I'm a person

[sonia]

runpunkrun asked "What's the one thing you wish people knew about your profession?"

The one thing I wish all my (prospective) clients knew is that I'm a person. Massage therapy is a service job. Some people automatically discount people who do services for them, and other people have a hard time seeing anyone as a separate person. I wish everyone could see everyone as separate people!

My fragrance sensitivities do a fairly good job of filtering for people who see me as enough of a person to make sure they don't wear anything scented to sessions, and my Covid precautions are adding another layer of filtering, so my actual clients are mostly fine. Over the years I've learned to more firmly show up in my personhood, rather than letting people erase me in the name of "good service."

There was one prospective client who thought she got to negotiate about waiting two weeks after Covid-risky behavior to come in for a session. I'm not saying two weeks is the perfect amount of time, but I'm definitely the one who gets to decide on a boundary about who comes into my space. She eventually went off in a huff, which was fine with me.

More specific to massage therapy but still about boundaries, I wish everyone were 100% clear that therapeutic massage is not sex work. It's been a while since I had an issue with that, but a recent client seemed a little confused at first. Fortunately he didn't reschedule.

And about trauma work, I wish everyone knew that they don’t need fixing, and my work won’t fix them.

Comments

[runpunkrun]

What kind of trauma work do you do?

[sonia]

I help people heal from abuse and all kinds of trauma that gets held in the body. I help people get back in communication with themselves and trust their body more.

If you're asking what tools I use, a lot of listening and reflecting back what I hear, sensing what's going on in their body and checking that I have it right, asking people to pause and let their body settle as they tell a traumatic story, along with massage and craniosacral and gentle touch that helps the body relax.

[runpunkrun]

Thanks for explaining. It sounds like a combination of several things I'm familiar with, and a little like EMDR without the eyeballs.

[sonia]

"EMDR without the eyeballs" is a great phrase. I loved finding out that they can do EMDR with sound, or with vibrations on hands. I think a lot of techniques address the same underlying nervous system issues.

I also think that a lot of healing, including with EMDR, is just as much about the client's and practitioner's nervous systems being in warm resonance as they are about the specific techniques.

[runpunkrun]

I agree. It's so much harder to work toward healing if your client/practitioner isn't on the same wavelength as you.

[jesse_the_k]

warm resonance captures that most excellent relationship!

I'm grateful I've encountered it with several talking therapists -- and now that I write it out, I realize that EMDR (in my case, audio boops and tactile buzzers) is both somatic and narrative.

---

I'm intrigued by "they don't need fixing" -- how is fixing different from healing?

[sonia]

So glad to hear you've had warm resonance with therapists!

Of course they can overlap in some ways, but to generalize: healing is organic and comes from the inside, and fixing is judgmental and comes from the outside. Surgery is fixing, and healing is what comes after. Some of my clients think they need (emotional) surgery, but there's nothing about them that needs to be removed. They need support to heal from the inside.

What's your experience with the two words?

[jesse_the_k]

Thank you for giving words to a distinction I've only understood recently.