“Everyone’s experienced trauma at some point in their lives,” says Katie Down, a music therapist in New York City. “Everyone has a story.” Down incorporates a whole range of techniques into her practice, but like many music therapists, she began with music first.

Down, a kindly and gentle sort with a wry sense of humor, was studying composition in graduate school before being struck by what she calls “a little existential crisis—what’s this all about and why am I doing this? How can the music I engage in do something for the world?” The question led her to working with refugees in Bosnia and later with classrooms of children in rough neighborhoods in Boston and in New York. “I started to understand what music can do for traumatized populations—it can help create a sense of normalcy, joy, expression,” she says.

“Music in therapy doesn’t work for everyone,” Down adds. “But I think there is a ‘music’ part of all of our brains. Studies have shown that even with degenerative brain diseases, like Alzheimer’s, one of the faculties that remains is our ability to recall melody and song, even when we can’t recognize the faces and names of our own children.”

Despite living and working with music for years as a violinist, journalist, and fan, I’ve sometimes wondered if my relationship to it is cathartic or narcotic. When music is habitual, piping through earbuds, it can be hard to maintain a connection to the idea that it is a transcendent medium: In putting on a record or playing a song, I am essentially queueing up emotions in a test tube, letting them percolate and develop until they darken and start reacting. I can stay to see what they become, if they bubble over the edge, or I can switch it all off and kill the experiment altogether if it gets too intense. This control over emotional states is intoxicating, and I sometimes wonder if it is a training ground for the real thing or just a comfy padded simulacrum.

Hoping to connect more instinctively to what music therapy can achieve on a primal level, I scheduled a series of sessions with Down. Though she uses a variety of tools depending on the patient and her own intuition, the goal is the same—to use music as a conduit, a medium, that allows for reconnection. Sometimes her clients bring in songs that they find particularly powerful, using them to access a part of themselves that feels healthy and strong. Down might encourage them to move or dance, and describe what the song makes them see or feel. “The music is just a way in,” she says.

She also has her clients make their own music. She tells me about a stint in a psychiatric facility for children, where she worked with of six boys, ages 4 to 7, who were “really out of control and even violent with each other at times.” Down sat down with a particularly angry boy at a piano and invited him to improvise, following along as he angrily pounded the keys, then slowly moved into playful, even joyful bursts. The other boys sat down, quietly, and applauded when he finished, jostling to be next.

In another exercise, she invited a group of eighth graders to write their own protest songs. “So much of who they were and what they dealt with began to come out,” she says. “Some songs were about living in the projects, or going to a school that has outdated books and bad cafeteria food, or having to go through security searches.”

When I come to Down’s Manhattan office, I look around and try to anticipate what she will ask me to do. There are instruments on a table in the corner, none of which I recognize—hand drums, boxy-looking simple stringed things. There is a slight hum I can’t place, which she will later identify as a “magnetic sound sculpture,” a bespoke instrument sitting on the floor and vibrating upwards. She sits facing me, at an angle, and I sense her straightening her spine, aligning her posture as a way to pick me up out of my habitual slouch. I sit up straighter.

After a few minutes of talking, Down asks me to simply sit up and feel my feet rooted to the floor, my hands on my thighs. She asks me to breathe, deeply and rhythmically. This isn’t even musical in any conventional sense, although she does at one point tell me to locate my pulse and tell me to think of it as “my internal drummer at work.”

She asks me to notice the pattern of my breathing without changing it, but the second I turn the lens inward, my breath suddenly turns shaky and bumpy, as if it is hitting snags. My breath becomes a dredging of everything it passes. Down asks me to bring that energy back up the arms and into the shoulders, then into the throat, and into the base of the skull. Then up into the spot between my brows. My eyes closed, I lift my left arm without realizing it; she asks me to notice the gesture. We spend several minutes doing just this, until she gently encourages me to add a sound to the exhalation, to vibrate a note out with the breath.

This is how I find myself, eventually, singing wordlessly and wailing aloud in her empty office. Some part of me cringes at the picture we make, but my own voice bulldozes through this self-consciousness at the next breath. Soon, I open up my throat from “ohs” into “ahhs.” I feel the sound in my forearms, which start sending tingling signals up to my fingers, as if they are being brought back to sensation from local anesthetic. I can feel the muscles in my throat shift and open, and the sensation brings other muscles into my mind’s eye: a vibrating uvula, an expanding chest. Each sound takes me to a different corner inside of my cavernous body.

“Your spine is the instrument,” Down encourages.

The simple singing exercise has gotten me out of my mind. I am now a network of muscles and nerves, heaving and contracting. In this state, my voice starts doing things—warbling, or making little glottal catches, like I am choking on something viscous. I tip my head back and howl like some kind of coyote opera singer.

At some point, I quiet down and feel a cool sensation flooding into the upper regions of my brain, which suddenly feels empty. Down gently dings a bell into the silence, completing the mental picture, as I track what this sound does, generated from outside of me, as it moves around in that hushed, stone space. The echoes of the bell fade, and my mind goes quiet.

And this, of course, is when I start crying. Hysterically, unstoppably, uncontrollably.