Blind Men on the Elephant part 1

The discussion of psychologically oriented bodywork was brought up in fb again, this time on Michelle Doyle's wall.

Here's my comment on Michelle's wall:

I think it's brings up important ethical questions. It also begs the question, when, in the world of alternative therapy and self help gurus, is a person practicing/teaching therapy without a license? I don't really know the answer to how the practice of psychotherapy is defined. I suspect it is probably different from state to state.

Ever feel like one of those blind men on the elephant with regard to our own little views of what's actually going on in the mind/body/spirit realm of the bodywork we share with our clients?!

In my experience, an emotional, psychological release is not always necessary. Sometimes it is and the condition doesn't resolve until that, and it's coinciding energy pattern in the emotional body or meridian system or energy body or whatever your vernacular chooses to call it, is addressed. But sometimes, not really, it's just more simple than that.

I also get a lot of athletes in my studio who have recently over-trained some part or area in playing the edge in their sports. Some of them see me weekly as part of their active recovery paradigms. In those cases it is often quite nuts and bolts. The right combination of specific massage techniques, some ice, some rehab exercises in place of whatever was recently over-training the weak link and they're good to go....and no it doesn't usually come back unless it gets re-injured.

So my view of this is that sometimes dysfunction is sourced in purely exogenous factors and doesn't require psycho-emotional release, sometimes it is a somatic manifestation of an endogenously sourced configuration. Then it's a deeper healing that must occur.

Mark Lamm and I had a dialogue about this recently, over on his fb page including speculations as to where these emotional traumas might be stored. It was long enough and interesting enough to me that I then posted on my blog with his permission. It can be also accessed from my fb wall as 'No Harm No Foul' or networked blogs if anyone is interested in that discussion.

One of the points I attempted to make in that dialogue, which I think is important and which does not usually get addressed in those schools of bodywork that are psychologically oriented, is that abreaction alone, including energy balancing, is often not enough to help a person fully integrate a newly remembered trauma, especially from physical or sexual abuse and especially if the person was young (pre-verbal) when it happened. Communication skills with loved ones and re-balancing of family dynamics is part of the integration aspect of this type of healing.

Bodyworkers, [massage therapists, physical therapists, chiropractors, osteopaths] are not qualified to do this work. We haven't been trained as psychologists or psychiatrists. I think that if we are trained in a psychologically oriented school of body work not taught by someone who is, at least, a trained psychologist we can very easily tap into a reserve of disowned material not unlike what is happening in the gulf right now, with the ooze making a mess in an untamed way and subjecting the client to ongoing unnecessary psycho-emotional pain by remaining stuck in a not fully resolved upwelling of something that was being held in the unconscious mind in a dissociative state for a reason.

Lomi body work (not to be confused with Lomi Lomi) taught by Robert Hall, M.D. and Richard Heckler in No. Cal. is a psychologically aware system originally taught by a team, one of which is a black belt in Aikido and one of which was a psychiatrist. I think the work teaches adequate respect for the complexity of the process of integration as an aspect of emotional release.

There are several schools of bodywork, however, teaching massage therapists and physical therapists to go for the energy cysts or myofascial unwindings coincidental to unremembered traumas in droves. This kind of work is being taught by physical therapists or osteopaths who have no clue about what to do to help a client integrate this material and are hubristic enough to think that it's not even necessary.

Frankly I think that's irresponsible and unethical. Since these folks have not done any population studies using Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) or another psych evaluation tool [*see below] to see if their clients are in fact better off a month, 6 months, a year after the work they will never have to know if a large percentage end up stuck in some PTSD state of perpetual victimhood.

I really have an ethical problem with their assumptions, and the hubris behind them.

*From Wiki: "Clinicians can use the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, HRSD in place of, or in conjunction with, the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale, the Wechsler Depression Rating Scale, the Raskin Depression Rating Scale, the Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (IDS), the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (QIDS)"