Fire Survivors Discover Music's Power To Facilitate Healing

After the Palisades and Eaton fires were contained and displaced residents began their recovery, their needs didn’t go away.

In the immediate aftermath of the wildfires, the nonprofit Project HOPE focused on distributing hygiene items, masks and other essentials. But then it shifted its focus to long-term support: mental health services meant to help survivors work through the grief, displacement and burnout that comes with the immense loss of everything going up in flames.

Sometimes, that’s hard to do with words – that’s where music therapy comes in.

“Life is moving, everything is changing, my house may be gone – but this is a song that might give me a sense of identity to remind me of who I am,” Project HOPE Mental Health Specialist Stacie Yeldell told Patch. “What music does is help us to process things in a non-verbal fashion.”

Early last year, Yeldell was hired by Project HOPE — a global health and humanitarian organization — to co-facilitate the organization’s emergency mental health and psychosocial support response to the Los Angeles wildfires. Over the last year that’s included programs for elementary school children in Malibu, an initiative supporting mentors of foster youth impacted by the fires, and workshops held in conjunction with local organizations.

Many of those programs have included music therapy led by Yeldell, a board-certified music therapist. While music therapy has applications for a range of patients – from those with developmental disabilities to traumatic brain injuries – in the case of fire survivors, Yeldell said the non-clinical, community-based approach she takes allows for the healing power of music to reach people where they're at.

“Music is a very non-invasive way to facilitate change, to facilitate healing – you’re not therapizing anybody,” she said. “People have songs that give them comfort, people have tones and timbres that soothe.”

Or put it another way: Much of her work with fire survivors has been empowering them to identify non-tangible things in their “toolkit” to help create a sense of groundedness and support in the face of the loss of one of their biggest tangible pieces of security – their homes.

And when it comes to non-tangibles, many people don’t realize they already have music in their toolkit, Yeldell said.

“If you feel sad, some people might want to listen to a sad song. What a song does is validates an emotion you may already be feeling. We can use songs as containers to hold very intense emotions,” she said.

In December, Yeldell led a breakout music therapy group during a virtual “Healing for the Holidays” session with Eaton Fire survivors. The members of the group talked about what was on their mind leading into their first Christmases after losing their homes.

“We went around and asked each person to share a song that was a song of resilience,” she recalled. “We played a couple of them … by playing those songs, us listening together, we were able to hold the person up. Hearing that lyric revealed or that instrument you weren’t expecting – it gave people the feeling of being seen and validated.”

In other instances, Yeldell held drum circles with elementary students in Malibu during a 12-week program. And at a Día de Muertos celebration, she led a song circle featuring a call and response approach, crafting songs on the fly with a guitar to help participants work through their grief.