Massage & Bodywork

JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2022

Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/1439667

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 53 of 100

L i s te n to T h e A B M P Po d c a s t a t a b m p.co m /p o d c a s t s o r w h e reve r yo u a cce s s yo u r favo r i te p o d c a s t s 51 How to Provide Possibility These are specific and practical ways you can work with clients to create a sense of expansiveness and possibility before, during, and after your sessions. BEFORE Get all the condition-specific information you need during your intake, but also make sure to think big and ask broad questions. Whenever a client is particularly focused on telling me about their specific "issues," I also make sure to ask a general question— "How is the rest of you feeling?" or something like that—to prompt them to think about their whole body. DURING The single most important thing you can do during your session is slow down. If you want your client to be more engaged in how their body feels, you can't rush through your strokes. You need to give the client the time, literally, to feel each stroke, and to feel how their body is responding. Talk Less If you have observations you want to share, save them until the end of the session. Because you are the authority, if you do talk during the session, the client will immediately pay attention, which means they won't be paying attention to what's happening inside their body. Allow your client to maintain their focus on what they are feeling. AFTER Give the Client Time to Talk I know we are often rushed between sessions. But even just a couple minutes of conversation can be very useful. (My solution is to invite the client to chat with me while I am setting up the room for the next client.) It is in this post-massage moment that you can encourage the client to explore how they are feeling and what they noticed during the massage, which can start to change their standard narrative. Celebrate Their Successes After the session, particularly for those clients who are adamant about how tight they are, I try to also mention a particular area of the body that seemed to respond really well to the massage, and that seemed to lengthen or loosen or soften as we worked. The point here is not to rebut or deny their own focus, but just to give them another perspective—to remind them there are parts of their body that have just shifted. I am planting the seed that this transformation is possible elsewhere. Give Specific Description and Simple Action Instead of making big generalizations, give specific description and simple action. I don't think there is any point in saying, "You're really tight" or "Your shoulders are like boulders." Instead, I try to offer more specific descriptions of what I felt. "The area around your deltoid felt congested to me" or "The lower back seemed to resist the pressure today, like it wasn't quite ready to release." And then I pair those descriptions with a possible action—either something they can do or something we can do together: "If you have a minute, I can show you a shoulder stretch that might be useful" or "Maybe in the next session we can give that area more specific attention." Acknowledge Your Opinions Very little we tell the client about their body is verifiable fact. Pretty much everything useful we will tell them is just our (informed) opinion. We should be clear about that. Acknowledge What You Don't Know It is easy to think the client needs us to answer every question they have. But we are actually more credible authorities—and more useful therapists—when we are honest about the things we aren't sure about and the questions we can't answer. Acknowledge that Your Client is the Expert When it comes to the client's body— and the client's experience of being in that body in the world—they know vastly more than you ever will. Clients often need to be reminded of this! Talk in Shifts, Not Absolutes I don't think telling a client they are really tight is helpful; but furthermore, I'm not even sure it is a particularly valid statement. After all, they are tight compared to what? It seems to me there is no standard, no average, across all people, for what differentiates a "tight" muscle from a not-tight muscle. (Our profession can't even agree on whether trigger points exist; how can we have any definite standard of what constitutes "tight"?) Hence, try to avoid these kinds of declarative statements. Instead, use statements that suggest change. "It feels to me like you are holding tension in this right shoulder blade today." A statement like this is specific rather than global, and it also implies this situation could be different tomorrow. For clients you see repeatedly, you can use what you've felt from previous sessions and make comparisons over time. "Your upper traps feel tighter to me today than they did a month ago. Have you been doing something different in your days? Have you been feeling particularly stressed?" That's a lot more valuable than just, "Wow, you are really tight." And this language of shifts opens the door to figure out ways they can make shifts in their own life to feel better in their body.

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of Massage & Bodywork - JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2022