okay, I don't have time for this, I'll deal with it later.' Because it will come back on you. So it's always better to take care of it. 

Thanks so much for having this conversation. And tell me, if someone wants to get in touch with you and schedule a session with you, where do they find you?

Well, you can find me on Instagram under @theliberatedmusician. I try to reply to every message I get, kind of immediately.

 

IG: Great. Thanks very much for being our guest. It was really a lot of fun and I took away a lot from it. Thanks for being a part of it. 

 

LM: Yeah, thank you. Have a great day. Goodbye.