Music therapy conversations - Joy Gravestock

Gravestock, Joy

Abstract

A podcast by the British Association of Music Therapy on my work.

Luke talks to Joy about her work with adoption and how this relates to her own life experiences, her development as a music therapist, and her current PhD research.

Joy is a self-employed music therapist in private practice. Prior to her music therapy training, she was clinical lead for a Nottinghamshire NHS Trust, (in adoption services, CAMHS, Nottinghamshire), having worked previously within the field of adoption for many years. She was also a member of both Nottingham and Leicester County’s Adoption Panels, offering both her professional and personal experiences to panel. Now as a specialist music therapist in adoption practice, Joy is an identified lead therapist for Adoption Services in the East Midlands, as well as retaining links with “CORAM” Leicestershire, and working extensively with individually referred cases funded by the Adoption Support Fund (which came into being in 2015 to enable adoptive families to gain access to psychotherapies). Joy works with adoptive families where longer-term placements are deemed “at risk of breakdown”, when ostensibly difficulties result from the placement of older children who are described as having significant “attachment (and other) disorders”. She also works with families at the beginning of new placements when it is thought likely that traumatic material will impinge upon the adoption placement.

She is currently working with adopted children with complex physical and learning disability, where often a disability discovered at birth led to the relinquishment of a baby. Joy developed her interest in how the impact of findings from neurobiology impacted on adult verbal psychotherapy, and what this might mean for music therapists trying to give meaning to what is emergent in the therapy room.

Her PhD research explores how relational attachments may be enhanced by moments of attunement (which might be explained partially in terms of their neurobiology) occurring within a music therapy relationship. She has written the BAMT literature on adoption which is available to anyone perusing the website with a request about music therapy in adoption. She has presented her work on music therapy, adoption, and the significance of attunement at numerous conferences over the past 5 years, and in 2017 presented at the World Congress Of Music Therapy in Japan and at “EcArte” (the Eurpoean Arts Therapies conference) in Poland. She also regularly presents work to adoption agencies, and consults to groups and service users within the adoption community. She is an author, supervisor, and lecturer at Derby and Nottingham Universities.

• Digital Artefact Type: Other
• Acceptance Date: Feb 22, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Feb 22, 2019
• Deposit Date: Mar 15, 2023
• Keywords: Adoption and music therapy
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10485847
• External URL: https://www.bamt.org/DB/podcasts-2/joy-gravestock