Workshop: Rebuild Your Relationship with Music

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Many survivors of cults, high-control groups, and the troubled teen industry carry complicated relationships with music. A song, style, lyric, or even a particular instrument can evoke powerful memories, emotions, and associations connected to life inside these environments.

Hosted by the Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion and developed with the support and guidance of renowned cult expert Janja Lalich, this six-week online workshop explores how music can be understood, examined, and reclaimed after experiences of coercive control.

Led by board-certified music therapist Dorian Wallace, MT-BC, participants will learn practical tools to understand their relationship with music, identify both supportive and triggering musical experiences, and develop new ways of engaging with music that promote safety, self-expression, and personal agency.

Through structured listening, discussion, reflection, and experiential exercises, participants will have opportunities to explore music as a resource for grounding, meaning-making, emotional processing, and integration. No musical background or prior experience is required.

Whether music was a source of comfort, manipulation, community, identity, pain, or all of these at once, this workshop offers a space to examine that relationship with care and build a new one on your own terms.