Music Performance Anxiety (MPA)
Are your performances getting harder and harder to hold together?
Do you ‘check out’ when you’re showcasing your skills in front of a crowd? Feel like your mind is going a hundred miles an hour?
Have to run to the loo several times and be sick before the show even starts? Do you shake so much you can’t play those passages cleanly?
Struggling with the expectations to perform perfectly? Do you feel like nothing you do to prepare is ever enough?
Do small musical mistakes feel like huge failures? Or maybe you have stopped performing all together because the last experience was so horrendous?
Psychotherapy aimed at reducing Music Performance Anxiety has been a clinically tested means of treatment to ease your symptoms on stage.
Together we’ll work on:
Identifying
Together we’ll identify the key stressors and the negative stories impacting your time on stage. We will use a tried and tested clinical music performance anxiety inventory to help us build a clear picture of what happens when you are on the stage at every level of experience. We’ll hone in on each area to address the key areas of where you MPA occurs to understand what’s going on for you in depth. We will also look at how anxiety appears in other parts of your life as well as explore what else is happening in your day-to-day routines (nothing happens in isolation).
Insight
Our work together will make links between what’s been happening on stage and connect it to other key experiences in your life so that you aren’t left guessing when and where MPA will hit. We will explore how MPA might be connected to other deeper patterns in your early formulative years so you can understand where it might have gained roots in the first place.
Improving
We will look at how anxiety affects your nervous system, so you can understand what is happening on a physiological level (hello, meet you your Polyvagal system!). You will learn to better understand your body, its reactions and develop and sustain new ways to effectively manage your stress on stage. We will look at what tools you already have in your toolbox for self-regulation, add or finetune the skills you have to ensure you can respond to stressors more adaptively.
Integration
We will spend time building a clear picture of how you desire to be on stage giving your music to others. We will work together to manifest this new reality in your future performance. Clients that have worked with me report that psychotherapy for MPA is healing, eye-opening and has a profoundly empowering effect on their time on stage as a result of this therapeutic work.