Ep #343: Music Therapy for Grief: An Interview with Tim Ringgold

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 343: Music Therapy for Grief: An Interview with Tim Ringgold.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Krista St-Germain: Alright, friends, I have something good for you today. I have a board certified music therapist, which we have never talked about before because I don’t know anything about music therapy. So, let me tell you a little bit about Tim, and then I’m going to have him introduce himself. Tim has been facilitating grief retreats since 2007. And unlike most people who do grief work when they don’t really know anything about what grief is actually like, Tim really does. So his grief journey actually includes the loss of five of his best friends in 1995, his dad in 1997, and one of his daughters in 2010. So we have with us someone who understands grief, which makes me very happy.

Tim is also the author of a book called Sonic Recovery: Harness the Power of Music to Stay Sober. And he’s provided music therapy to thousands of teens and adults in residential treatment and is a sought after international speaker, having shared the stage with some of the top minds on the subject of music, the brain, and personal growth, including Tony Robbins. Tim was the first person to give a TEDx talk on music therapy in 2012 and is a former regional president of the American Music Therapy Association. Tim, welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast.

Tim Ringgold: Thanks for having me, Krista. I’m kind of giddy with excitement to spend this time with you.

Krista St-Germain: You know, whenever I go and I talk to other people on their podcasts, I think they always think it’s going to be this really heavy, hard conversation. And when I show up giddy, they think it’s weird. So I don’t think it’s weird at all that you show up giddy. I’m glad that’s the case.

Tim Ringgold: We will get along well.

Krista St-Germain: Okay, good. Good stuff. All right, so having just read your bio and the listeners now just having heard that you have experienced a lot of profound loss. So you get this. I would love to start the conversation with just how you even got into music therapy. Tell us a little bit about your journey kind of.

Tim Ringgold: For sure. I’ve been a musician my whole life. My first solo, I was four, like in kindergarten. Like a voice was my main instrument. I was privileged to sing for Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square by the time I was 16. And so music was always a central theme in my life. But it really wasn’t until music became a thread through one of the roughest experiences of my life, which was the murder of my five best friends in 1995. And, you know, you just can’t wrap your brain around what that even means. Like, what? How? All the things, right? Like it just was beyond. I come from a small town in Connecticut. Like these are just things that don’t happen.

I had to get up, bury a friend, and then I’d get hammered as possible to pass out from the pain, and then I would have to wake up and do the whole thing again the next day and the next day. There I went to five funerals in four days. And at each one of my friend’s funerals, I sang a song for them, which is a song I had written about them a couple of years earlier. And I used to sing it to them at the saloon on open mic night. Yes, it was that small of a town, we had a saloon. And it would be like a tear in your beer kind of moment, and it was like my way of saying goodbye. My community like embraced it, but it tore me up to sing that song.

The night of the last funeral, one of my last remaining friends was like, “Do you want to go see some live music?” And I was like, “Yes, please.” So we went to a club, went to go see a musician play, and for the first two hours since I had gotten the news, I found peace. And candidly, no amount of drugs, alcohol, porn, cable, food, video games numbed that pain that week. And I’m not ashamed to say I tried everything I could to try to numb that pain. Nothing worked. But the music did. The music did.

And in that moment, I realized what everybody in my community had been saying about when I shared music with them because this time I was on the receiving end. And it was like something clicked right then and there. I was like, that’s it. This is my dharma. This is my purpose. And literally from that moment in time, I just dedicated the rest of my life to helping people reach for music in their toughest times.

Krista St-Germain: Amazing. And how old were you at that point?

Tim Ringgold: I was 22.

Krista St-Germain: 22. What had you imagined that your trajectory was going to look like before you had that moment?

Tim Ringgold: I was an aspiring rockstar. Okay. And to be honest, like I continued down that road, but I went down that road with a very specific context, which was I want my music to reach into kids who listen to like goth and industrial music and wear all black and have no one to talk to about their feelings. Like I want to reach into their bedrooms and let them know they’re not alone and I want them to know they could have a direct connection to God if they want. Like you can have a sense of spirituality. Like you don’t have to go to church to be spiritual. Like I was heaven bent on this mission I had through music to really connect people and to calm and soothe and uplift them through the strangest of means. And for like for your YouTube viewers, I’m going to show you a picture. This is what I looked like on stage.

Krista St-Germain: Oh my goodness.

Tim Ringgold: I’m the guy in the white and black. So for those of you who are listening, I’m showing a picture of me on stage where I wore liquid latex on my entire body on stage in this crazy heavy metal rock band. And so like it was the last thing that people thought like I was on this empowering, you know, journey of healing through that. But it was actually very specific. But I’ll be honest with you, that lifestyle almost killed me. It’s not a healthy lifestyle and I said yes to everything along the way, got distracted by all of the distractions in the world of rock and roll and by the time I was in my early thirties, I was like, you know, I’m going to be dead or in jail if I keep this up.

And to be honest, I found myself in a 12 step recovery meeting. And in that meeting, like I realized I wasn’t alone. And I realized there was a way out from all of this. And so I embraced the 12 steps and within a very short amount of time, I discovered the career called music therapy because I was engaged to be married and I didn’t want to live a life on the road as a musician. I wanted to live a life at home. And so I found there’s this career where you can get a degree in this, go to work in clinical settings, work the same hours as my wife, and be around for my kids and be around for my family.

And the moment I discovered the field, literally the day I discovered it on the computer, I filled out my FAFSA and my online application to that school. And I spent five years full-time in my thirties starting over, went back to school for five years including a six-month unpaid internship ninety miles away, and I just got after it and I never looked back.

Krista St-Germain: I can only imagine what that must have been like to see that a field like that exists and the resonance that must have had for you.

Tim Ringgold: I was so happy because I had been struggling. I was living two lives. I had like a Clark Kent kind of day life where I was in sales and in marketing because I had a voice that sounded normal even though I didn’t look it. And so I would like my Clark Kent job would, you know, and then I’d have this like alternate persona, Tim, who was this crazy rocker and I was trying to lead two lives and it was exhausting. And when I realized when I have to give credit to Arizona State University. It was their website and on their site, they had a page for the major music therapy. And it had two paragraphs, Krista. The first paragraph was like the type of work you do in the field. The second paragraph was like the kind of person that would become a music therapist. And the first paragraph read like my dream job and the second paragraph read like an autobiography. Like I could get a degree in just being myself. It was what I was already doing in music, but now there was a professional structure that I could actually plug into and it looked sustainable unlike the black hole of the music business.

Krista St-Germain: That’s amazing. So how would you explain music therapy to people who don’t really know what that is?

Tim Ringgold: Well, I explain it a lot because it’s a very small field. It’s a tiny field in allied health. There’s only about 8,000 of us board certified in the United States, maybe 4,000 members of our professional association. Now compare that to 900,000 members of the American Psychological Association and you get a sense of just how small and niche this field is. Very small, maybe 80 schools nationwide offer degrees in it. And you can get a Bachelor’s, a Master’s or a PhD in music therapy. And the way I like to describe it to people is it’s similar to physical therapy. So in physical therapy, you use exercise in very specific ways to heal or help. And you don’t need a physical therapist to exercise. But the targeted use of exercise in the right setting can help someone who’s got a diagnosis or a prognosis or an injury, right, or repair. So it’s the targeted use of exercise.

Music therapy is the targeted use of music to help or heal. And you don’t need a music therapist to enjoy music. Everybody prescribes themselves music every day. That’s what a playlist is. But the targeted use of music in certain settings can help someone with a diagnosis or with a challenge or with an injury in very similar ways. So music is the modality that treats the issue and the issue has nothing to do with music. Right? It’s a non-musical issue that they’re dealing with in their life. You know, we work with pre-term infants all the way through the lifespan to the elderly. And there’s just different ways we can point music at a problem to help support or, you know, transform that situation.

Krista St-Germain: Okay. So then when it comes to grief, first, what kinds of problems are you seeing? How do you label that? And then what are you pointing toward those problems? I imagine that’s probably a super deep rabbit hole, but you know, kind of simplify it for us so we know what that is.

Tim Ringgold: Yeah, no problem. For me, working with people who are going through grief, it falls under the mental health umbrella in terms of what they’re they’re having an internal experience of brokenness, of disconnection. I like to describe the death of a loved one as a social amputation. Because humans are social animals. Like being human is a shared experience. So when you literally lose a piece of yourself. And it’s like phantom limb pain. You lop off an arm, you know, you’re looking for that arm. Your brain’s looking for that arm. So for me, when you when you lose a loved one, you have this social amputation, you have this loss that was not consensual, that happened to you. And so there’s a disconnection that’s going on in that way.

And now, back up and let’s just all agree that within the culture, we also don’t educate people what’s normal when you grieve, and we don’t educate people on how to hold space for people who are grieving. Those two things alone make the pain of grief, like all the suffering on top of it because of those two things, so unnecessary, which is why people like you and me are out here crying out into the wilderness. Like, there’s a way, there’s a way, you know, you’re not alone. It’s just we get an F minus in our culture.

So we have this like really isolating experience. And so with music therapy, we can point music very specifically. Now, the book I wrote, the word sober in the title, Harness the Power of Music to Stay Sober, the word sober is an acronym.

Krista St-Germain: Oh.

Tim Ringgold: It points to the five benefits of how music can help you in a mental health context. So when you make music, tap, snap, clap, hum, rap or sing, when you make music, it actually helps you to stay present mentally because your body is present, like…

Krista St-Germain: Can I just say like if you – for the folks out there listening to this on Apple, just come on over to YouTube because there’s slides. There’s visuals. Come on over to YouTube, listen to it there. Okay, carry on.

Tim Ringgold: Yeah, so when we engage our body with music, our focus drops into the present moment because our body is always located in the present moment. And as you know, one of the big problems with grief is our mind wandering into the future about what’s going to happen if, what’s going to happen when, all the uncertainty, all the unknown, which produces anxiety, or the mind wandering into the past, right? All the shame, the regret, the resentment, the guilt, all the things about the past that are unchangeable.

And so when the brain mind wanders into the unknowable or the unchangeable, it can produce anxiety or produce depression, which exacerbate the experience of grief. So one of the things we want to do with people who are grieving is we want to get their mind where their body is. Now, making music instantly does that. Now, the best part about it is you’re not thinking about being mindful or being present moment oriented. You’re just engaging with music. You’re listening to physically, you’re having a musical experience, and as a result, you are in the present moment. And so you’re out, you’ve rescued yourself from your own head.

Krista St-Germain: Beautiful.

Tim Ringgold: Yeah. Now, we live in a culture of music listeners. So most of us aren’t used to consciously engaging with music. And there’s a lot of myths in our culture around music. Like, there’s a talent gene, or it’s hard or expensive or time consuming to be musical and some of us have it and some of us don’t. All, all illusions, all myths in our culture. All babies sing before they speak in all cultures.

Krista St-Germain: Never thought about that.

Tim Ringgold: Yeah, we are wired to be musical as a species. Evolutionarily, they believe that humans sang before spoken language was even invented. And it’s thought of developmentally and evolutionarily as what’s called a proto-language or a pre-language. So music really is this thing that we all start inside of music. We all start listening to our mom’s heartbeat in the womb. It’s the first sound we hear and we hear the world we enter before we see it. Our ears develop first and stop last. So we are very much a hearing person.

So all babies sing. All moms sing to their babies in all cultures and they all sing almost identical melodies. When ethnomusicologists take recordings of mom singing and they put them in a computer and they map them, they follow very similar lullaby-esque sounds, step, step, step, step, drop, step, step, step, step, drop. It’s as if we’re wired to be musical. Your body runs on rhythm, which is the basis of music. Your heart runs on rhythm, you breathe in rhythm, you sleep in rhythm, you blink, you chew, you walk, you talk, it’s all rhythmic, and you scratch an itch in perfect rhythm. So your body is full of rhythm, that takes care of that. So everybody sings and everybody’s rhythmic. We’ve covered everything there is to be musical right there.

And so one of my jobs is to kind of liberate people from the myths that they’ve inherited about themselves and music. A lot of us have been divorced from the ability to participate with music because some music teacher ironically told us we didn’t have what it took or something like that.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: Which is sad because everybody deserves the right to have the experience of being musical. It’s a lovely experience. In my work, it’s really about getting people to engage musically, not just me be the musician. It’s not that at all. No, I’m my job is to show them how successful they can be, how easily they can have a musical experience themselves. And when they’re doing that, that gives them a break from the worry or the rumination.

So music helps us to stay present. So that’s one of the one of the cornerstones. It also helps us to open up. Now, we can talk about our mood in order to change it. But we don’t need to talk about our feelings to feel something different and we don’t need to talk about our mood to change our mood. It’s one tool, but it’s not always the right tool because sometimes we don’t have the words to describe what we’re feeling, especially in grief. How do you describe to someone who hasn’t lost a loved one the social amputation concept? Like they don’t have a shape in their peg board in their head that like the words just they don’t match. So sometimes we just don’t have the words to describe what we’re feeling in our body. We don’t have the willingness to use them. Like, especially as a man in grief.

Like let me tell you on my grief retreats, zero to two men every retreat because we get socialized to internalize our feelings. It started on the playground in kindergarten. If we show our emotions, we are dead meat. We are toast on the playground if we show our emotions. We learned that really fast. As men, we are told to be strong. You’re going to have to be strong for everyone else. By the way, I don’t know what be strong actually looks like on the playing field. Like I love how people will say, you’re just going to have to be strong for someone else. And I’m like, I don’t even know what that means.

Krista St-Germain: Don’t emote, right? Yeah, don’t emote. Don’t have feelings. Be a robot essentially. That’s unrealistic, unhuman, deny what actually exists in your body. Which is which is normal and human. Just shut it down.

Tim Ringgold: It’s a great recipe. I love it. It’s working really well. So like to open up, right? Like, well, music allows us to open up without having to talk about our emotions because we’ve all had this experience where we’re either anxious or angry and a song comes on and before the song is even over, it’s calmed us down. Or we’ve been sad, lonely, feeling depressed and a song has lifted our spirits. And we didn’t call our therapist in the middle of the song to process.

Krista St-Germain: Pause. Hold on. We’re going to need to talk this one through. Thoughts and feelings.

Tim Ringgold: Yes. Yeah. No. No, you were good. Words are a good tool, but we live in a talk obsessed culture. And sometimes words are just the wrong tool because we don’t have the words. We don’t have the willingness to use them. Or you don’t have someone you can use them with. I mean, how many times has someone tried to use words to placate your pain and say some sort of platitude and it just comes out all wrong?

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: And for lots of reasons why that goes south, but mostly people think there’s something they have to say rather than there’s nothing to say, just listen. That would be the gift. So like words, we just bet on words too much during the grief journey, I think. So that’s not to say they don’t have their time and their place. It’s just that they’re not the panacea that our culture thinks they are. And if you’ve been through trauma, we’ve got thirty years of research that shows that cognitive behavioral therapy by itself is not an effective tool for treating trauma.

So we just know this now, but we still all hear things like my mom who’s a retired therapist, I love you mom. My mom will say things like, “Timmy, I think you should talk about it. I think if you just talk about it, you’ll feel better. You want to talk about it?” “No, I really don’t want to talk about it.” “I think you should talk about it.” “No, mom, I don’t want to talk.” “I think you should talk about it.” I know you think I should talk about it, mom. Thank you. You’re very clear about how of course, she was trained as a talk therapist. It’s like to her, she’s a hammer, all the world’s a nail. I get it. But as a music therapist, hey, Hans Christian Anderson said it best, when words fail, music speaks.

Krista St-Germain: Amazing. So, as you’re saying that, I am reminded of the many, many times I have been asked by a concerned mom whose child has lost their other parent, what to do when they aren’t talking about it. So it’s so great for them to hear from you as well and not just me.

Tim Ringgold: Yeah, thank you. And you know, everybody’s process is different, right? You know, grief is both universal and unique. Two people are grieving the same person a different way because they’re two different people. And they’re grieving a different way because there was two different relationships. So it’s a very, you know, it’s a conundrum that it’s both universal and unique. You know, your kids’ process may not be to talk about it. That doesn’t mean they’re not grieving or they’re not processing their grief. It just means they’re just not doing it the way you do. And talkers think everyone else should talk.

Krista St-Germain: Should talk. Yes.

Tim Ringgold: They’re the worst. They just project talking like megaphone onto everybody else. It’s funny because non-talkers don’t project non-talking on everybody else, but talkers think it’s the greatest thing ever. And it’s very funny because I recognize myself as a talker. I have to be like, yo, this isn’t for everybody. Like, recognize. So…

Krista St-Germain: Know thyself.

Tim Ringgold: Know thyself. That’s right. The next letter in the equation is B, which is be creative. Now, creativity, as a human, all humans are creative. Some humans use their creativity artistically, but all humans use their creativity to problem solve. Creativity is a coping skill first and foremost for human beings. Whenever you are presented a problem, the part of your brain that you engage to solve the problem is your creativity. In our culture, we map creativity and artisticness, we collapse the two.

Krista St-Germain: Yes.

Tim Ringgold: Now there’s a beautiful painting behind you and that was both artistic and creative. But the little plastic tip on my shoelaces, that was creative.

Krista St-Germain: Also creative.

Tim Ringgold: It wasn’t artistic.

Krista St-Germain: Yes, yes.

Tim Ringgold: Because it solved a problem. How to lace shoes at scale. Without an aglet, lacing a shoe becomes a problem and then people will throw, you know, like lick and twist or they’ll burn it off or they’ll put like scotch tape on it, getting creative to solve the problem. Now, the journey of grief presents all kinds of problems. I mean, all kinds of problems, none of which you asked for. And so there’s a part of your brain that you need to be able to rely on a daily basis. And that’s your creativity.

Now, you can strengthen creativity in humans. It’s not fixed like eye color or height. You can develop it. And one of the ways you can develop it is by learning something creative, particularly music instruments. Musical instrument instruction like is so good for the brain because it’s a problem to solve, how to play a C chord on a guitar. That was a terrible chord growing up. Oh my god, it was so hard. What that does, it strengthens the part of your brain that’s related to frustration tolerance.

Krista St-Germain: Okay.

Tim Ringgold: Frustration tolerance is the ability to stick with something even when you don’t want to be dealing with it. And if that doesn’t describe so much of the grief journey, stick with…

Krista St-Germain: No kidding.

Tim Ringgold: You have to deal with.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah, you didn’t ask for and don’t want to deal with, but here we are.

Tim Ringgold: Here we are. Right? Exactly. So like being able to develop frustration tolerance is really helpful during the grief journey. And so, dear listener, if you’ve ever played a musical instrument, get back into it. Don’t compare yourself to your past best. Just pick it up and start learning the old material again. It’s so good for your brain. If you’ve wondered about playing a musical instrument, you know, someday maybe. You know, like for example, Krista, have you ever wondered about playing a musical instrument?

Krista St-Germain: I have played many musical instruments, but yes. Yeah, in fact, I played the flute, the piccolo, the saxophone, and the bassoon. But I just picked up my flute not long ago out of nowhere. As I was doing it, I did not realize I was increasing my frustration tolerance. But it kind of makes me want to pick it up again. Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: That’s right. Getting your ambusher back.

Krista St-Germain: The ambusher was I was like, oh, hi muscles that we haven’t used in a while. Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: 100%. Yeah. So like for people who have always wondered about playing a musical instrument, like it’s never been easier. And there’s two reasons why. One, YouTube, every musical instrument, someone’s teaching for free on YouTube and the lessons are really high quality. The second thing, no joke, Facebook marketplace, because somebody wants to get rid of that same instrument.

Krista St-Germain: Oh, true.

Tim Ringgold: It’s crap taking up room in their house and they will take almost any offer if you promise to be on time.

Krista St-Germain: I’m so glad that you said that because I would have never thought about it. But yeah, that makes so much sense. And I’m surprised to hear that there’s quality free instruction on YouTube. So that’s also…

Tim Ringgold: Really good quality because most of the instructors that I’ve come across, it’s like a freemium model. Like they have courses, they have apps, they have lessons, they have programs, but they really want to show you how good they are. So they’ll post content for free and then it’s ad driven anyway. So if they get enough views, they’re making money off the ads. So it’s really, it’s important for them to put out really good quality content for multiple reasons. It’s amazing. Like anything that you need repaired around the house, you go to YouTube these days and hi, I’m Roger and I’m a plumber. And Roger will show you exactly how to fix that thing. And Roger’s getting seven million views and getting paid 5,000 a month. I’ve met Rogers who are seven figure plumbers on YouTube. Like I’m like, I missed my calling.

But like for real, like YouTube is this phenomenal resource. I’m using it to relearn my old classical guitar rep from college right now. I just like, you know, I should walk the walk. I should go back and learn some of my old stuff. So what did I do? I pulled it right up on YouTube. There are the lessons, there are the music going by. Like I went to college in the early 2000s, we weren’t there yet. The level of what you can learn on YouTube is unbelievable and Facebook marketplace is how you get into a beginner’s instrument for cheap. If they’re selling it on Facebook marketplace, they don’t care. They just can’t bear throwing it out. If it’s a really good quality instrument, they sell it elsewhere. So that’s why you go to Facebook marketplace because it’s the place where people go to unload stuff they don’t want in their house anymore.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah, and if you’re watching it on YouTube and you’re doing it at home, then any sort of judgment or worry that you might have about doing it in front of someone else gets remedied.

Tim Ringgold: 100%. And that’s a really good point because most people have this performance anxiety. Listen, you never need to perform for anybody to unlock all the benefits of music. You can learn and play a musical instrument in your house for your own good. I have a friend who plays piano. She lives five doors down. I’m begging her. Please play Nope. Nope, she plays for her. And it’s like, I respect that. I get it. I get it. So, yeah. So music helps us to be creative and strengthen that problem solving skill set that we need.

Krista St-Germain: Okay. So we’ve got just to review for other people who maybe aren’t seeing the visuals. So we’ve got the S is stay present, the O is open up, the B is be creative, moving along to the E.

Tim Ringgold: Yes. So the E is music helps us to escape stressors. What are stressors? Stressors are things that activate the stress response or what people know is the fight or flight response. Now, here’s the thing about the fight or flight response for those listening, you’re not meant to access that evolutionarily unless you’re hunting or being hunted. No joke. That is an emergency response system. The chemicals your body releases to get you out of danger also contribute to the four things that people die the most from. which are cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and diabetes. So you want to have a healthy respect for stress. Chronic stress, right? Acute stress, moment by moment every or hormetic stress where like I go to the gym to work out. That’s cool. Chronic stress literally is a killer.

Now, it does a couple of things to you during the grief journey because grief is a stressor on the nervous system because it is an existential threat. Remember, you lost one of your limbs. So that threatens your survival evolutionarily. If you lose part of the tribe, that’s danger for you. So grief is legitimately a physiological stressor on the on the nervous system. Now, how do you turn stress off? Well, the beauty is music making or music listening can turn off the stress response in your nervous system.

Krista St-Germain: Okay, so even just listening. So now it’s not only making, okay.

Tim Ringgold: Right. But two things, when you’re music listening, the music has to be the subject matter of your focus.

Krista St-Germain: Okay. Can’t be passive.

Tim Ringgold: Right. So a lot of times we’ll put music on and multitask to the music and the music helps us do something else better. Like I clean to music or I do some other project to music. I’m not paying attention to the music. If you want to use music for relaxation, you have to sit like you’re at a concert and be in the music engaging actively listening to the music itself.

Krista St-Germain: Okay.

Tim Ringgold: Second is people will ask me all the time, what kind of music should I listen to? And the research points to that the type of music that comforts you is the type of music to listen to.

Krista St-Germain: Beautiful. So…

Tim Ringgold: if gangster rap is your thing, like you go listen to gangster rap.

Krista St-Germain: Okay.

Tim Ringgold: If Celine Dion is your thing, you go listen to Celine Dion. If heavy metal is your thing, you go listen to heavy metal. Like you listen to the genre that comforts you. So the patient is the DJ and I like to joke that’s why God invented headphones.

Krista St-Germain: Yes. Yes. My late husband would be like, “Celine Dion, no.”

Tim Ringgold: I know.

Krista St-Germain: But some of his French music was a little too weird for me, so.

Tim Ringgold: There you go. Right? So, now one of the things you can do that I advocate for people to have on their phone is what I call your power playlist.

Krista St-Germain: Ooh, I like I like the name of it. It’s got alliteration, power playlist. Okay.

Tim Ringgold: a sucker for alliteration. Acronyms and alliterations all day. So a power playlist, three or more songs that fire you up, comfort you, lift you, basically center you. Mhmm. You know what songs will calm you down. You know what songs will lift you up or make you feel good, like bring you back to your center if you’re feeling too high or too low. And you’re just 15 seconds away from that relief when you remember to reach for your phone.

Krista St-Germain: 15 seconds?

Tim Ringgold: Yeah, I mean, that’s about how long it’ll take you to swipe through to your playlists and get it turned on.

Krista St-Germain: I see what you’re saying. Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: Right? Now, what the research shows is nine minutes of your favorite music will turn off the stress response. That’s what the research shows. My experience is different. My experience is that the number decreases as you continue to use the same music because you condition the relaxation response.

I witnessed this as a music therapist working in the hospital. So I’ll never forget this. Early on in my career, I was working in oncology. The work I was doing in the hospital was the work that my TED talk’s based on. And I had this one patient, she was a cancer patient, she was young, she was like 28, super anxious. She’s there with her mom. She’s inpatient at this point, so it’s not good. And I go in there and she’s dealing with anxiety. And so I lead her through a relaxation technique with my guitar and just kind of walking her through this technique. It takes about fifteen minutes for her to finally really calm down. Cool. The next time I went to see her, it only took us five.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah. Your body’s already anticipating it.

Tim Ringgold: Already anticipating it, but the third time I went to go see her, she fell asleep while I was putting my guitar on.

Krista St-Germain: Wow.

Tim Ringgold: No joke.

Krista St-Germain: Didn’t even no music was played.

Tim Ringgold: No music was played. “Oh, there’s Tim with the…” She’s out. Sawing logs. And I look at her mom and she looks at me and I just high fived her and I was like, “Well, my work’s done here.” So, yeah, I always recommend this for people is with playlists that you use for purposes. So like I have a workout, like a running playlist, like I have a cardio playlist, I have a weightlifting playlist, I have a relaxation playlist, I have an inspiration playlist. Only use music for that thing. Like there’s plenty of music out there that you can listen to whenever you want. But there are some songs that work just right for just one thing and restrict your use to just that scenario so that every time your brain hears that song, it knows exactly what you’re doing in that moment next. And it cues either the upregulation or the downregulation. The music cues that.

Krista St-Germain: Makes so much sense. Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: Now, the last thing we need to say about that is that when you’re stressed, your creativity part of your brain gets bypassed for reactivity so that you can get out of danger.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: You think faster, quite literally, you think faster when you’re stressed to get out of danger, but you think better when you’re relaxed because you have access to the concept of future and consequence. Which your amygdala and your stress response doesn’t care about.

Krista St-Germain: Don’t care about. Get out of danger right now. That’s right.

Tim Ringgold: Now, now, now, now, now. So if you want to be able to be at your best and make your best decisions, you first need to escape those stressors before you can be creative. So those two work hand in hand together. But the good news is it only takes a couple of minutes to be able to reset that. Then you can come back to the situation calm, cool, collected and creative.

And then last but not least, music helps us to reconnect. We are mammals. And as mammals, we’re pack animals. Like we are meant to connect to each other, to things outside of ourselves. Again, like I said, being human is a shared experience. So we need to feel connection. And gosh, is grief not a disconnecting experience? Like we feel alone, we feel isolated, we feel lonely. The word loneliness is one of the biggest words that if it was like a word cloud from my people who come on my grief retreat, the loneliness that they experience in their experience of grief, they just don’t know who to turn to, how to talk about it, people don’t know how to hold space for them or you know, companion with them at all. And so they just feel so lonely and I can totally relate.

Like when my dad died, I was in a band and we were like a band of brothers, really tight. Only one of my band members came to my dad’s funeral. Only one friend ever acknowledged verbally my dad even died. One friend said, I’m sorry about your dad. And he said it in a room of about 10 people and it was as if he was the spokesperson. Like he said it so everyone else wouldn’t have to. That was it.

Krista St-Germain: It is wild. The support we expect and how it compares to the support we receive, it can be just so wild.

Tim Ringgold: Yes. One of the one of the points I make on my retreat is you don’t get to pick your team.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: Your team picks themselves because of everybody’s incomplete experience with grief in our culture. We have no idea who has the capacity and the bandwidth and the compassion to show up for us in our moment. We would lose bets all over the place.

Krista St-Germain: Yes. And the people you never thought would show up for you come out of the woodwork sometimes.

Tim Ringgold: Absolutely. When my daughter Bella died, we live in Southern California, but we were in Minnesota at the University of Minnesota at their children’s hospital undergoing a bone marrow transplant as a part of a clinical trial to try to save her life. So we were halfway across the country and living in the Ronald McDonald house for six months. When Bella died, my sister who lived in Madrid, Spain at the time with two little boys on her own, on her own time and dime, she flew to Minnesota, packed the Ronald McDonald house, shipped it to California for me, and then flew back home to Madrid. Now, when I eventually got home, Krista, I found boxes in my entry way. I didn’t know how they got there. And it took me a second to recognize the Sharpie handwriting on the boxes as my sister’s. I forgot she had even come to Minnesota.

Krista St-Germain: Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: She was an angel in my life. Now, my sister and I, candidly, we’re not really tight. You know, we’re amicable and everything, but we’re just not really tight. But like in that moment of need, my sister, like, wow, I would have never guessed and I never would have asked because she has these two little boys. She’s in Spain. She’s taking care of, I didn’t want to be a bother. Oh my god, how many of us don’t want to be a burden?

Krista St-Germain: Don’t want to be a burden. Don’t want to be a burden. Right.

Tim Ringgold: Exactly. So we don’t ask for what we need. And yet she came through in a way that I will never forget and I will never stop telling that story. So the reconnect thing with music, what’s cool about music is that you can connect to a beat. You can connect to a bass groove. Like if you think about Michael Jackson and Thriller. What a groove. He hasn’t sung yet. He hasn’t said anything, right? Oh, we can connect with a great groove, a great beat, a great keyboard, piano, melody, sax, wind instrument. Like, and some lyrics are a lifeline because they tell our story. Right? Like, yes, Queen, thank you. That’s exactly what it’s like. Yes. Sometimes someone has said it better than we could have ever said it ourselves. And in those moments, we don’t feel alone.

Krista St-Germain: Yes. I really hadn’t thought about the connection component of listening to lyrics, but that, I don’t know why. That makes so much sense.

Tim Ringgold: That’s it. And when you put them all together, you get an acronym because who doesn’t love an acronym when you’re trying to remember stuff?

Krista St-Germain: Amazing. Okay. So, if someone wants to start, they’re like, yes, I’m interested in this. Where do we even start? Do you go to the playlist first? Do you just look through and pick what resonated with you? What do you do?

Tim Ringgold: Yeah, so I guess it depends on the situation, what you are dealing with. For example, if you’re struggling to stay present and you drive in your car, one of the easiest things to do is play some steering wheel drums and sing in your car with the music you’re playing, interact with the music you’re playing with. 10 seconds later, you’re out of your head, you’re back in the present moment. It is that fast. So it just depends on what you’re struggling with as to which one of these tools is the right tool at the right time. It’s more like it’s just it’s a buffet of options and you know, different ones are the right tool for the right situation.

Sometimes the stress is in the present moment, sometimes the stress is coming from the future or the past. So, you know, if the stress is in the present moment, we might want to take a step back, go listen to our power playlist for a few minutes and take our mind off of whatever the stressful thing is and fall into the music. Disappear into music for a while. Music can help us to leave the present moment. I mean, Calgon, take me away, you know, like that’s one of the cool things about music is it just takes us somewhere else. Sometimes we need the music to bring us back to the present moment. So it kind of depends on what you need in the moment as to – it’s like a Swiss army knife. There’s a bunch of tools on a Swiss army knife, right? And that’s what this acronym really allows you to do. It allows you to reach for music in several different ways, depending on what you need.

If you don’t know how to make a playlist, don’t worry about it. Know what’s your uplifting song. What’s the number one – know how to reach for it, know how know where it is. You know, so for a lot of people on my retreats, they’re 50, 60, 70 and they have varying levels of skill sets with their smartphone. So having a power playlist, that might be too tech heavy for them. And they’re like, oh, I know which CDs work. And I’m like, what’s a CD? No, I’m kidding. I’m kidding. And so I’m like, okay, have your CDs handy that you know are good for you.

Now, there is one thing I should say before finishing this because music listening is not all good. There’s a caveat to this as any good clinician should say side effects include. So what they find in when you’re using music for mood management, it really does only work about a third of the time because a third of the time it does nothing. your mood stays where it was. It was beautiful, but it didn’t move you. But a third of the time, it can actually make things worse. You can feel more wound up or more low. Music can actually drag you down further. And whenever I ask an audience, you know, how many people in the room have ever had music make you feel worse? Half the room raises their hand every time. So it is legit. That’s been…

Krista St-Germain: I mean, sad country songs have a reputation for being sad country songs for a reason.

Tim Ringgold: That’s right. And sometimes sad music lifts your spirit because you can wallow in that misery together. You’re like, yes, that’s what it’s like. But sometimes it can just make you feel like, you know what? There is no hope. And so here’s the thing. If you ever find that music’s moving you in the wrong direction, put on something different. Don’t just stop the music, put on a different piece of music until that music starts to center you again. Finish your music listening session with that because most likely that’ll be the song your brain keeps playing the rest of the day. And we’ve all had a song stuck in our head. So if you’re going to have a song stuck in your head, you want it to be a song that’s moving you back to your center.

But it is very common for people in grief to have music be overwhelming or too stimulating for them. It just it makes them feel too much. So no music might be the right thing for you in the moment if your nervous system is just getting too hammered by listening to music, listen to your body. So it’s important to recognize that. So again, just listen to your gut. If the music is feeling overwhelming in your body, then stop the music, put on something different until your body starts to calm down and then that’s the music to finish up with because it is important to understand that music can move the body in the wrong direction.

Krista St-Germain: I’m really glad you said that. I’ve experienced it before, but I wouldn’t have thought about it, you know, in terms of giving advice to people. So, yeah, thank you for saying that.

Tim Ringgold: For sure.

Krista St-Germain: So how do you work with people? What do you do? I know you have retreats.

Tim Ringgold: Yeah. So a couple of different ways that I work with people. There’s kind of like three phases that I work in. One is as in clinical music therapy, as a music therapist, I work in treatment centers helping people to come back onto their feet after struggling with addiction. And we do that in person, in groups. I also do it over Zoom, just like this, which is why I have this fun little thing here because this is kind of a way I can reach more people. And then on stage at conferences as a keynote speaker, I’m on stages all the time talking about this topic because people love music and this gives them a very legitimate validating background as to why they can reach for it more confidently.

But the work that lights me up the most is the retreats that I host in the Southwest here in Arizona and in Southern California. We have lots of retreats one every quarter. We do like a phase one, like part one and then a part two. And it’s based on the dual coping model, the dual process model. And so, you know, we’ve got kind of a loss-oriented part one, restoration-oriented part two. And then I offer group integration programs to make what we do on the retreat actually stick over time, which is one of the reasons I loved hearing about your work because you’re very similar in the way that you’re like, we need to practice our healing. It’s a practice.

And so we come together on retreat. I love the retreat model because it gives you the time, the space, and the safety for those deeper emotions to bubble up and release. And we do singing and we do drumming and drumming moves all that stuck energy out of the body without having to use any words. So it’s immensely cathartic and the joy that I witness in people because being musical is joyful. And what that shows them is that you can have moments of authentic joy in the midst of all your grief. It’s like a cup of water on the marathon. And it’s authentic. We just move through moments in our day, you know, moment to moment. And if I can show you ways that you can experience authentic joy along the way, we need that respite. And at some point, you know, we can move to a place where joy becomes the baseline.

And so that for me is my commitment is that I work with people. We do over the course of a year, you’ll come on one retreat, then we’ll do the integration for 10 weeks. And then you come on a second retreat, you know, three, six, nine months later, depending on the timing. And then we go through two months of integration on that. And by that point, I watch women heal and they grieve well.

Krista St-Germain: That is a lovely model.

Tim Ringgold: It’s possible, right? And so people ask me they’re like, why do you do what you do? You’re such a freak. You know, like why you enjoy this? And I was like, are you kidding me? Of course you do. Right? Like…

Krista St-Germain: Yeah, aren’t you sad all the time? Why do you like that? Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: Oh, absolutely. People are like, you are so weird. And I’m like, no, no, no. Let me explain it to you from my vantage point. I sit in a chair in a room and I witness healing, transformative, like it’s exponential. They come in on Friday night, their facial affect, their body posture is frozen in grief because time doesn’t heal grief. It freezes it. And then I watch Friday night, Saturday, Sunday morning, I watch them thaw right in front of my eyes. I have a front row seat to their healing. I’m making popcorn. I can’t wait. I love it. I have to tone it down so much on Friday night of the first grief retreat because I’m so giddy because I know what’s coming. And I’ve…

Krista St-Germain: Yeah, the energy does not match. Yeah.

Tim Ringgold: Oh, man. I wear like – I love like really comfy yoga clothes. So like my really cool yoga pants don’t come out till Saturday or Sunday. Like Friday night it’s like hi everybody. Yeah. Welcome. I’m so excited for you.

Krista St-Germain: It’s so resonant. That’s how I feel when people come in and it’s like call number one and my program’s six months long. So call number one, but I’m so excited not because of what they’re feeling right now, but because I know the trajectory, I know the possibility and it’s like, oh, mark this day. Mark this day.

Tim Ringgold: Yes. And I’ve seen it happen enough times. I mean, I’m we’re in somewhere between 45 and 50 retreats at this point. It’s like I witness the transformation enough times. Yeah. Now, I am just a conduit, right? I just want like my spiritual beliefs, right? Like this is me showing up in service. I’m a guide. It’s not the Tim show. It’s really the community is doing the work and healing each other and companioning each other. But like it works. The model works. So I’ve just seen it work so for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of women and a few men too.

Krista St-Germain: And a few occasionally. Hopefully more to come, right? I think…

Tim Ringgold: Yes. I do think so. Surely you’ve hopefully seen the numbers increasing in men.

Tim Ringgold: Oh, yes, I will say candidly, yes. So particularly since COVID, on the back end of COVID, prior to COVID, it was we’d have twenty people in the room between zero and two men every time. Never more than 10%. But after COVID, I don’t know why. This has just been what I’ve observed. The numbers are getting higher and higher. We might have fifteen people in the room and we’ll have three men or we might have ten people in the room and we’ve got three men. Uh it’s been like a higher percentage of the whole moving forward, which gives me hope.

Krista St-Germain: Okay. So if people want to find out about your work and connect with you, where should they go?

Tim Ringgold: Yeah, the easiest thing to do is go to 5WaysToHeal.com. The number five, 5WaysToHeal.com. On that page, if you just put in your email address, you will get a 30-minute video of me, just like this, talking through five and there’s a bonus, it’s really six, six of the best evidence-based practices that I’ve observed, different tools for you to use starting today to help you heal your grief. So if you go to 5WaysToHeal.com, you’ll get that video and then that will plug you into my ecosystem and my emails and you’ll you’ll be able to find out about when upcoming retreats are and plug in and heal and have fun along the way. It can happen. You can have fun along the way. It is possible.

Krista St-Germain: I am so glad that our paths crossed. Truly, so glad to meet you and get to know you. I feel like we could talk so much longer. I’m kind of sad that we’re out of time. But thank you for coming and sharing what you know.

Tim Ringgold: Oh, it was my pleasure. Truly. Thanks for having me.

Krista St-Germain: All right. Well, maybe we’ll have you back.

Tim Ringgold: Let’s do it.

Krista St-Germain: Okay. All right. Thanks, Tim. Take care.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

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