mattlistener

So, I'm a massage therapist. I took a professional massage training course '98-'00, and I've had a successful private practice for almost two years now.

I'm also a client-centered therapist. I took a 1-year Diploma program in Glasgow during '96-'97 in this discipline, returned with some coursework incomplete, and back-burnered it to pursue the massage career. Now I've front-burnered the counselling again and am rolling right along seeing 2-4 clients per week, still on a student basis.

All along I've been telling people that 5-10 years down the line I could see myself practicing a combined discipline of massage and counselling. I knew coming back from Scotland that I wanted to get training in healing through touch, and saw the combination-potential then. I could have gone right into body-oriented psychotherapy, but I was really clear that I wanted to have a separate foundation in each discipline first. Good me!

My recent client-work has gone very well. I'm really starting to feel I'm a competent, professional counsellor, and coming up again is my question of what a combined discipline would look like. One immediate observation: it's a lot easier to add talk to touch-therapy than it is to add touch to talk-therapy.

In fact, as I think about it more, my massage therapy is *already* a good ways along toward the combined discipline I imagined. As I'm working with people I'm teaching them how to be more directive with me in asking for what they want, and helping me hone in on the best way of working on them at that time. Sometimes I make body-observations during the session (regarding process, not appearance). I remark that one area is tighter than usual, for example, and point out sudden relaxations or other ways their body is changing in response to what I'm doing. I ask what they're noticing too, and we learn together about what is going on. After every session I ask a client for their observations about how they feel differently now, and ask them to go beyond "great" and "very relaxed" to really focus on what areas of their body feel different and how.

My longer-term clients have gotten much more aware of what is going on in their body and more articulate about what they areas want worked on and how. That's important healing in and of itself! There's a mind/body aspect to what I'm doing that I'm realizing is probably of more long-term importance than the tension-reduction.

Thinking about the future again... I prefer the therapy relationship (of any kind) to be client-directed as much as possible. I don't have an agenda about how people are supposed to be or feel, and I very much believe that people have a natural tendency toward growth and healing. IMHO that tendency is a more trustworthy guide to a therapy process than someone else's "expertise".

However, a lot of people don't know what to do with a formless helping relationship, they just know that they're unhappy. In a talk-therapy session, it's not formless -- people generally start talking about something that's bothering them, and we follow our noses from there. But if I'm going to offer a helping relationship that potentially involves talk and touch, people are going to want to know that looks like and get an idea of how that can help them. I'll need to come up with or learn a structure to present. Or at least that's the way it seems to me at the moment.

Or it may be that a future client naturally starts utilizing more of what I have to offer, and I start learning the structure of the synthesis by *doing* it, and following the scent of what works. That would suit my style. :-)

Comments welcome!