Our Mission: From Hurting to Healing
Songbird Sings is dedicated to helping people work through and recover from traumatic experiences. Music is a healing force, and our workshops help to transform those who've been silenced by domestic violence, sexual exploitation, childhood abuse, and the horrors of war. Through songwriting and creative collaboration, participants find the key to their own healing, developing inner strength and resilience as they come to trust themselves and others, while building support systems among those with a shared history of trauma.
Our Vision:
To create a nation-wide network of accredited trauma informed instructors to offer Songbird Sings songwriting and recording workshops for those in need. To help as many traumatized people as possible to tap into their inner resources, find their voices, and write the songs that will lead to their healing. Whether on the streets, in homeless shelters, in prison, at community centers, Veteran's centers, school, or suffering silently at home, Songbird Sings will be there, listening to their stories and helping them sing their songs.
How songwriting helps to transform trauma:
Songwriting takes participants out of the broken places, the darkness, the places where they had given up
Songwriting helps participants realize they are not alone
Songwriting helps participants experience joy through the songs they write and the validation they receive from the other women who are writing their stories into song
Songwriting helps participants find the power in their own voices and gain the confidence to move forward into a healthier, more fulfilling lifestyle
Songwriting helps resolve conflict and inner turmoil
Songwriting helps build community
Songwriting gives participants a key to their own healing capabilities.
True Story #1
H came from a well-known family; her father was a respected doctor in their community. Little did anyone know, besides the other perpetrators he was associated with, was that H’s father, a pedophile, was trafficking her from the time she was 7 until the time she was 12. Later, while attending a prestigious college, her brain cracked open and she began to remember what had happened to her. I met H 20 years later when she came to A Woman's Voice songwriting workshop. Every day is a struggle for H, but she has been able to tell her truth in song, bringing about shared tears and shared laughter.
“My experience of A Woman’s Voice was a necessary one for my healing. I didn’t know my pain mattered enough, that it was worthy of a song. I had no idea that sharing my words or truth about my anguish could be healing for anyone else. Yet my heart and my soul healed as related to the strife and troubles that were these other women’s stories. It broke all the social taboos and the denial and systems in place that create the crime of isolation and the silence for our population of trauma survivors. Denial, isolation, and being silenced are the reality we are surrounded with and knocked down by constantly. Poverty and a mental health system that is not only incompetent but also willfully ignorant of the needs of single women and mothers who are wracked with post traumatic stress disorder, is what is available for us who are living with disability from our abuse. Now picture us walking in to a room with warm, friendly, playful, understanding, and talented Robin Lane encouraging us that our story matters; that our stories and the songs that are in our heart are every woman’s story. That we are so NOT alone.”
Through the experience of being in A Woman's Voice and writing her song, H realized she is not defined forever by the most terrible betrayal that could happen to a child. This recognition has set H on her way to being an advocate for women who’ve survived trauma.
True Story #2
K flipped out as I was playing guitar to a click track for her song. She threw her headphones off and ran out of the room. All of us in attendance were stunned. We followed her out of the room and tried to soothe her as she was crying and shaking. She told us her story. K was placed with a foster family when she was a child due to violence in her bio household. Little did DCF know, the foster family was involved in a Satanic cult. The cult would gather 30-40 people and use K for their rituals. She was placed in a casket. Nails were hammered in. She didn’t say what happened after she was nailed into the casket (as if that wasn’t bad enough). The sound of the click track triggered the sound of the nails being hammered in.
“To deal with the trauma I experienced as a child and as a teen I needed to write, yet a tide of emotions just wasn’t given voice until A Woman’s Voice songwriting class. I believe hat music itself is a healer. I know for a fact that it has helped me heal. It is because of Robin Lane’s program A Woman’s Voice and the help she gave me that I am planning to become a music therapist.”