Hope

Hope. It’s a word these days that can be hard to conjure, and for this reason can be even more important. The longer I’ve been a massage therapist, the more I realize that this word is paramount to my career. Not for my sake (although this could be true as well) but for my clients’ sake.

Often times as massage therapists we see clients who have been dealing with pain for years and years, seen multitudes of healthcare practitioners, and come to us without hope. “I have to learn to live with this,” “I don’t know what else to do,” “I’m sure you can’t help with this, but…” are all phrases I hear regularly. At times the hopelessness is clear as day and expressed before any other “symptom.” Other times, it’s a longer story and comes about through multiple sessions as you build therapeutic rapport. It is also not surprising when you hear the stories: decades of pain, multiple surgeries, years of suffering, destruction of quality of life, dismantling of relationships, suffering. Our clients often lack hope.

A couple years ago, I made a decision to tell most of my clients this simple phrase: “I think you’re going to get better.” I was very nervous to do this. After all, clients I often see have been in pain for decades and seen a host of practitioners smarter than me. I didn’t say it out of arrogance, but rather with the knowledge of the power of hope. As with most experiments, despite the fear, I realized the usefulness quickly. Even with my most complex clients, the phrase did exactly what I wanted: gave hope. Now let me be very clear, it was not false hope provided by claims of grandeur. There were caveats of ignorance of how and when. I avoided foolishness with clients who I thought had conditions beyond musculoskeletal pain. It was not founded in arrogance of my technique or touch. The statement was built on the foundation that most musculoskeletal pain improves with time (even without intervention), extensive experience that PNMT can help a lot of people with musculoskeletal pain, and knowledge that a client who has hope has a better chance than one without.

This is also when rubber hit the road and I had to back up my hopeful assertion. Results are what give hope. Not statements or theories. Results. It is in this that the power of PNMT and massage lies. Giving results of pain relief with consistency gives a client hope. A hope that may have been missing for years. This isn’t easy to do. It takes assessment, it takes skill and most importantly it takes learning from failure. It takes an understanding that you need to walk with your client on their journey to give them hope. Session by session. False promises and elaborate theories do not give hope. Insistence on a certain technique, dogmatic principles on mechanism do not give hope. Results do.

Similarly, I have learned over my career that it is important to not underestimate small results. It is often in small changes that hope lies. Most clients in my experience are not looking for a cure, they’re looking for progress. There are outliers of course, but the vast majority also intuitively know the power of hope. If they could just get a little better, they could start walking the dog again, and they wouldn’t be so stressed about missing another day of work, and they could go out and dance with their friends again.

Giving hope is perhaps the most beautiful thing about being a massage therapist. In a world of pain and suffering, it’s what is absolutely necessary.