BY Melanie Langer

The Fulcrum, Issue 93 September 2024

There is an alchemy that brings practitioner and client together. Both are teachers, both are students. Each with their own story and path of learning.

Discovering the dynamics at play in the relational field is a profoundly therapeutic process for both practitioner and client. Understanding these dynamics through reflective practice empowers us towards safe and effective work that deepens beyond the more tangible aspects of the treatment process.

Discovering a Resonant Field

It’s 1994, I’m in my mid-twenties and have been working as a massage therapist since age eighteen.

It’s my fourth client of the day and I’m feeling strange. I’m starting to judge myself. What is WRONG with me? One minute I’m feeling energised; the next a bit numb. Before lunch I felt exhausted, and now I’m feeling so tight in my chest that I’m finding it hard to breathe. Why am I so moody? Am I ok? Should I be doing this work if I’m not the balanced practitioner I’m ‘supposed’ to be?

Thirty years later, I recognise that my self awareness was then in its infancy. Even now, it’s an ever-present growing edge. Back then, there were few road maps for body workers interested in the emotional dimension of their clients. To me, it seemed obvious how relevant this connection was, yet it appeared more novel to others than I ever expected. For the time  being, I was alone with what was emerging in my treatment room. It would be five years and  a training in counselling later before I came home to CST and a way of working where this  mind-body connection was fully accepted.

As CST practitioners, we attune to ourselves before coming into the shared field; we  delicately and resourcefully sit within a dynamic state of constant unfolding. It takes time and, usually, many clients to build the exquisite muscle that is needed to hold the bigger story we  encounter in this work. This bigger story is interwoven with the tissues of the body and asks  for attendance in the relational field. In turn, the relational field is rich with everything needed  for steps towards greater health and well-being. It is also rich with unconscious content that  can weigh heavily on the therapeutic process.

Back to 1994.

I continue in self-judgement until something at the back of my mind starts joining up the dots. I remember feeling great during my effervescent first client and heavy whilst working with the next client, who felt closed, just wanting to escape through the treatment. Struggling with a sense of tiredness, I then worked with a woman who was overwhelmed and overworked. And here in my fourth client, I realise they’d said they were finding it hard to breathe over the weekend – hmmm, a coincidence?

Is it really possible I could be feeling what THEY feel? Is that why I’m feeling this tightness in my chest? I remember recently hearing about somatic resonance. Is that what this is and, if so, what do I do with it?

Something pulls me to keep asking these unspoken questions, moving me closer to this territory that is opening up as I work with clients. It’s rich and compelling but disconcertingly unclear, and to be honest – I’m not sure what I’m doing. As one part of me moves without hesitation towards this, self-doubt cautions me causing an inner conflict.

Recognising A Need For More Skills

Like a ball that begins to wobble as it’s pushed harder and harder, the amount of information I was getting from my clients’ bodies that I didn’t know what to do with, put great strain on what I was using professionally to treat them. It wobbled and safety became, despite the best of intentions, at risk. There was something in me that sensed this but it took time to reach my cognition. The call to work with what was arising in my clients became so great that I was forced to seek something more: some kind of muscle I hadn’t developed yet, knowledge that would equip me to walk this line between mind and body and support my clients, whose somatic expression opened doors to their psyche in ways no words could.

I was riveted. How can I discover more about this territory and the dynamic that seems to involve both my client and me? As a bodyworker, was it even my place to follow this unfolding story? I want to know more but what do I do with this information? Clients aren’t asking for this – they come to lie down, ease pain and relax, not for a therapy session.

I soon learned there needed to be a negotiated agreement to venture into this territory. That consent was probably necessary. My massage training had simply been to ask questions at the beginning of a session about things that might affect a client’s lymphatic system, their sleep, their monthly cycle, their tense shoulders. In most bodywork courses at the time, there was a divide between facilitating emotional work and bodywork.

That day, back in 1994, was thankfully unusual, but it was pivotal. I rarely spent whole days feeling what my clients were bringing. From that day on, the more I became aware of what was happening beyond the actual treatment itself, the more it became information for me. The more it became information the more it became heard and the more it became heard the less it was an unconscious burden in the field between us. Symptoms became expressions and expressions relieved symptoms. The journey of reflecting on clients, myself and what happens between us became an inextricable and essential part of the actual moments spent directly in the treatment room.

To Work With Clients Is To Work With Ourselves

Clients mirror things for us and we do the same for them. Our physicality and embodied restrictions can play into the treatment process. As we simply sit with our clients things can come up or be triggered for us to process and consider consciously. This might be painful or overwhelming and, for the safety of the work, it is these moments where supervision really comes into its own, steering us towards finding support with the hard to hold material that this profound work can elicit.

I remember speaking with my first supervisor about how difficult I was finding it to manage my own emotions after a bereavement. She gave me an image of a pot on a stove and suggested I move it onto the back burner and turn down the heat whilst I was with my clients. An invaluable image I use to this day: as practitioners, our personal content is for us to hold, not the client, and it is important we remain responsible for  whatever we begin to become aware of.

The Therapeutic Relationship

A therapeutic relationship is automatically formed between practitioner and client. The power  dynamic here needs awareness and responsibility: there are unspoken hopes and fears on  both sides; the client’s desire to be well and ours to please or heal; the vulnerability that  would have a client put us in a position of influence if we’re not mindful of this.

There is a shared path of healing, often illuminated by the clients we attract and who choose us as their practitioner.

There is great value in exploring what this means to you in your existing practice and learning how to embrace how this dynamic affects your work with clients, their response to treatment and your own personal development.

We can find ourselves balancing the need to reassure clients whilst avoiding false promises.  There are a myriad of ways we can get caught up in a web of transference and counter  transference. Yet it is this very web where we often find the grist for our clinical mill.

When you look into yourself to understand the process with your client, you have an  opportunity to see reflected aspects that can give greater insight into both your client and the  therapeutic relationship where healing occurs. Invisible content becomes visible in ways it  wasn’t in the treatment room and working with this is powerfully transformative. Chomping  through blocks where progress is stagnant, where frustrations are high, unearths information  which, in and of itself, ends up being the portal to integration and re-alignment when  processed. When acknowledged and reintegrated, this subtle level of reality potentially  transforms the healing process and the relational field within which we work.

Reflective Practice as a Clinical Tool

For many, developing a reflective practice goes alongside the development of their  perceptual skills.

Like our work on the table, it exists within a wider field of action. Finding the middle ground  between not over-focusing on emotional patterning (or any other aspect of what draws our  attention, for that matter) and not spiritually by-passing what genuinely wants to be  acknowledged and felt is a powerful edge to walk. One that CST well disposes us to.

Therapeutic direction can be profoundly altered by including and working with ourselves, our  values and the therapeutic relationship as part of what arises during a session. Blocks we  might not have even known were present in the treatment room can present themselves in  the supervision space. Sometimes these need curiosity and consideration; other times the  lightest acknowledgement allows them to give way. Sometimes they cause us to face our  own shadow and ingrained patterns that can show up again and again.

By attending to unconscious content in the field, the field is changed.

Those who include reflective practice as part of their everyday way of working will know how  it untangles things that have not necessarily been consciously worked on. The nature of awareness can change what’s presenting itself without a word being spoken. To understand  this phenomenon is to consider things like constellation work,Sheldrake’s morphic resonance, quantum non-locality and field theory.

Trusting Your Own Practitioner Voice & Identity

Each of us comes to CST with our own reference points and unique history that informs our  lens. We all have our own emphasis and are led to work in different ways, making the  supervision space different things to different practitioners.

Finding and believing in your own particular flavour, nuance, strengths, and interests is what  carpets your treatment room with empowerment. We come to this work from who we are and  who we are is all we can ever be. THAT is who your client comes to – not some idealised  expert. Finding peace within your practitioner skin is not linear or static but a rich and  wonderful, unique and personal journey. One taken on a path along which we walk with our  clients beyond the treatment room – rich with growth and learning that continues for as long  as we do.

Melanie Langer is a complementary health practitioner with a private practice in Surrey and online. She holds a BSc (hons) in Biomedical Science and has trained in massage therapy, reflexology, integrative  and humanistic counselling and CST. A teacher, supervisor and mentor, she is passionate about empowering practitioners to honour their unique essence.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of the CSTA.