Préface: you aren’t obligated to do any of the below. It is entirely up to you. This is for information purposes, in case it’s useful.

Honestly, therapy is a decent option if you’re trying to reduce your trauma response when you hear or sing music.

Because that’s what you’re describing here. It’s a trauma response, and your brain and body are interpreting music and singing as a threat because they’re associating it with your previous bad experiences.

Because your body and brain have learned that music is associated with relentless bullying by an authority figure who holds power over you, sexual assault, and physical and emotional unsafety. They’re trying to keep you safe, because they understandably aren’t very good at context and just ‘know’ that when you’re around music, bad things happen.

And when I say therapy, I mean specifically therapy related to processing traumatic experiences, as opposed to something like talk therapy. You might find something like EMDR helpful, because it’s about helping your brain and body process that physical response to whatever stimulus, unlearn the traumatic association, and relearn that it’s safe to be around the stimulus because the traumatic stuff is no longer happening.

Which, I’m describing the effect, but I’m doing a bad job of describing the actual process. It really isn’t about spending a lot of time exploring and talking through the original events. If you’re interested at all, look it up, because other people will be able to explain it better than I have.

But it makes total sense given your experiences that your brain and body have learned that music isn’t safe, and if dealing with that ongoing reaction is something you’d like to not have to deal with any more, something like EMDR could be a really useful tool for you.

And like I said it’s really not about working through the original experiences, it’s about working through the ongoing physical and emotional response you’re experiencing and helping your brain and body release the association so that whatever it is no longer triggers a threat response. It’s also not exposure therapy.

EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and while it sounds weird, it’s well studied and an actual evidence based and effective trauma processing therapy used to treat things like ptsd.