By Dan Vidal
If you take away one thing from this post, let it be this: the treatment process is kind of like working out – its success depends on your level of active participation and commitment.
When you come in for treatment, you must understand that although you will be receiving massage with the goal of getting overactive muscles to relax, in many ways this is more like a personal training session than a relaxation massage at the spa. Instead of training your muscles to grow bigger, we are training you to have better awareness, and therefore better CONTROL of your muscles through therapeutic touch, joint mobilization, and mindful movement.
The first step in this journey is to improve your ability to sense where your muscles and the bones that they attach to are in space. You must learn to sense where the areas of tension in your body are, how these areas of tension affect one another, and how these relative levels of tension are affected by what is happening in both your internal and external worlds.
There is a simple rule of thumb: the more pain you are experiencing and the more distortions in your posture there are, the less efficient you probably are at sensing what is happening in your body. It has been shown that human touch is sensitive enough to detect the difference between surfaces that differ by just a single layer of molecules!* If it is possible for human beings to detect things at the molecular level, then this leaves a very high ceiling for us to improve at sensing and understanding exactly what is going on in our bodies.
There is an entire universe of physiological activity going on within us at all times – respiration, digestion, nerve signaling, immune function, and muscle contraction just to name a few. My job as a therapist is to guide you in your journey to better understand your body so that we can best help it heal itself.
I assess how your body organizes itself according to what I observe and measure, as well as by the things you report that you sense within your body. Input from you the patient is crucial, therefore it is your job to focus on what you are sensing, and to continually work on improving this ability on your own time.
In order to do this, you will have to be persistent, patient, and curious. You must be interested in and willing to keep learning more and more about how and why your body works the way it does. This will make treatment sessions much more productive and reduce the number of treatments you will need in order to get better.
Remember: half of the information we obtain about your body is from what I observe, but the other half is from what YOU observe. The more detailed and accurate that information is, the better able I will be to help you, and more importantly, the better able you will be to help yourself.
References
* https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/amazing-sensitivity-human-touch