The Therapy of Touch II: Masculine Massage

The current obsession of the Massage profession with ‘fixing’ the structure of a body is rather worrying to me. Have we really not had enough of this ‘masculine’ leadership of the Massage profession? Do we really have to ‘subjugate’ and ‘control’ the body? Must we still follow these apparently ‘touch phobic’ leaders of the Massage profession (whether male or female) who seem so very frightened of simple nurturing touch?  Do we really have to follow blindly as they insist on our touch becoming so ‘male’ and so ‘medical’?

If I had wanted to be ‘medical’, then I would have trained in Medicine. Yet so many of the profession’s ‘leaders’ seem to want me to become a ‘wannabe doctor’. “Be like me!” they proclaim. “I couldn’t be bothered to train properly as a doctor or a physiotherapist, but I want to do their work, nonetheless”

Well, that dog simply ‘don’t bark’, for me. You see, I chose Massage because the body is the most magical self-healing organism on the planet, and guess what triggers that self healing? Simple Healing Touch. 

Any Massage practitioner who has spent any time at all in the treatment room observing their clients’ reaction to touch, knows that the muscles in the body have only one ‘origin’ and one ‘insertion’ - the mind. Experienced Massage therapists KNOW that nurturing touch enables clients to release all their  tight muscles in just one breath. Because they are ‘letting go’ in their minds.

Now is this structural, emotional or psychological Massage? You tell me. Annoyingly, the human being has this habit of confounding all our healing systems and crying out instead “I am unique, I am complex and I am made up of all five P.E.E.M.S.”

So if I am your client, please stop trying to tell me which bits of my body are in the ‘wrong’ place and trying to put me ‘right’. Just give me touch that respects the journey of my life, and properly values the history that twisted my spine and compressed my tissues. Then I will release what I am ready to release. In my own time. In my own way.

Please don’t just sit there taking a ‘case history’ that only addresses one fifth of what makes me human. I am more than just muscle, tendon and bone. I am made of SOFT tissue. This is the softest tissue on the planet and it responds to the slightest thought or mood that passes through me. Don’t you realise that 90% of my tension was created by my MIND? Over years?

See all of me. Listen to all of me. I will not think you a prostitute if you touch my body gently.  I know the difference between therapeutic Massage and sex. Do you? I come for touch. Deep touch. Soothing touch. Touch that connects me with

my very soul.

The Therapy of Touch I: P.E.E.M.S..

This series of blogs aims to explore just what the power of touch brings to the therapeutic relationship. It challenges the Massage profession to take more account of the psychological, emotional and spiritual aspects of touch and it questions the psychotherapy profession’s almost blanket refusal to use touch in the treatment room. It is a selection of thoughts and reflections after a lifetime’s work in both fields. Your comments and thoughts are welcome. Use the Follow By Email box on the right to receive each installment direct to your inbox as they're published.

So just what is it then, that makes us truly human? Are we really just muscle tendon and bone as the Massage profession would currently have us believe? Are we really just a collection of ‘complexes’ or neuroses as the psychological professions would have us believe? Or are we much more than this?

To understand what a human being is composed of, I use my ‘P.E.E.M.S.’ acronym. It is a model that has served me well for 28 years of clinical practice. It simply stands for:

                        P -  Physical

                        E - Energetic

                        E - Emotional

                        M - Mental

                        S - Spiritual

When we touch a person’s skin, it is impossible to only touch their ‘physical body’. In giving over 20,000 Massage treatments as a Massage therapist, I have found it impossible to Massage another human being without having a powerful impact on their energy system, their emotions, their mental outlook or indeed their spiritual state.

In almost as many years as a psychotherapist, I have found it utterly impossible to do any profound work at all with my clients without completely altering their physical state, their energy system or indeed, their spiritual state, whilst supposedly working on their mental and emotional issues.

So why then, the Massage profession’s current and obsession with only the person’s physical structure? Is someone out there in the Massage profession afraid of how touch affects our emotions, our thoughts or our spirit? Are we afraid of what a human being really is?

Why then our psychotherapy profession’s highly Oedipal fear of touching our clients? Is someone afraid that if we use touch in therapy all a client will want to do is “sleep with their Mummy or their Daddy”? Do they really believe that qualified therapists and grown up clients cannot handle transference? After all, if we have trained and worked on our professional boundaries, then they should be used, not put away in a dusty cupboard entitled “too scary to try out”.

Does a Massage treatment that simply says “Touch is healing, that is what I shall give you” really turn us into prostitutes? Does a psychotherapist who addresses our fear of intimacy through reaching out and touching my arm or giving me a hug really only want to sleep with their client? Do clients that are touched become overwhelmed by an irresistible desire to sleep with their therapist? Have you seen these therapists? Would you want to sleep with them?

In Massage, so many bodyworkers I meet seem to just want to ‘prod and poke’ and frantically ‘fix’ the body; as if it is an ‘enemy’ to be ‘controlled’. Just like we ‘controlled’ the native American Indians or subjugated the Indian sub continent. Likewise, it seems that many psychotherapists want to hide behind their words and theories as if they too, are afraid of the great primaeval forces of nature that threaten to engulf us, should we ‘dare to touch’. If we reach out and in any way touch our clients, it seems they really do fear that we may perhaps enter into ‘The Heart of Darkness’ described so well by E. M. Forster. Of course such touching must be consensual and contractual. That is why we train psychotherapists. Of course it must have a clear purpose.

If a human being is comprised of P.E.E.M.S, then how can we limit our impact to just one of these areas that constitutes the miracle that is humanity? A Massage therapist who does not allow a client the chance to explore their emotional and psychological reactions to a treatment is surely no better than a psychotherapist who does not allow a client the chance to explore the physical implications of their work and their relationship with touching?

Both are in danger of hiding away in some remote professional forest, far away from the scary glare of the ‘Queen who sees’, living in houses that may be safe but are too small for us, just like dwarves in a forest. We spend our professional lives always looking over our shoulder at this scary thing called ‘intimacy’ and touch. Like Snow White, far better to just hide away with ‘the little men’ who make up regulations to keep the witch at bay.

For those of us actually in clinical practice, however, we often find it impossible to keep the door to powerful and healing touch shut all the time. Sometimes we must open the door, and it is a risk, this touch.  We may well fall foul of old ladies who are not always what they seem, offering apples. What fairy tales tell us, of course, is to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway”. So far both professions seem to only be ‘feeling the fear’ and not doing it at all.

Just how we work with more touch in Psychotherapy and Massage is a big issue. If we want to be effective with clients who are suffering, then we need to use the most powerful tools at our disposal. If we wish to demolish a bridge we must use dynamite. We do not sit around making regulations about the the risks of dynamite and put a lock and key around our dynamite storage depot. Demolishing the bridge one pathetic tap of the hammer at a time, is all that will result. For Massage and Psychotherapy professionals alike, touch is that powerful tool called dynamite. We need to learn how to handle it safely, whether in Massage or Psychotherapy, not lock it away.

The integrative, intimate and healing power of touch is always there, no matter how far into the ground we wish to bury our ostrich heads.

Psychological Massage and Script

Many of you share with me a conviction that Deep and powerful Massage can have a profound PSYCHOLOGICAL effect on both us and our clients. I was particularly struck by this yesterday in my clinic....

I saw three clients and what struck me most about each of them was how they used their work with me as a new PERMISSION in their lives. Those of you who have learned how to use my Fairy Tale Process™ to change things in your life will know all about the power of PERMISSION. For those who have not attended, let me explain it.

INJUNCTIONS

Deep down in the psyche - in the murky world of our UNCONSCIOUS in fact - lies our SCRIPT and this is the reason why we find ourselves in situations we really don’t want to be in over and over again. Perhaps it is something to do with our relationships, or our health, or our work and money situation.

At the roots of our SCRIPT lie our INJUNCTIONS, which generally begin with the word “Don’t”. Some examples would be:

• Don’t Be
• Don’t Feel
• Don’t Make it
• Don’t Be Close

Towards the end of his life, Eric Berne became obsessed with the connection between his clients’ lives and how much they resembled Fairy Tales. He called these INJUNCTIONS “Witch Curses” to express the venom and damage they can do. These INJUNCTIONS fuel our beliefs and actions even though we are not aware of them. And they are very deeply rooted in the Psyche.

THE ANTITDOTE

The antidote to the poison of our INJUNCTIONS is in fact PERMISSION. This means that we begin the sentence “It’s OK to:  “Be” or “Feel” or “Make it” or “Be Close”. However the great myth of psychotherapy is that by becoming AWARE of our INJUNCTIONS and giving ourselves new permissions as grown ups, we will be ‘sorted out’.

Not a bit of it! Awareness is but the first step. SCRIPT lives and thrives deep in the sea of our UNCONSCIOUS so the odd word or thought is but a drop in this vast ocean. What needs to happen for a person’s life to be healed of this toxic belief is to reconfigure the SCRIPT itself right in the place where it lives.

Trying to change this script in a grown up way is simply fiddling with the icing on a cake - no wonder so many of our resolutions to make changes only last a short while. How many New Year’s resolutions are dead and buried by lunch the next day?

The analogy would be to be sitting in a boat out in the deep ocean and being rather confused as to why my control of a goldfish in its goldfish bowl was making no difference to the great big whale swimming a mile underneath!

LOCATING SCRIPT

Which brings us to the question, where exactly in the UNCONSCIOUS does our script actually live? If you really want to get an idea of the immensity of the UNCONSCIOUS then watch the film INCEPTION. In this film Leonardo Di Caprio is trying to find his colleague in the vast ocean of a person’s mind and it certainly conveys how like a “needle in a haystack” finding SCRIPT could be.

Except that Eric Berne did that! He located the script deep in the CHILD EGO STATE and positioned it in the very early formation of that part of our Psyche - right in the part where we would ‘somatise’ our thoughts and feelings directly through the body. This is the part where we would have a tummy ache because we were experiencing difficulty in leaving home for school. It comes from that golden age when thoughts and feelings were utterly inseparable from the body. We felt happy, we thought happy and we just danced. There was no need to explain to either ourselves or to others that “I feel happy”, we just laughed and giggled and danced. Instant holistic living!

THE SOMATIC CHILD

This is why BERNE named this part as THE SOMATIC CHILD because of the unified physicality of this stage of our life. Now this has some serious implications for those of us involved in Massage therapy....

Now you are probably beginning to see the connection between our psychological state and MASSAGE. My own view is simple. If psychotherapists actually understood what script really was and where it lived, then they would all become MASSAGE THERAPISTS!

Here is the place where we soothe anxiety with the reassuring touch of THE OCTOPUS. Here is the place where we offer release from the trauma of “DON’T EXIST”. With our touch we give endless PERMISSION solidly for a whole hour.

What could be more healing?

And we don’t even have to know that we are doing it!

So back to my three clients. Although anonymous, you should know that each client has discussed this article with me and has given their consent to me writing about their session in this way.

CLIENT ONE:

My first client shared with me how she needed to ‘Speak out’ in her life and speak her truth.

If her life was a Fairy tale it looked to me a bit like SNOW WHITE, hiding away deep in the forest, keeping her life a secret. Living a small life with small people.

It was clear to me that if this client started to speak her truth she would have a MASSIVE HEALING IMPACT on the world. What injunction might have been lurking around deep in her UNCONSCIOUS? Well, if you don’t believe it is OK to speak your truth then you are probably running a “DON’T BE YOU” - what do you think?

So this client was seeking a new permission, one that she wanted to anchor deep in her SOMATIC CHILD. Do you think Massage is an effective way to say:

“It’s OK to be You. You are you and there is only one of you. You are brilliant, eternal, a child of God and UTTERLY UNIQUE. It is safe to let your light shine.”

I am amazed at the number of my clients and students who do just that after their experience of the power of NO HANDS - they go out and let their light shine in the world.

CLIENT TWO:

My second client complained of a tight neck and shoulder and when I asked what might have caused this, she had no answer. For me there was a sense of the answer lying hidden in the room but now was not the time to probe. So I got on with the (structural) Massage and it was a privilege to work with her as she was such an awesome client. Each breath was an opening and a release. If God got on the table, I do not believe he would do a better job. Which of course he was... on the table I mean.

Anyway, after I had given God a Massage, my client came back at the end and said “You know the reason I am so tight is because I haven’t had a Massage in four months - since I last saw you, in fact. That’s really silly isn’t it?”

I have to say I agreed with her.

“It’s like I need your permission to go and see another Massage therapist.”

BINGO!

If this client were in a Fairy Tale she sounded rather like RAPUNZEL who was not allowed out of the witch’s tower and would get punished for forming attachments to other people.

The injunction that may be going on here is possibly a variant of “Don’t Be Close” - in this case “Don’t Be Close to anyone else except me”. I also had a sense that it was “OK” for this client to be sad - even when so much in her life was actually going really well. After all, if you are imprisoned in a tower it is very hard to be happy so I suspect this client also had a “Don’t be Happy” injunction.

Can you see how MASSAGE provides an awesome PERMISSION to “Be Happy” with all those ENDORPHINS flooding the body from the smorgasbord of touch that a NO HANDS Massage provides?

Because the issue of her feeling ‘disloyal’ (to the witch and me) only emerged at the end of the session I asked her if she would actually like my permission to see someone else (bear in mind this is a part of her that is probably only 3 years old) and she nodded (non verbal, somatic) so I told her that she MUST see other Massage therapists and I ANCHORED this by pressing her leg as I said it - to make sure it went into the SOMATIC CHILD.

Most important of all, however, was the fact that the treatment had given her permission to be Happy so she could talk about what made her unhappy. How many of our clients really open up AFTER the treatment? This is because of the power of PERMISSION.

CLIENT THREE

My last client of the day arrived having overcome phenomenal obstacles to travelling from London to Morecambe - all the west coast Virgin trains were cancelled for the day! When she arrived after this Herculean journey she said quite simply “I want to be connected to  my body and to the human race”. Now this particular client has had an incredible history of illness - which clearly stopped her being fully alive and a part of society. She was forever having to ‘retire’ from life due to her illness. After a lot of personal work over many years she reported that she was ‘well’ and so she wanted to really let herself ‘get stuck in’ to life.

If this client was in a Fairy Tale we both thought this sounded a bit like CINDERELLA finally getting out the house and GOING TO THE BALL!

I am not sure what INJUNCTION she was running - it could have been any one of a thousand! The major feeling was of her ‘rejoining the human race”. Berne called this “taking out your subscription to the human race”. It really was about getting connected. Connected to her body, connected to the Earth and connected with another human being. My gut feeling was that she had a “Don’t be Here” injunction which is about as much of a “Don’t Be” as you can get. There were also strong indications for a “Don’t Belong”.

So this was a lovely slow and deep Massage in the connecting style that I teach on Mastery. At the end of the Massage she was surprised at how open she felt in her upper body and how much taller she was walking. It was as if she was taking her space in the world physically. She also talked about feeling wider and bigger and she looked amazing. She also described how feminine she felt in her hips which made me wonder about a “Don’t be a Woman” injunction as well.

Whatever the injunction, this client walked out demonstrating in her body movements that she had taken PERMISSION to be alive to be herself and to take her place in the human race. She looked like she really was going to the ball - instead of to the train station for an uncertain journey back!!!

SUMMARY
Three clients, three permissions, three life scripts all undergoing fantastic cure.

All through the powerful permissions given to THE SOMATIC CHILD through the immense healing power of touch.

If you want to learn more about this - and its enormous relevance to Massage - you can attend my PSYCHOLOGY OF CHANGE weekend which is where I now teach all of this ‘script’ this material. If you want to find out more before committing to a full weekend, I am also running POWER OF THE UNCONSCIOUS evenings around the UK - click here for more information.

The Laughing Giraffe

So what really causes tension? This of course, is the $64,000 question for all Massage therapists. In fact,

Healers, healthcare practitioners and therapists from all over the world grapple with this one on a daily basis.

The thing is this.... supposing the answer was actually very simple?



Image with kind permission from *fiiish* art uk

In the Bodywork world, tension is synonymous with tightness. If, for example, you subscribe to the religion of ‘Trigger points’ as the CAUSE of all tension, you only have to look a little deeper into what causes a trigger point and what releases a trigger point to soon realise that trigger points are simply the result of tension, not the cause.

Mostly, Massage therapists are dealing with chronic and latent tension or trigger points... Only rarely will we be dealing with tension that is the result of a sudden and recent trauma.    If that is the case, we are normally severely limited in what we can actually do through Massage. Massaging inflamed and damaged tissue is not a good idea! Unless you have specialist training in physiotherapy or sports injury rehabilitation, you need to wait until the injury is healed before looking at Massage.

What we find in the treatment room is that we are mainly dealing with either ‘old and cold’ injuries or aches and pains and sore areas. Very often these tight and painful areas contain many active trigger points. Any short or tight muscle has trigger points. Before Travell they were simply called ‘knots’.

In general what we find is that most often, these active trigger points are really only latent trigger points that have been ignored for a long time. And latent trigger points are simply the result of muscle tension. Pain = tension that has been ignored and accumulated over time.

So back to the question - what really causes the tension?

The more the muscle gets tight (and therefore full of trigger points), the more we generally restrict our movements - to avoid the pain. So instead of facing the tension head on, we generally do our best to ignore it and hope that it will just ‘go away’. Which it does - because this is a strategy that works - ignoring the body. But does it really ‘go away’?

Not at all....

Only in the short term, anyway...

Ignoring the body is only a strategy that can work in the short term. Unless we find the time and space to UNWIND this tension at a later date, what happens is this: the tension, when ignored, just sulks and burrows deeper. It ‘schemes and plots’ until it comes up with a way to really get your attention. What I mean here is a SERIOUS illness. One that can’t just be shrugged off.

In addition to this, without consciously realising it, we restrict our movements so we don’t feel the pain or discomfort anymore. We start to live a restricted life. We wake up in the morning and find ourselves living in a smaller and smaller world...

It is this restriction and fear of pain that is the beginning of serious long term illness, in my opinion. For example:

A pain in the neck which is the result of tension referring from the trigger points in the tight pectoral or trapezius muscles may (if ignored) easily go deeper and start to restrict our breathing. Over time the bits of the lungs that are not being used (because we are restricting our breathing to avoid the referred pain when we breathe deeply) start to fail to ‘clear’ the day to day debris that accumulates in the lungs of us all.


This debris attracts infection and now we are taking antibiotics on a regular basis because of all the coughing and inflammation. As the antibiotics invade the system they reduce the inflammation. However, they also clear out much of our valuable immune response chemistry and now we are failing to fight off the multitude of pathogens that have been a part of this planets ecology for millenia. Only now, modern medicine has removed our natural ability to fight off these pathogens.

Further down the line, who knows? Asthma? Pleurisy? Lung cancer?

All for the want of an easy or ‘pain free’ life.

But let us wind back the film... all the way back that referred pain in the neck from the trapezius and pectoralii muscles....

You decide to get a massage from a bodyworker that KNOWS what the answer to the $64,000 question is. This therapist is a simple soul who believes that cause of all tension really only comes from one thing....

THE MIND

Instead of bowing and scraping to the ‘Structural Gods’ of trigger points and ‘fixing’ the problem to help it ‘go away’, this therapists loves to simply breathe and ‘mulch’ the tissues in such a touching way that the client cannot but connect with the SOURCE of the tension in these muscles and realises, in an “aha!” moment that...

Maybe they have been pushing themselves too hard over the last 2 years and with a contented sigh decide to just ‘let go’ of the demon in their head that drives them on and on and on...

Maybe they realise that it is time to let go of anger and make the mental decision to finally forgive those who have hurt them...

Maybe it is time to let go of their anxiety for the future and once again learn to trust in the divine flow of this amazing universe and the love that keeps the world spinning in space...

Maybe it’s time to let go of the crazy idea that they need to put up with this annoying boss that they have tolerated for 20 years? Time to make the decision to simply walk away...

Tension caused by trigger points and tight muscles?

You must be “having a giraffe!”

Its all in the mind...

Happy oiling!

 

ABOUT GERRY:

Gerry has been a full time Massage therapist and teacher for over 25 years. He also qualified as a UKCP registered Psychotherapist (TA) in 1999. 

He is the creator of The NO HANDS Massage Therapy System, which is now one of the most popular Massage approaches in the UK. He has also recently launched the PSYCHOLOGY OF CHANGE, a unique new approach to making lasting change within your life. To learn more about these courses go to www.nohandsmassage.com

3 MASSAGE LESSONS FROM......THE 'OLD MASTER' AND THE 'NEW BROOM'
I could not resist watching bits of the 'Murray vs Federer' tennis semi today (Australian Open). 

What a history the two of them have had! Every time (apart from the olympic final) Fedora wins. My friend Geraldine will testify that I correctly read their body language and announced Murray to be the winner early on in the first set. Nonetheless, I learned so much from just watching them:

On the one hand there was MURRAY, just coming into his prime, looking stronger with more bulk on him and  beginning to display the mental maturity that enables him to take the 'ups' and the 'downs' of a game with real professionalism. You can still see and hear the petulant whine that has characterised Murray's tennis, but now there is a new control that heralds the sort of great wisdom shown by the real pro's like Federer. And then there is Federer himself, still going strong and already a legend almost a decade ago! Possibly the greatest tennis player of all time. 

1. DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND LOVE WHAT YOU DO
Before Fedora even started playing, his comments to the interviewer a day or so ago struck me. He told the interviewer that he was looking forward to the game because 'with Andy it always turns into such a tactical game'. Like a chess player he was relishing the opportunity to try out his moves and catch his bright young opponent out. He simply loves playing tennis. I get the feeling that even if he wasn't any good, he would eat, sleep and breathe tennis - even if he had to have a day job to pay for his addiction! If you are doing what you love (as I know so many massage therapists are) then you always 'win'. How can we 'lose' when we do such an amazing therapy as Massage? 

If the treatment does not go well, then there is simply LOADS to learn! If there are not enough clients for your practice, there is simply the chance to find new ways to attract people to your treatments. If your body is tired and you are exhausted, there is just more to learn about health and healing - on yourself! Always something important and valuable to do - always MEANING in your life....

2. THE VERY BEST TAKE RISKS
I was particularly struck by the brilliance of Federer as he launched himself into every opening that Murray gave him - and there were precious few of those. But Federer waited, cat-like until a weak serve arrived and then RISKED EVERYTHING to turn that into a winning opportunity. Neither player did anything 'safe' in this thrilling match. Every shot was 'pushing the envelope' because both knew that ordinary and safe shots would never win the point. What has safety got to do with excellence, I ask myself?

There is nothing 'safe' about building a successful Massage practice. Making good and meaningful connection with each client sometimes involves 'risking' eye contact or a joke or sharing a personal story - to make it 'real'.  Getting new clients often means taking our Massage out into public places, giving talks and being seen by a less than sensitive public. The comments I have overheard regarding my treatments at exhibitions or conferences have ranged from "I wish I was on that table" to "I think that's disgusting!". There is no safety in letting your work be seen....

3. PERSEVERANCE IS THE KEY
At the end of the fourth set, Federer was 2 match points away from losing, and he just kept going - and Murray made two unforced errors! He went on to win the tie break and get through into the fifth set. 

OK, I know he lost the fifth set, but he showed us all just what it takes to be great. For a Massage therapist like me it means that I intend to keep learning more and more about the amazing magic of healing touch until my very last breath on this planet.

Why would we do anything other than 'always keep learning', when we are privileged enough to be doing what we love?

ABOUT GERRY:

Gerry has been a full time Massage therapist and teacher for over 25 years. He also qualified as a UKCP registered Psychotherapist (TA) in 1999.

He is the creator of The NO HANDS Massage Therapy System, which is now one of the most popular Massage approaches in the UK. He has also recently launched the PSYCHOLOGY OF CHANGE, a unique new approach to making lasting change within your life. To learn more about these courses go to www.nohandsmassage.com