(This may sound like I’m plugging Henny’s book — I’m just excited about getting some answers as to why rote task-shifting can be hard for me at times. That said, if you want to support her work, by all means, do so.)

One of the things I’m working on in my creative process is how playing music (as a stim) can get intertwined with playing music (as a creative mode of production, as well as a way of making a living).

This isn’t always easy to unpack! There’s a range of different things feeding into this — alexithymia, sensory regulation, visual and auditory thinking, as well as stimming and music-making.

Further, I’m both a pianist and a composer. Both of those creative processes are very closely tied to all of the above, as well as requiring a fair amount of fluid context-shifting, from “right-brained thinking” to “left-brained thinking” and back again, or put another way: shifting from auditory processing (the internal “image” of the music) to visual processing (the score) to textual processing (letter names for the notes). I can do all of those things, but there’s times where the shift isn’t fast enough to fit within an active production schedule.

There’s tools and methodologies to work with this, as it turns out. Which is a huge relief! The usual focus is either on standard music skills-building ones (which isn’t enough, becase it doesn’t account for our neurologies), or interventions (which can be harmful).

That’s why Henny doesn’t take students who are enrolled in ABA programs anymore. Not only is it traumatizing them (and can result in PTSD), it overrides their ability to make independent decisions, as well as giving no means to cognitively process sight-reading and performance.

In other words, ABA is about “cure“, as well as denying agency, in a very direct way, with frequently disasterous consequences.

What Henny is teaching are tools: this is how you connect music in your head to notes on a page, to playing those notes. For myself, I already have a musical process, but there are areas where I’m rusty, and I have challenges in relation to very small task-based shifts in context. From the looks of things, I don’t need admistered tools, I need the tools themselves. Which I got from her book, and as I move forward, am working through and figuring out on my own.

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