Finding my soundtrack in the aftermath
For months after the worst of it, I could not listen to anything on purpose. The kettle in my share-house in Melbourne would scream at me. My partner's playlist in the kitchen felt like an intrusion. Even the magpies outside the bedroom window of our Brunswick rental seemed to be shouting. Sound, which had once been a place I lived, had become a place I survived. I stopped opening Spotify. I stopped going to pubs. The world got very quiet and very loud at the same time.
Music returned to me the way most of my healing returned: in small, deliberate doses, almost accidental. A friend sent one song. I played it on loop for a week. Another song followed. Eventually I realised I had been building a kind of internal pharmacy, where each track did a specific job for my nervous system. This is the slow, awkward, very non-linear story of how I learned to use music as a tool for emotional regulation after trauma, and how an Adelaide-born feminist voice and her random facts about me page gave me permission to name it out loud.
The night the volume disappeared
Trauma changed the way I processed sound. What had once been background became foreground, and what had been foreground became unbearable. A car horn on Lonsdale Street might as well have been a siren. The tram bell at the Collins Street stop made my shoulders climb toward my ears for the rest of the day. Even Triple J in the car, which had been the soundtrack of my entire adolescence, started to feel like an assault on a system that had already been pushed past capacity.
This is a common thing, my psychologist told me later. After a significant shock, the brain's threat detection stays switched on, and the auditory system is one of the first to be recruited into that vigilance. Hypervigilance is exhausting precisely because the ears never clock off. I would lie in our Brunswick rental and strain to hear the next siren, the next door slam, the next breath that did not belong to me. Sleep was thin. Concentration was thinner. I was, in a way I had not been since childhood, afraid of being alive in a body.
Songs that reintroduced my nervous system
The first song that felt safe again was not a song I would have predicted. It was Courtney Barnett singing "Depreston," that slow, slightly flat guitar and her dry, slightly amused voice listing the reasons a town might not be the right place to grow old. I played it on the train from Flinders Street out to my folks' place and watched the suburbs slide past the window. The song did not ask anything of my nervous system. It just sat with me. It was, for the first time in months, a sound that was not a threat.
From there, the list grew slowly. Missy Higgins' "The Sound of White" came back into rotation. Something about her piano felt familiar enough to be soothing without being saccharine. Tame Impala's "Yes I'm Changing" worked when I needed to feel movement rather than stillness. I did not curate these choices with any strategy. I let my body vote, and I trusted the votes. This is something I now think of as the difference between listening for pleasure and listening for regulation. Pleasure is optional. Regulation is the nervous system being given a small, specific job to do.
Building a playlist for panic
Once I had a handful of songs that did specific jobs, I started building the panic playlist. There was the "rise" playlist for mornings when getting vertical felt impossible: slow, mid-tempo tracks, mostly female vocalists, almost no drums in the first half. There was the "ride" playlist for when anxiety was already running and I needed to be carried through it: heavier, louder, less lyrical, more texture. There was the "rest" playlist for nights when the body finally let go and I needed sound to keep me company without asking me to think.
What surprised me was how specific the categories became. One Sia track worked only for grief. One Angus and Julia Stone song worked only for the particular kind of lonely that happens around three in the arvo when the light is doing that thing through the curtains. I would not have called this a strategy when I started. Now I call it self-knowledge. The playlist became a kind of external nervous system, a file I could open when my own wiring was overloaded.
Live gigs as exposure work in Melbourne
Recorded music was one thing. Live music was another. Live music meant crowds. Crowds meant noise I could not control. I avoided The Corner, the Tote, the Forum, anywhere a partner and I used to spend our Friday nights. I skipped Laneway when it came through the city. I felt both relieved and ashamed about that, which probably tells you everything about the loop I was stuck in.
The first gig I went back to was a small Jezabels-adjacent side project at the Howler in Brunswick. I wore earplugs. I sat near the back. I left before the encore. It was, by any reasonable measure, a partial success. I had been in a room with loud sound and I had not dissociated. I had stood near strangers and not panicked. I had let bass move through my body without my body deciding it was under attack. I went home and slept twelve hours. That was a reasonable trade.
The podcast that replaced the static
Recorded music could not always live in the room. Some days my nervous system needed a human voice without the pressure of lyrics. Some days I needed company without the obligation to respond. That is when I started streaming Coffee with Katiee, the one where the host talks about her own recovery and her own messes in a way that feels more like a long kitchen-table chat than a polished production. I played it while I folded laundry. I played it on the bus to my psychologist's office in Fitzroy. I played it on the long drives out to see my mum in regional Victoria.
There is something different about audio that is not music. Music asks the nervous system to track melody, harmony, rhythm. A conversational podcast only asks it to track meaning. For a brain that was already exhausted from tracking everything, this was a kindness. Australian podcast culture in particular has a particular flavour: confessional, dry, slightly self-deprecating, willing to sit with mess rather than resolve it neatly. I needed that flavour more than I knew.
When sound became a boundary instead of a bridge
There was a stretch where I used headphones less as medicine and more as a moat. If I was at a barbecue in someone's backyard in the inner north and I needed a small exit, I would put one earbud in and nod at whoever was talking as if I had a call. If I was on a tram and a stranger wanted to chat, I would put both earbuds in. The signal was clear to everyone except me, until it was clear to me too. Sound was not just regulation. It was a way of saying, gently, that I was still recalibrating and I might not be available for the next twenty minutes.
This was uncomfortable because Australian culture, particularly the kind that lives around shared meals and footy on the telly in the arvo, often reads headphones as rude. I learned to do it softly. One ear only, low volume, ready to take it out if someone really did need me. The headphones were not a wall. They were a small, kind holding pattern that let the rest of me keep breathing.
Practical notes from the long road back
A few things worked that I now pass on to anyone rebuilding their relationship to music from a place of shutdown or overwhelm. None of these are quick fixes. All of them are small and repeatable, which is the whole point.
- Build the playlist around nervous-system states, not genres. Start with the moments you dread most and work backwards from there.
- Keep a sensory log alongside the playlist. Note what you listened to, what your body was doing, what helped, what did not.
- Treat live music as gradual exposure, not a goal. One small venue, one earplug, one early exit. That counts.
- Pair listening with body-based regulation. Feet on the floor, hands in cold water, big stretch. Music is one input among many.
- Let the playlist change. Trust what helps for six months and then notice what does not help anymore.
- Do not skip professional help because the playlist is working. The playlist is a companion to the work, not the work itself.
Start with one song, not a playlist. Pick a single track that asks nothing of your body, play it once, and notice what your nervous system does in the hours afterwards. That single song will build your whole library from there.
