Transference – you learned about it in basic massage school and now as a practicing massage therapist, you will come to understand it more each day.
Transference is what keeps people from speaking up while on the massage table and complaining later. It is often a state that people are in when they feel like they have to bring you gifts. It is what makes them call you or text you all hours of the day and night. It is what makes them keep chattering on the table instead of being able to relax. It is the state they are in when they get mad at you for raising your rates by $5.00. It is the state a client is in when they are acting out by being late to appointments and expecting the full time. It is when clients get a crush on you.
Transference is what happens when there is a power differential in a relationship. The client perceives that the therapist is all good and all knowing because they felt such relief that they may have never felt in their life before. Put quite simply…transference is when a person views you as the parent figure and subconsciously want you to automatically know what they need. When clients receive massage and are touched it often brings up subconscious feelings of being cared for that should have taken place in the parent/child relationship but may or may not have been enough.
Transference IS NOT taking on the clients pain or getting a headache yourself after working with a client with a headache. That is Counter-transference if anything.
Cidalia Paiva in her book “Keeping the Professional Promise” says this:
“Transference refers to those situations where the patient projects onto the therapist old feelings or attitudes they had about significant people in their past, often parental figures. Transference is often referred to as ‘the unreal relationship in therapy’. The roots of transference are most often found in early childhood, and it constitutes a repetition of past conflicts with significant people in our lives.
Elliott Greene author of the book “The Psychology of the Body” writes this:
Transference is the displacement or transfer of feeling, thoughts, and behaviors originally related to a significant person, such as a parent, onto someone else, such as the massage therapist. It is a common reaction of clients to their therapists. A bit of transference happens in most relationships in which there is feeling present. Usually, transference-related feelings were formed in the past, so it could be said that these feelings transfer from the past to the present. In transference then, the client relates to the therapist and present moment as if the therapist were the significant person. In this sense, transference is a projection of the internal drama of the client, and the therapist is assigned a particularly important role and script.”
Clients defer to the practitioner’s judgment because they desire to be helped by an authority figure that possesses greater knowledge, healing ability and, therefore, power.
Ben Benjamin author of the book The Ethics of Touch: The Hands-on Practitioner’s Guide to Creating a Professional, Safe and Enduring Practice
defines transference as this:
Since a power differential exists in any health care relationship, the client may be inclined to respond to the practitioner as he or she would other authority figures, and in doing so, may recreate elements of similar past relationships. This situation is known as transference, a normal, unconscious phenomenon that appears during a therapeutic process. Professional helping relationships usually have a strong transference element in which the parent-child relationship is unconsciously re-established. In transference, unresolved needs, feelings and issues from childhood are transferred onto the helper.
Transference of feelings requires that the massage therapist learns to not take things personally and set professional boundaries to all the transference process to happen safely but it a way that the client also can learn. Hitting the boundary is one more opportunity to feel the pain of the situation and learn to respond differently knowing that the massage therapist is not the actual cause of the feeling. This is really what setting policies and procedures are about – setting boundaries. Things like your cancellation and no show policy, payment policies and policy for late arrivals comes in. It is also how you set boundaries on the table with informed consent statements and communicating with clients.
These are boundaries that allow the client to choose how they will continue to behave that often provide them a learning experience that they are safe even if they are trying to act out and push you away by being obnoxious.