The Therapy of Touch IV: 'Merging'

One of the most valuable things I learned when I trained as a Transactional Analysis psychotherapist was to learn the difference between my “self” and the “other”. This is particularly important in a therapy like Massage which offers so many opportunities to ‘merge’ with our clients. Before my training I had gotten myself into difficulty with merging. I had assumed that what I felt or experienced was what the client felt or experienced.

This is what I mean by ‘merging’. It is when I confuse what I am experiencing and thinking with what the client actually experiences. It is an “I - Thou” issue. This sounds a bit obvious, doesn’t it? However, one of the most common mistakes I witness in my training of Massage therapists is precisely this problem. Many Massage therapists actually foster this delusion and pride themselves on their ‘sensitivity’ and their ‘psychic’ abilities, even. They simply love to prove their abilities by telling clients exactly what they notice about them and what their ‘energy’ is doing. Yet if it was really happening, wouldn’t the client be telling them?

What is really going on here, is a manipulative ‘power play’ in which the client is encouraged to disable their critical and ‘Adult’ faculties. In Transactional Analysis terms what we have is a lack of grown up Adult communication. Instead what we have is a therapist’s Child ego state that is living in a fairy tale world of wizards and witches doing its very best to convince the Child ego state of the client that all this psychic and magical thinking really works.

To ‘out’ this process we must see it in the following transactional terms:

Client: “May I have a Massage”

Therapist: “Yes, but first may I magically discern what you need, thereby disabling your ‘Adult’ ego state and discounting any ability you have to think or talk for yourself?”

Client: “Is that what I must do to have touch?”

Therapist: “Yes, and having disabled your ‘Adult ego state’, let me now anaesthetise any critical and evaluating Parent ego state you have by using the hypnotic and merging power of touch to give me total power over your interpretation of reality”

Client: “Oh goody goody, this is such fun!”

What we now have are two children ‘running the show’ which is generally a total disaster for the therapeutic relationship. Most of this merging is simply ‘projection’. We feel uplifted so we say to the client “I notice how uplifted you are”. In the power relationship of Massage, the client is bound to agree. Occasionally, a client with a strong ego will simply walk out and not return, as a result of such insulting and manipulative behaviour.

What I teach to Massage therapists is how best to ensure it is the client’s own experience they are describing in their own words. To do this, I invite the client to spend a few minutes lying on the table at the end of the treatment. This is so they have time to integrate the effect of the Massage. I leave the room so they really are in their own space for this phase.

The second part of this ‘Integration phase’ is when the client is dressed. Here, I still avoid ‘chit chat’ and deflect the inevitable “what did you notice, Doc?” game, by simply asking the client to: “Walk around the table and notice how your body wants to walk after this treatment. Tell me anything you notice that feels different from before you got on the table - if anything.”

What is remarkable is that clients never say “Wow, I feel so myofascia-ed!” or “I feel like my ilio-psoas is now so much longer!” Unless that is, they are structural bodyworkers who have virtuously ‘fought off’ the implications of letting in powerful healing touch throughout the whole treatment. Only Massage therapists and professional bodyworkers talk such daft and unnatural language. If clients really do speak this way, then they have simply been ‘educated’ in the same way that Freudian clients have been trained by their analysts to dream in Freudian imagery and Jungian clients to dream in Jungian imagery. What clients actually come out with, without such professional brain washing is, well, absolutely anything!

It is so exciting to actually listen to clients’ own words without any merging or attempt to ‘influence’ their findings. I genuinely never know what will actually come out of their mouths, despite 28 years of watching clients get off the table and walk around the room. One client may walk like a zombie carrying lead weights on his feet and still exclaim “I feel so light and free”. Another may prance around like the sugar plum fairy saying “I feel so grounded and centred”. Who am I to say what my client actually feels or experiences internally? What is certain is this:

Everything I learned about the power of touch and Massage came from the mouths of my clients. None of it can be found in the Massage or Psychotherapy text books which, of necessity, only speak ‘bodywork’ or ‘Psychotherapy’. Yet to really understand the immense power of touch, we really need to turn each client we Massage into our teacher, by truly listening to their words. We need to learn how to

‘speak client’.