Ethics

Educating Massage Clients is one of the best ways to create awareness and acceptance about massage.  Education is not talking at people telling them about massage, about what you can do and why they should get a massage.  The root word of Education is the Latin word educare, which means to “draw out.” To educate, therefore, means to draw out something that fundamentally is already there. In the process of education, you actually become aware of yourself.   In most of our standard examples of education like in public schools and in massage school it becomes just a memorizing of information and a regurgitation of that information.  It isn’t education.

To educate clients and potential clients it is more about building a relationship with them.  It is about setting aside your own agendas to even get a massage appointment and showing a real interest in them.  It begins with asking people questions to find out their needs.  Then if you find that their needs match what you have to offer you can then easily talk about what massage can do for them.

I have heard a few massage therapists say things like ” I have sent many letters over the years to doctors and others trying to educate them and it didn’t work.”   While I don’t know for sure what was in the letters I would guess that it wasn’t educating and it was more about them. It might have been more along the lines of presenting information that the recipient wasn’t interested in.

To educate others you need to forget what you know about massage – all the big terms, the name of the muscles and things like that.  The ‘Curse of Knowledge” from Chip and Dan Heaths Book “Made to Stick” says:

Once we know something it is hard to imagine what it is like to not know it.  Our knowledge has cursed us.  And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t really create our listeners state of mind.

• Make sure your website and communication is about the client and what is in it for them. So often massage therapists make the mistake of making everything about themselves. Assume that people know little to nothing about massage and what it can do until you find out otherwise. Keep it simple and in plain English.
• You need to understand what your client/potential client wants. They start with saying they want to feel better or be out of pain – but why? So they can play a sport better? So they can play more with their kids? So they can enjoy their work, home life, vacation? Ask questions to get to their why? Tell them how you will help them solve their problems and help them achieve their goals.
• People want to know that you are the expert and can handle whatever health issue that they have and that you will be able to do the right thing to help them. Let them know that you understand by sharing a story about other client situations (without names or client ID) or let them know a story about you. You are the EXPERT! People want to know that. Google wants to know that too! Google wants your website to be good enough to pass their E-A-T guidelines that were just released by Google in 2014 and recently updated
  
  E-A-T  (“Expertise, Authoritativeness or Trustworthiness”
• Believe in what you do. Understand what you do. Be always learning about what you do. But more than that, make sure you know how to express that belief without sounding like a used car salesman.
  

Example: I started my business renting a room out of a health club in downtown Seattle. I used to sit at the front desk and greet club members and hand out towels and locker keys. One guy would go out running when he was there and he did his stretching by the front desk and would stop to talk. He kept saying “Oh I need to get a massage someday” etc etc but never would book. One day I asked him why he was running so much – did he have a personal goal or was he training for some event. Turns out he was training for a marathon. When I was able to make the connections to how massage could help him run better and train better, he signed up for a massage….not just one massage… but one massage a week for about 10 years.

Yesterday on Facebook I saw this post from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills show that showed just how much people do not know about what massage is and who massage therapists are. We have lots of work to do.

Originally written on June 5 2010. Updated May 18, 2019

 

The word ‘energy vampire’ seems to come up every so often in discussions about massage sessions with clients.  What is an energy vampire?  Is there even any such thing? How can you protect yourself from these beings and run a successful massage therapy business?

What is an “energy vampire“?

I found many definitions of them:

• Psycentral.com says:  “Energy vampires are emotionally immature individuals who have the sense that the whole world revolves around them. They are almost incapable of seeing things from another person’s perspective. They often lack empathy. They believe that they must take everything they can get from others and that giving anything will deprive them of essential resources. It’s as if the whole world exists just to serve them and you are the latest object upon which they have set their sights for exploitation.”
• Judith Orloff, author of   Empaths Survival Guide and Emotional Freedom and  says in her article What is an energy vampire?:
  “Energy vampires exude negative energy that drains you. Energy vampires range from the intentionally malicious ones to those who are oblivious to their effect. Some are overbearing and obnoxious; others are friendly and charming. For example, you’re at a party talking to a perfectly nice person, but suddenly you’re nauseous or weak. Or how about the co-worker who drones on about how she broke up with her boyfriend for the tenth time? Eventually, she feels better, but you’re spent. The bottom line is that on a subtle energy level these people suck you dry.   Types of energy vampires include The Narcissist, someone who is self-absorbed and has empathy deficient disorder. The Victim, someone who wears you out with their wining and lack of willingness to find solutions. The Passive Aggressive, someone who is angry with a smile and gets you with jabs that you don’t see coming. The Rageaholic, someone who dumps anger on you and spreads toxic energy in their general vicinity. The Drama Queen or King is someone who wears you out with exhausting drams.”
• Christiane Northrup, MD, author of the recent book “Dodging Energy Vampires,” explains that energy vampire characteristics do tend to map to “cluster B” personality disorders — the ones where people tend to have dramatic, overly emotional or erratic thinking or behavior -Cluster B includes people with antisocial, borderline and narcissistic personality disorders

Types of Energy Vampires

You probably have come across various types of so called energy vampires and have seen how they work.

• People who talk too much in a session especially about topics that annoy you – politics, religion, how they cheated on their spouse or they consistently talk about themselves.
• People who try to control the session and tell you what they think YOU should be doing and massaging and HOW you should be doing the massage.
• People who consistently arrive late to their massage sessions.
• People who arrive late and still want their full session time.
• People who consistently no show their massage sessions.
• People who consistently cancel their massage sessions within the allotted time in your cancellation policy, but it still leaves you at a loss.
• People who tell you all about their other massage therapist that does something different/better than you are doing.
• People who don’t do anything obvious that you can put your finger on, but they just drain you.
• You come home with headaches, shoulder, neck pain or with some of the symptoms that you saw in clients that day as you worked on them.

Getting upset about these things is the energy drain.

Here’s the thing…. most everyone is an energy vampire at one time or another.

All of these scenarios are really about your boundaries, how you set them, how you inform clients about them and how you enforce them.  The energy drain that these things put on you is just telling you that you do not have a boundary in place to protect you from this loss of energy.

First off, that isn’t how energy works.

The use of the word vampire in this expression brings in the added drama of fear and mythology of vampires that started in the 1800’s.

By calling someone a vampire, you are trying to elevate yourself as being better than another.  Calling people energy vampires is very unprofessional and uncalled for.

What we do have is people and interactions with those people who drain us if we are not taking care of ourselves and doing the internal work of becoming aware of ourselves.

We have People.

What we do have is people…people with issues….people who just had a bad day at work, people who are narcissistic and controlling, people who didn’t get enough touch and nurturing in their early life so they are fearful and defensive.   What we do have is people who just want a massage and they don’t want us telling them what to do.  What we do have is people who are depressed, isolated, fearful and alone.

What we do have is people who are touch deprived and insecure.  What we do have is people who want to control their massage session and may take that to directing the massage session.  We have people who want to talk too much.  We have people that didn’t have the support that they needed to feel heard and to feel good enough.  We have people with attachment issues of all kinds.

Trauma, stress, pain – these things create a void or need in people that needs to be filled/healed and they try to do that in any way they can which often makes them into an ‘energy vampire”.

People may have busy lives and need to constantly reschedule.   They are late.  They have drama filled lives and experiences that they bring with them to the table.

How people like these affect you or your massage work is up to you.

Just stop and refuse to offer up your neck.  These people are not usually doing this on purpose. They have something inside of them that needs attention and some empty part that needs to be filled or healed.  They are pushing your buttons and triggering old parts of you that also need attention or healing. Don’t react. Give them nothing. Just stop feeding them.

It’s about YOU…not them.  They are not energy vampires.

A massage session IS all about them!  Why should it matter to you how they want to spend their time?

People don’t ‘steal’ your energy or put their ‘energy hooks’ into you.   You let them in.  You let them ‘steal’ your energy.  You let them carry on with their drama and incessant chatter that bothers you.   You let them come late without penalty.

It is about knowing your boundaries and knowing when it is starting to happen in a session.  Is someone’s incessant talking or directing you making you feel stressed?  Bring them back to their body by asking them something like ‘What do you feel here under my hands where I am working?”.

Set your boundaries and stick to them and be professional about doing so.

Take care of yourself and your own needs so that the ‘needs’ of clients to be controlling, always late, demanding or whatever it is that is draining you or that you are saying is being an energy vampire don’t bother you!!!

If something a client is doing or saying on the table, it is also another great opportunity to turn things around and learn more about your own judgements about this behavior.

People’s behavior will only affect you if you let it.  That being said, it isn’t always easy of course and it does require some support and awareness of when this is happening in your practice and learning what to do about it.   One of the best ways to do that is in the process of supervision.  It is also just about taking care of yourself enough so that the things people do don’t affect you or trigger you.

I am not saying that there are not drama issues or attention issues that you may find challenging when dealing with clients.  It is also about taking responsibility.  It isn’t that the client is the problem and is draining.  It is more that I am too tired, I am not able to deal with the clients needs for attention, I am not able to deal with being controlled by clients.  It is setting boundaries around your time and your sessions and if that still doesn’t work,  letting that client go is also part of having good boundaries.

Plugging the drain.

You may have been taught in massage school that the way to deal with things like this is to smudge the room, think positive thoughts, put a wall up around you, karate chop your wrists to imagine that the energy stops there, ground yourself, protect your hands/body with energy, garlic and texas toast, wear a silver bullet around your neck.  The big one is fire clients and just move on.  Firing clients should be the very last resort after you have worked to communicate your boundaries and worked to enforce them.  What schools are not teaching is that it isn’t the actual situation that drains you – it is your response to the situation and what it does to your body and stress response system.

People are people and they just do their own thing.  They have busy lives.  They don’t understand the value of massage. They haven’t been told that their incessant chattering takes away from their session that they are paying for.  They are not taught to respect others.  People do crazy things.

It is YOUR reaction to these things that drains you and brings you down.  The more adult, professional thing to do is first to recognize the things that drain you and learn to become aware of what those situations really mean to you?  Do they invoke anger, make you upset?  You might get mad and upset but honestly – what is the problem? Did it really hurt anything/anyone?  Everything that happens in our lives is usually a part of our preprogrammed perceptions of reality that start at birth. Our anxiety and response to these situations is usually an attempt to avoid the feelings of anxiety that these situations have created for you. Anxiety and anger are usually automatic survival reactions.  You can’t control what others do/say but your reaction to them can be controlled. It is your angry reaction that drains you.

1. Become aware of your own needs and work on becoming more aware of your own issues that trigger you.
2. Keep your energy up and your mind clear by doing your own work.
3. Don’t engage with ‘energy vampires’ when your energy is down. (Lack of sleep, poor diets, not getting massage yourself, etc)
4. Practice compassion.  Respond to people who are late, talk too much, drain you by telling them (in a nice way) what you need – what your boundaries are and learn to enforce them with consequences.  That is done by having policies around canceling, arriving late.  It is done by telling them to stop talking – it is a massage and that is what they are there for.

Or yes you can stop seeing them all together.  That is part of boundaries too.

But remember: We all have a little big of energy vampire in us at one time or another.

 

First Published on: Jan 25, 2014 @ 12:57  Updated Nov 3, 2018 @12:35

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How can I help? Stories and Reflections on Service” Is the title of a book by Ram Dass written about the helping professions. I was first introduced to this book in massage school in 1987 and read it through briefly and didn’t really think much of it.

It is now the center of what is really some of the core issues in the massage profession and is the most tattered book on my shelf.

The main theory of the book is that there is a deeper reason as to why people help or feel a need to help. We need to boost our self esteem, we need approval and appreciation, we need to feel needed. But helping for the purpose of getting our needs met often leads to burnout and in the massage profession – a failing practice.
Because we work in a profession that works very closely with people, it is important to begin to always be working on ourselves to become more aware of our issues and blindspots.

It feels good to be working in a profession where we can ‘help’ others. But helping is different from being of service. Ram Dass says in the book

“Can we see that to be of most service to others we must face our own doubts, needs, and resistances?

What do you get out of helping? What purpose does it serve for you?

When you can begin to unlock the deeper meaning of ‘helping’ you can begin to uncover the unconscious beliefs that are usually the cause of our need to help others. When we come from a place of ‘needing’ to help others it gets in the way of the therapeutic relationship. It starts to become a massage session that is all about us and not the client. We are less likely to be able to really listen to a clients needs and concerns. We are more likely to bend our boundaries to accommodate clients thinking we are giving when in reality it is about much more than that. We give so we can get. We give up ourselves so that clients will stay clients because we fear not being able to make a living. We don’t have cancellation policies that support us – we let clients come and go as they please while our income suffers.

When we work to become more aware of our own issues and work through them with a counselor or in peer supervision/supervision our work changes.

As Ram Dass puts it:

“Our service then, is less a function of personal motive and more an expression of spontaneous, appropriate caring”

We get caught up in doing for others thinking it is what they need. We get caught up in giving advice or sermons thinking it is for their own good. When people don’t get better, we say we did all we could do and told them everything we knew. We forget to really listen and witness the process of healing.

We get caught up in thinking that all of our training, all of the extra hours of learning new techniques, all that you know is what makes you a ‘good helper’.
When you help from a place like this it becomes an addiction – like eating candy or drinking alcohol. You get your high from helping and like to think you are being useful. But when does that ‘helping’ begin to hurt more than it helps?

The more you can look at this act of helping and all of the needs and feelings associated with it, the easier it will be to fill your practice with the kind of clients who are nurturing and respectful of you and value your time and efforts to pay you what you are worth.

Questionnaire to further explore helping issues in the massage profession.