Christin Perry-Michalik has a BS in psychology, an MA in professional counseling, and is a Licensed Professional Counselor. For the past fifteen years, she has specialized in working with children. While she also sees adult clients, her focus is on kids ages four and up who are struggling to recover from emotional trauma. Her main tool-of-the-trade is Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or TFCBT. She has also been a member of the Lost Voices Board of Directors for a little over a year.
What first drew you to Lost Voices?
It’s exactly what I’m passionate about. First off, I love music. As a kid I loved singing, I was involved in a band and a youth orchestra. Then my professional passion has been working with kids who have experienced trauma, and the importance of them having a voice, being able to tell their story. It’s critical to their recovery to get the sense of validation, that sense of feeling that they are important. Lost Voices combines those two things that I really love. It was the perfect fit for me to become involved in whatever capacity I could.
You’ve watched the Lost Voices team in action. What are your thoughts about that?
When I first came to see you working with the kids, I didn’t know what that would look like exactly. What I found was that it is very similar to how kids will write their trauma narratives when they’re working with me in therapy.
Sometimes the parent, or the legal system, or whoever will focus on, “Let’s find out exactly how it happened.” They need to get the facts right and in the context of healing, that’s not really the point. The trauma narrative is about them speaking their truth. They are free to put their thoughts and emotions to their experience.
That’s exactly what I saw you guys doing, helping them find their words, their truth. It’s a process of being able to share their narrative with a trusted person. Then you wrap their personal truth in music and help them get it out into the world.
What healing is really about for these kids is being able to process the pain, being able to feel the feelings, being able to share that with somebody, then being able to get that out into the world. Whatever the actual facts are, their story is their truth.
You mentioned the importance of sharing their story with a trusted person. How do you think the Lost Voices teams are able to build a level of trust that makes this possible?
The kids you are working with have been through the system in so many ways. They’ve been in foster care, in Child Protective Services, and many other circumstances where so many adults are interacting with them and they don’t have a lot of control. Again, it’s mostly been about the adults trying to get all the facts straight, and the choices the adults are making, and the kids don’t have a lot of ownership over their lives in all that.
You guys are not the “System.” You’re just people coming in caring about kids, and you just want to hear their story. Kids want that so badly, they just want someone who will listen to them. In a world where kids don’t have a lot of ownership, and they don’t have a lot of control – especially the kids that we work with, who have all this trauma – it is so important that somebody listens to them, that somebody sees them and hears them.
How do you feel the Lost Voices process aids healing in ways that some other things might not?
In a song they can get at the feeing or the root truth of what their experience is, instead of getting it all jumbled with the details and the facts, which don’t really matter as much. There’s acknowledgment of their truth and their story, and that’s what they need to have heard. That’s where the healing comes from. It’s not about fixing all the things, or making everything in the world better, because they know better than that. That’s actually what happens in therapy, too. It’s people being heard and acknowledged for what their truth is.
Why do you believe the kids watching the final concert are so profoundly affected?
I think it’s a matter of shared experience. When they hear someone else, a peer, sharing their truth the way the Lost Voices kids do, they can see a commonality with their own story, and feel a validation of their own story with that. I think there’s also healing in knowing you can be there for somebody else. It’s feeling that you have a purpose in supporting or just listening to someone. Healing happens through connection. If you put your story out there and there’s nobody there to hear it, you don’t get the same sense of validation and connection. This is why that final concert, the way you guys set it up, is so important to the whole process.
How does the Lost Voices process work to assist the therapists who are working with the kids?
You have the kids telling their stories as they would in therapy sessions, but in therapy it’s contained in the context of meeting with the therapist.
A lot of times these kids have been brought to me by court mandate or some other factor out of their control. Because I’m in the role of therapist, they come in thinking, “You’re part of the system, and you don’t really care. You’re just paid to do this, so I don’t want to tell you.” I have to work hard to get past that. I need them to see me as a human who just cares about them and wants to hear their story. That’s when healing actually happens.
The Lost Voices teams don’t have that role as the set-up, so you’re able to get right to the human. You guys don’t come in as part of the system, so you are able to get right to the connection part. I think that creates the trust, too. They’re used to transactional relationships, especially when there’s been abuse or trafficking. Their habit of thinking is, “In order to keep myself safe, I have to do what this person wants me to do.”
You guys don’t come in with any of that. They don’t have to do anything for you. There’s no ulterior motive, there’s nothing in it for you.
Can you summarize why you think Lost Voices gets results that are so powerful?
The Lost Voices process is unique and needed. It’s really not the same as anything else. You basically create a nonjudgmental trauma intervention, take the core healing power of the trauma narrative, and combine it with the familiar idea of expressing pain through music. Putting the whole thing “on stage” completes the process.
It’s very common to have music be about heartbreak and suffering, and to have the song be the artist’s way to put that out into the world. We’re just naturally drawn to the rhythm and the experience of someone putting feeling into words. So I think what usually happens is that singer-songwriters exist in their bubble and write about their experiences.
Therapists, on the other hand, stay in their own bubble and work with people, but they can’t necessarily put the art to it. Even in cases where they are doing art therapy, the art is rarely so deeply entwined with the trauma narrative. With Lost Voices, we make this connection as our basic mission. We bring the bubbles together, and that is unique.
