What is trauma-informed massage?
Photo courtesy of Lauren Hanussak.
Trauma has become a buzzword in the last few years, but what is it? In broad strokes, trauma is our response to experiences that make us feel unsafe. Whether they’re ongoing situations or singular events, they make us feel like our well-being is at risk and trigger our sympathetic nervous system. While each of us and every situation is unique, reactions to trauma typically fall into five types- fight, flight, freeze, flop, and friend (the last of which includes the more commonly mentioned fawn response).
There is a huge amount of ongoing study on this subject and our understanding of how trauma impacts our health is still relatively shallow, but it is widely accepted that experiencing trauma does have a negative impact on physical and emotional health.
The adjective “trauma-informed” has become its own buzzword in healthcare and education. From Psychology Today, “to be ‘trauma-informed’ is to recognize the pervasiveness of trauma in the world. . . It means becoming aware of trauma's many personal and societal consequences, anticipating how trauma survivors may respond to our words and actions, and doing our part to create a world that does not cause further harm. Even more, being trauma-informed means helping to create a world that can foster growth, resiliency, and healing...”
When it comes to trauma-informed care, what is left out of the above definition is as important as what is included: It is not necessary to know the details of an individual’s trauma in order to provide trauma-informed care; and, offering trauma-informed care does not necessarily involve treating trauma.
Your massage therapist does not need to know what specific events have occurred in your life that have left you traumatized. As massage therapists our scope of practice is strictly limited: We work with the nervous system (via the musculoskeletal system) to relieve stress, pain, and discomfort. Because everything is connected, this can and often does have a direct, positive impact on mental health, but we aren’t psychotherapists or psychologists. While most of us are more than happy to lend a compassionate ear, it is outside of our scope of practice to provide talk therapy.
So, what is trauma-informed massage? It’s mostly about how we communicate, and not so much about how we do the actual bodywork. The above definition from Psychology Today is a good one, and applying it to massage therapy includes (but isn’t limited to) the following:
Open, clear, compassionate, and direct communication
Client-centered care, prioritizing informed and ongoing consent
Body-neutral and gender-affirming language
Rebalancing of the power dynamic between therapist and client, empowering the client to express their needs
Recognizing that our expertise in massage and anatomy doesn’t grant us expertise on YOU
Small details like not blocking the exit during the intake conversation, and guiding you through the entire experience so that you’re never left wondering, “What am I supposed to do now?”
There’s so much to cover here. Pretty much everything I’ll be sharing on this blog is about some component of how to be a trauma-informed massage therapist, so keep reading.
That’s it for this post. Please leave questions, constructive criticism, and whatever is in your heart in the comments!