Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/1234356
the client says, "It's still not deep enough." Your breath shortens, your lips tighten, you feel the tension in your own shoulders building, and you push into their rhomboids with all your strength. You can feel your deltoids and biceps start to shake. You start to pay less attention to the client and more attention to the clock. You muddle through the rest of the session and leave the room quickly, shaking your head all the while. Spoiler alert: Your client probably isn't happy. You definitely aren't happy. Clients who keep demanding deeper pressure are infuriating, but this kind of client is going to keep showing up. And your current approach to these clients probably isn't working. So let's try something different. Here's what I think: Yes, many of these clients will benefit from deeper work, but what these clients are really asking for is something more important—more engaged work. This client doesn't need you to dig into their muscles with all your might. This client needs your help to inhabit their own body more fully. This client needs your help to feel your touch. How do we do this? First, we are going to see this client differently. Then, we are going to work with this client differently. Seeing Differently The problem of the demanding client is a problem of perception. These clients—the ones for whom your best work is never enough—are annoying. They are infuriating. They are bad people. They exist to ruin your day. I have thought all these things. You probably have too, as you muddle your way through the session and hope they don't come back. But as you know, this type of client is going to come back. So instead, let's try to understand them. Occasionally, you may get a client who is having a bad day and is just determined to have a bad experience on your table. Alternately, it is possible you may have the rare client who has some kind of condition, neurological or otherwise, where they are literally incapable of feeling pressure unless it is exceedingly deep. But, in the vast majority of cases, this situation is much, much simpler: You are just working with a client who, at this moment, is having a hard time sensing your pressure. And chances are, in general, this client has a hard time feeling their own body. Your job is not to show this client how strong you are. Your job is to help them feel their own body—to become a bit more embodied. No small feat, for sure. But enabling a client to feel their body more fully is actually easier—and infinitely more rewarding—than trying to overwhelm their defenses and get them to submit to your Herculean cross-fiber friction. We are going to explore this very different way of seeing this demanding client, and then explore how you can work on them—how you can show them how to feel your touch, and their own body, in a more satisfying way. Acknowledging the Autonomic It is easy to think of each body on your table as a long pile of muscles, topped by skin, and perhaps interwoven with fascia. We spend each session trying to relax, lengthen, or release the muscles. That vision of our work—manually manipulating one muscle, and then another, and then another—is too simple. The only way a muscle changes is when the nervous system changes. The muscles are just meat. It is only via the sparks of nerve conduction that a muscle is animated. It is only a nerve firing that causes a muscle to contract— whether concentrically, eccentrically, or isometrically—and only the absence of nerve firing that allows a muscle to passively return to its resting length. As David Lauterstein says, "Muscles don't relax or tense up of their own accord any more than lights turn on or off without electricity . . . . Thus, it would appear our therapeutic effects arise from communicating with the nervous system through the musculoskeletal system—not by directly manipulating it. Just as we communicate through cell phones, but are not talking to the phones themselves, we are sending messages to the nervous system using the foundational language of caring, skillful touch." 1 It is true that each of our strokes works with the muscles (and the skin, the fascia, and the endless numbers of receptors embedded within each of these layers), but all of those strokes have to work through the nervous system. As a result, we need to pay more attention to the nervous system while we work. When the client is lying passive on our table, their somatic (or "voluntary") nervous system is at rest—they aren't consciously moving their bodies (except to jerk their head out A minute later, That client might have asked for more pressure because that is often the only thing a client knows how to ask for when a session doesn't feel right. It is possible that what they really wanted was your attention. 70 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k m a y / j u n e 2 0 2 0