How Body Workers Get Defeated

The greatest enemy to massage therapists and all body workers is themselves. We could be the best at what we do, but if we execute it without grace it will backfire on us all the time. The body is hardwired to defend itself and governed by a super-computer; so, we have to understand that we can not beat this system. Instead, we must try to understand this system, and get it to realize what is going on inside--not giving it a beating just because that “works.” Every therapy works, but the majority of them will get recycled into a better defensive cycle of the system. So the next time you try that same trick you forced on it before, it will probably not yield the same positive result.

We must understand this reality to get the body to cut us some slack and stop staying in a highly protective state. Understanding this should be our first objective--not finding trigger points and pressing as hard as we can because it makes the client squirm, or asking to be beat up in a deep tissue session for ourselves. This type of behavior makes the defensive pattern worse. For example: think about the body of a small child. He needs to be guided, and sometimes given a small push to learn something; he can never be forced to do anything! If forced, he will resent you for a very long time, and this resentment comes in the form of self-protection. Where you suspect that the body is doing something protective but are unsure if it is, chances are that it is. An example of this is when a client is unaware that she is holding up her leg as you ask her to drop it. These examples are signs of auto-protecting and/or child abuse.

A while back I had a client that had no clue how his body was feeling when he laid down on the massage table. During the session, I would be on a spot and ask him how it felt, and he would respond: “fine.” Moments later, the muscle I was holding began to recoil into a tight ball, and I asked again “does this hurt?” He said “no,” so I asked him, “do you see how your body is running away from me?” He blinked and said, “Huh, wow. It is doing that.” This is the body protecting itself without the client being aware. Therefore, we need to stop diving in and making people squirm just because you can. Yes that way works, but produces a short term gain in exchange for a long term loss.

So where can we go from here? What we can do is play with that area. Let’s take a trigger point, for example. The muscle with a trigger point can refer pain somewhere else, but we need to resist the temptation to grab at it. Instead, we should back off, feeling lightly on it to look for when that specific muscle begins to push back, and then wait or stop because that is it for now. The feeling we are looking for is very subtle push back. Imagine the muscle is a damp sponge. The correct massage technique feels like this to you: you want to push gently on the sponge to the point when the water starts to trickle out of it. When you learn that push, you will be able to get an area of the body and/or a particular muscle to clear so much quicker and with less backlash.