Using Music to Connect in Trauma-Informed Mentorship

For mentors supporting children who have experienced developmental trauma, including foster and adopted children, music can serve as a gentle yet powerful bridge toward safety and emotional growth. 

Why Music Matters

How often do you come across a child who struggles to articulate their emotions verbally, but would happily spend the whole session talking about their favourite music? Here’s why music can support trauma-informed mentorship: 

• Music is universal 

Music is a language across age, culture, and background. It naturally supports essential qualities in trauma-informed mentorship, including consistency, empathy, and reflectiveness. 

• Music mirrors life 

Like the natural flow of life, a piece of music has a beginning, pauses, moments of tension, and moments of resolution. For children in foster care and adoptive families, this ebb and flow can provide a safe way to reflect on their own life stories.

• Music embodies emotion

Music gives voice to feelings that are difficult to verbalise. It reflects the intensity, color, and shape of emotions in ways words cannot. By acknowledging that emotions can be expressed musically, mentors can open the door for children to explore feelings in a fun but safe way. 

Five Ways to Build Bridges with Children Through Music 

 1. Start with their song

Invite the child to share a favourite song or artist in an early session. Listen together and be curious about their musical choices. You might ask:

• What’s your favourite part of this song? 
• How does your body feel when you listen? 
• When did you first hear it? 

This fosters identity validation and can start a gentle conversation about emotional awareness. If you feel comfortable, you may also share a piece of music that you enjoy. With older children, you can invite them to ‘interview’ you on your chosen piece of music with the suggested questions, so you can model healthy verbal reflections. After all, music occupies a unique space where it is personal enough to build connections, yet not so personal that it feels intrusive. 

 2. Create a feelings playlist  

Invite the child to choose songs that elicit specific positive moods for them, such as a playlist for calmness and one for hopefulness. Listening back together helps them notice how music connects with feelings. To model healthy self-regulation, you can add a couple of your own safe examples with phrases like ‘this one helps me when I feel anxious. What do you think about it?’ Over time, the playlist becomes a resource they can return to outside sessions, a musical ‘toolbox’ for managing emotions.

 3. Drum it out together 

Drumming is a simple, tactile way to release energy and settle their bodies. Research shows that rhythm supports self-regulation by engaging our natural sense of timing, which helps calm the nervous system (Bensimon, Amir & Wolf, 2008). Shared drumming can be a playful way for children and their mentors to connect. Try: 

• Exploring body sounds, clapping, stomping, think ‘We will rock you’
• Creating call-and-response patterns
• Matching each other’s rhythms
• Take turn playing a specific emotion on the drum for the other person to guess 

 4. Turn feelings into music 

Children often experience emotions in their bodies first: a heart racing with excitement, a heavy chest with sadness, a flushed face with anger. You can help them articulate these sensations into music by asking: 

• If this feeling were a piece of music, what would it sound like?
• Would it be fast or slow?
• High, low, or constantly changing? 
• Layered like a band, or a single instrument? 

Inviting children to describe their sensations through musical qualities gives them a way to recognise and articulate their feelings in a contained and creative way. 

5. Hum to regulate  

Ever notice yourself humming your favourite song out of the blue? When we hum, we create vibrations throughout the body that stimulate the vagus nerve. Research shows that activating our vagus nerve can slow our heart rate, deepen our breathing, reduce blood pressure, and facilitate a sense of relaxation (Porges 2011). 

For children who have experienced developmental trauma and struggle to remember lengthy grounding techniques, humming is a simple tool to regulate themselves. It can be used by trusted adults to co-regulate with their child. Once the child is more settled, you can expand this into a fun exercise using prompts such as: 

• What’s the highest note you can hum? 
• What’s the lowest note you can hum? 
• What does a happy bird sound like?
  
  

Making it Trauma-Informed

• Always follow the child’s lead. If they are not interested, that is fine.
  
• Choose predictable, clean music. Sudden changes in music or specific lyrics may feel unsettling.
  
• Honour each child’s unique response. What soothes one may settle another; their meaning matters most.
  
  

Bringing it Together 

Like an accordion, relationships in mentorship expand and contract, sometimes offering closeness for support, sometimes stepping back to give space. Music mirrors this rhythm. It creates moments for expression and reflection while mentors hold space within the structure of the programme. By weaving a little music into your sessions, you create more ways for a young person to feel seen, held, and emotionally anchored.

Download a free guide of integrating creativity in your work here.

Crysal Luk-Worrall is a HCPC-registered music therapist and EMDR practitioner based in London, UK. She specialises in working with the adoption and fostering community through her private practice Clap & Toot, and works with bereaved families at Shooting Star Children’s Hospices. Her clinical passion lies in collaborating closely with families and integrating creative approaches within trauma-informed care

References

Bensimon, M., Amir, D., & Wolf, Y. (2008). Drumming through trauma: Music therapy with post-traumatic soldiers. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 35(1), 34–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2007.09.002

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. Norton. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429499885