By Emily Braunewell, EdM, LMHC, CMPC
Welcome to the BSPP Blog! In this series, we’re taking you behind the scenes for a glimpse into the work we do. All identifying information has been modified or composited to preserve our clients’ confidentiality.
In this second installment, we are focusing on Sam, a flute player seeking integrated Clinical and Performance Psychology services.
When Sam was 17, her teacher told her she should seriously consider playing flute in college.
When she was 20, she sat in the practice room of her university’s music department and wondered if he was wrong.
Professor Clarke, Sam’s teacher, loomed over, gazing down with none of the warmth and encouragement that had guided Sam there. Sam held the flute to her lips, trying to keep her attention on the music in front of her, but she couldn’t stop her brain from noticing Clarke out of the corner of her eye. It took only until the second page of the piece for her to miss a note.
Sam winced, both from the jarring sound of the wrong note, and the anticipation of her teacher’s reaction to her mistake. She began frantically trying to continue on with the piece.
“Stop.”
Sam jumped. At some point Clarke had moved into her full line of sight and had slammed a hand down on Sam’s music stand.
“Dana,” Clarke said. “What was Sam doing wrong?”
To Sam’s left, her classmate, Dana, had been looking on with disinterest.
“She’s too stiff,” Dana shrugged.
Clarke nodded. “Yes. You’re too stiff, Samantha. Still.”
They were right, if only partially. Sam’s shoulders were practically up to her ears, and her knuckles ached from her desperate attempts to keep pace with the music. Sam was grateful that Clarke hadn’t asked her directly; she didn’t know how to explain to Clarke that her presence itself was just as, if not more, disruptive.
Clarke tapped the page in front of Sam. “Start from the top. Hands loose.”
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Sam sat in front of the same page a week later with a painful knot in her chest.
Loose… loose… loose. She practically begged her hands to relax, but they ignored her once again, even as her flute rested in her lap. Dana was running through her own piece, but Sam barely heard it.
“Better,” Clarke said when Dana finished. “We’ll need to keep working on the reprise, but that will just be to clean up the details. We’ll end there today. Samantha?”
Sam jerked up her head. She had been looking down at her lap, fingering the keys on her flute.
Dana was quietly packing up her things. Clarke was standing directly in front of Sam in her standard looming position.
“Did you notice anything about Dana’s wrists during that run?”
Sam hadn’t, but she had a feeling she knew what Clarke was getting at.
“They were loose?”
“Exactly,” Clarke said. “Dana, show her.”
Sam’s cheeks went hot with embarrassment as Dana repositioned her flute to her lips, and she nodded robotically as Clarke highlighted Dana’s firm but relaxed wrist shape. Sam even gave up her own hand for Clarke to demonstrate the comparison, continuously emphasizing exactly what Sam kept doing wrong.
“Do you have anything immediately after this?” Clarke asked Sam.
Sam shook her head. She suddenly regretted not scheduling her composition class for the hour after their lesson.
“Good. You and I will stay here and work on scales.”
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“Some musicians just aren’t able to move beyond a certain point, Samantha. They just don’t have the drive.”
Sam’s flute was leaden in her hands. Clarke wasn’t angry, exactly. She was rarely truly angry, mostly just stoic and cold, but Sam could see Clarke’s jaw twitch while she considered her next words.
Sam heard Dana sigh, as if she were personally inconvenienced by Sam repeating the same mistake again.
“You should consider that,” Clarke said. “Unless you are content watching Dana progress each week while we practice scales.”
Sam felt the dreaded pressure of tears behind her eyes and willed every ounce of energy into fighting them back. Truth be told, she hadn’t cared about Dana’s progress when they started. She had genuinely enjoyed watching Dana play, had admired how agile and light her technique was, and she certainly hadn’t been thinking about it compared to her own skill.
In fact, Sam had always hated comparisons like that. It had left her feeling isolated from her classmates at school, pitted her against her brothers and their careers, and discouraged her away from participation in sports beyond two seasons of T-ball.
She had instead wanted to see Dana as someone to learn from. Maybe even a collaborator. Meanwhile, Dana seemed perfectly content to keep their relationship as neutral and insignificant as possible.
It wasn’t until Clarke kept pointing out how much better Dana was at just about everything – her technique, her ear, her breathwork, and of course, her hand positioning – that Sam began to really notice it. To actually think of herself as worse.
Clarke’s words rattled in Sam’s brain as she walked toward her apartment later that afternoon and remained while she lay in bed that evening. They continued to follow her onto the graduation stage and beyond, until even the cool, familiar touch of her flute began to feel like acid, and she stopped bothering to pick it up at all.
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Sam didn’t know why she chose to bring it all up to her therapist. She’d spent the last 12 years actively working to leave it behind, choosing instead to focus on composition when she graduated. Her academic advisor had suggested it, given her consistent success in comp classes. She’d tried not to interpret it as a consolation prize, after she’d clearly lost her chance at pursuing flute.
Just once, about 5 years ago, she’d tried picking up her flute again. She’d been working on a new orchestral piece, and upon hearing the flute in her headphones while she searched for inspiration, she was struck by a powerful urge to reconnect with it. She had spent so many years of her life with this instrument, and she couldn’t help but feel sad at the idea of leaving it behind forever.
She lasted 5 days before her flute went back in its case.
Sam had been meeting with this therapist for a few weeks now, and they’d talked about her introduction to music, her anxiety about breaking into the industry, her recent writing blocks, and just about every other aspect of Sam’s performance. But she had taken care to avoid spending more than a sentence or two on flute.
Maybe she was tired of shoving away the memories and the feeling of failure that always came with them. Or maybe she’d just seen the flute in its case the other week, displaced with the rest of her things after the move, and staring up at her from the kitchen table.
Either way, it had come up, and part of her knew that if she didn’t get into it now, she might not find the courage to do so again.
“So, you want to pick up the flute again,” Her therapist said. She was leaning forward in her armchair, curious about Sam’s unexpected declaration. “Can I ask what made you stop playing?”
Sam wasn’t sure where to begin. She didn’t quite understand it herself, let alone know how to express it to someone else.
So, she just started at the beginning.
Many minutes later, Sam was lost in the story, caught in a wave of emotions and memories that had been tucked away in a closet for over a decade. It wasn’t until she finished that she realized she had tears in her eyes. On instinct, she tried to push them back, feeling silly for crying about something that happened so long ago.
Throughout the story the therapist sat patiently, occasionally nodding in encouragement when Sam seemed to be losing her nerve. Now, Sam felt the urge to fidget in the sudden quiet, while the therapist took a moment to gather her thoughts.
“It sounds like your teacher was pretty hard on you,” the therapist said.
Sam shrugged. “Yeah, I mean she was strict. And she definitely had high expectations for us.”
Sam didn’t know why she felt the urge to qualify the therapist’s comment. Professor Clarke was hard on her, but she had also told Sam many times that the music industry would be even harder, and that if Sam wanted to succeed, she should get used to that kind of criticism.
“Was it helpful for you?”
“Was what helpful?”
The therapist smiled. “That kind of teaching style. Did you find it helpful?”
Sam sighed. Even now, thinking back, her heartrate sped up at the thought of Clarke’s disapproving stare. “I don’t think so, no. And if I’m being honest, I always hated how much she seemed to bother me.”
The therapist cocked her head. “How did you expect yourself to respond?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I know I didn’t have to like it, per say, but I feel like I should have been able to just take the feedback and let it go. Dana never seemed to struggle with that like I did.”
While Dana hadn’t gotten nearly as much of Clarke’s criticism, when she did, she took it without flinching. It was another thing that Clarke always pointed out to Sam.
“What was your relationship with Dana like?”
Sam was a little startled by the question. “Um, we didn’t really have one. We were just lesson partners. She didn’t really show any interest in being more than that.”
“I ask because I’ve noticed Dana come up a few times so far,” The therapist said. “When you’re talking about things you ‘should’ have been able to do, and so I was curious about how you two interacted.”
Sam swallowed. Her body suddenly felt very heavy. “Oh, yeah. I mean, Dana was significantly better than me. Which, isn’t a bad thing of course, but when it’s just two of you in a class and your teacher keeps bringing it up, I guess Dana kind of became the standard.”
“So, because Dana could do something, you eventually expected yourself to do the same?”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, let’s try and put aside the ‘should’ for just a moment,” The therapist said. “I’d first like to know more about what effect Professor Clarke’s comments did have on you.”
Memories of Clarke flooded to the surface of Sam’s mind. She could almost hear Clarke’s sharp, icy criticism, as if she were once again in her university practice room, gripping her flute as tightly as she could.
“Hold on a moment.” The therapist’s voice broke through Clarke’s memory, jolting Sam back to the present. “What just happened there, with your shoulders?”
Sam was confused at first, until she realized that her shoulders were practically at her ears. “Oh,” Sam said distantly. “Yeah, they are really tight.”
At the same time, she noticed her jaw was tense enough that her teeth were practically grinding to dust, and she had begun wringing her hands together in her lap.
“You had mentioned something about tension when you were talking about Professor Clarke,” the therapist said. “Was that something that would come up often?”
Sam laughed, though she didn’t exactly find it funny. “Oh God, constantly. She was always commenting on how tight my wrists were, my fingers, my shoulders, everything. Which was fair, I guess, because to play flute well, especially if you’re playing pieces that are faster, you have to stay loose.”
“It sounds like that was hard for you to do though,” the therapist said. “To stay loose.”
Sam nodded. “That’s why I could never get past a certain speed on scales. Even when I tried to pick it up again a few years ago, I got stuck at basically the same place. And that was when Clarke started telling me that I probably wasn’t going anywhere with flute.”
“That sounds like a really hard thing to hear,” The therapist said gently.
“It was.”
Sam’s eyes were on her lap, but she could tell her therapist was watching her closely.
“You know what’s interesting?” The therapist said. “Even just thinking about your professor, a person you haven’t seen in over 10 years, your whole body tightened up.”
Sam looked up.
“If your body reacted that strongly just remembering her, I wonder how it was reacting when she was actually in the room?”
Sam considered this. She’d always assumed the immovable tension came down to her not being good enough. After all, Dana didn’t have any issue relaxing.
She said as much to the therapist. The therapist nodded.
“I have some thoughts about where we can go from here.”
READ PART II OF SAM’S STORY HERE
Be sure to check back regularly for more installments of our “Meet…” series, where we will take you behind the scenes to meet some of our clients and the work we have done with them.
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