29/09/2024
Educate your clients
Often we face the dilemma of clients wanting a lot of pressure, even to the point of hurting them, and hurting ourselves in the process. What can we do? First, we need to educate our clients. Many have been brainwashed into thinking that it's the pressure that makes the changes. If you understand that massage works via the nervous system, not by mechanical pressure changing the tissues, then you can then help your clients to understand that, too. Clients have often been taught that massage needs to be painful to be effective. By educating clients about how pain works and that causing pain may actually sensitize their nervous system, we can counteract this idea of "no pain, no gain." Some clients crave intensity. I'll tell them that I'll work firmly but not hard because I don't want to injure them. I'll try to meet them halfway, so to speak, and give them enough weight to try to satisfy their craving for intensity, adding the skin stretching along with it, and, over time, try to gently back them away from needing such a high level of stimulation. I compare it to someone who is listening to music at a dangerously loud volume. If you turn it down abruptly, it will feel to them as if they can hardly hear the music, but if you turn it down incrementally, they may slowly adjust to a safer level of volume. If clients continue to insist on what seems to be excessive pressure, I will tell them about clients who have been injured by massage, sometimes permanently, and let them know I don't want them (or me) to be the subject of the next case report. If a client still insists, then perhaps it's time to let them go and hope they don't get injured by another therapist.
I hope this will help massage therapists get ideas about how they can work in a manner that will allow them to have a long and enjoyable career. We talk about sustainable practices regarding the environment but we need sustainable practices in our job, too. If we don't work in a manner that we can maintain over a period of many years, we'll end up putting ourselves out of work. Not only will we lose a job that we love, we may end up living with chronic pain as a result of it. Our clients will lose valued therapists and our field will lose therapists just as they are beginning to mature in their profession.
I'm sure that other seasoned therapists have ideas not mentioned here. If you're an experienced therapist and have other ideas you'd like to share, please feel free to leave a comment.
P.s..I have struggled this last few weeks getting this same message across to certain individuals who still have the 'no pain no gains ' theory and as frustrated as I am with this recently, I still won't give in to it.
