Transference is one of the most important concepts to understand for a massage therapist but the least understood and talked about. It is usually covered in a few hour workshop in massage school. Transference is a very complex phenomenon that comes from the psychology profession. The reason that it is so important to understand is the fact that the process of transference is actually what can lead a person to becoming more aware of their thoughts and issues. Transference is what heals.
Ben Benjamin author of the book “The Ethics of Touch” defines transference as this:
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.
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.
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.”
Nina McIntosh in her book “The Educated Heart” says this about Transference.
“Transference may sound complex and unusual, but it’s actually part of our everyday life even outside of our offices. It’s normal for any of us to bring the past into our present relationship. In fact it happens all the time. They are magnified ina manual therapy session because of the intimacy of the setting, the clients altered state and the way that the practitioner/client roles mimic those of the parent/child.”"Transference isn’t a rational process.
Terrie Yardly-Nohr in her book “Ethics for Massage Therapists” says this:
“The very nature of the therapeutic relationship allows transference to happen easily. Bodywork can trigger a variety of emotions from clients such as anger, frustration, sadness, fear, or joy. These feelings are generally the result of some emotion the client felt in the past towards another person.”
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.
So what is transference then?
Simply put, transference happens when there is difference in authority that resembles the parent-child relationship. The client who comes to a massage therapist receives the nurturing that they never received as a child and puts the massage therapist on a pedestal. The nurturing touch brings out the old feelings and emotions that were repressed or suppressed in early childhood. The client unconsciously begins to see the massage therapist as the nurturing parent and it can bring up feelings of attachment that were not resolved growing up. It is when the client unconsciously thinks that the massage therapist is their mother or father or other significant caretaker. Note the word - UNCONSCIOUS.
Attachment is what happens between a mother and child that allows the child to grow and build self esteem. The infant knows learns about themselves through touch. There are various stages of attachment that occur in child development where the infant feels like they are one with the mother. (And of course they once were in eutero.) As a child grows they learn that they are separate from the mother. This is where things often go astray. If a secure attachment is not formed in their early part of life, they will have life long challenges that result from that.
Massage and nurturing touch re-enacts the process of development. I actually think this is also why spa treatments are so popular with the use of healing waters and body wraps. Getting regular massage and developing a relationship with a massage therapist in which the client feels nurtured and cared for as if they were receiving it from their mothers can help heal the grief of not ever getting those early childhood needs met.
Transference is really important yet difficult to understand. The best way to understand it is to experience it. You may or may not have had some of these feelings arise when you were getting a massage from someone:
Feeling like you don’t want the massage to ever end
Not wanting to leave the office
Seeing the massage therapist outside of the office and wanting to follow them where ever they go.
Or from the other aspect seeing it in your clients:
bringing you flowers or special gifts
hearing about people’s personal problems
being asked to make exceptions in scheduling and payment options.
inviting you out socially as a friend
asking you out on a date or making other advances on you.
Or if you ever worked with a psychologist or mental health professional in therapy, you can come to learn more about transference from seeing your own. Becoming aware of your projections in a therapy setting can be a painful experience. It is a matter of getting a look at your unconscious thoughts through relationship. It can be a very eye-opening process and really lasts a lifetime.
While some of these things may just seem like normal things, it is difficult to know the difference. You probably won’t know the difference.
What you can do is create a code of ethics and a set of policies and procedures for your practice that will help you make proper decisions in any situation. It is having boundaries that teach people when they are in transference that you are separate from them is what will allow the person to heal and build self esteem.
The other thing about transference is that it not only occurs in these helping types of relationships but almost all relationships. Friendships, significant others, family members and the person who checks you out at the grocery store who seems to ‘look just like your mother”.
Reading and learning everything you can about transference can also help. These are some of my favorite books:
The Dali Lama was just in town for the weekend promoting what he calls seeds of compassion. There were about 5 days of talks to mainly kids of all ages on compassion and how to be more compassionate toward others. I didn’t get to go to any of the events but heard him speak on TV and through his webcasts which you can find at seedsofcompassion.org.
One of the most interesting things he said was that more women should be leaders because compassion comes easier for them than it does for men because men are so caught up in their aggressive tendencies and egos! He also talked about how nothing can come of war and that talking is needed to end the differences between people. He said something about that the leaders of the world should come together and spend a few weeks on vacations together with their families so that they could see that we are all humans.
Compassion is such an interesting and complex subject. A few years ago I studied and read all that I came across on compassion - books and articles online.
What does it mean to be compassionate? Compassion is the feeling of wanting to relieve the pain and suffering and others. It goes a step beyond empathy which is feeling the feelings of another and acknowledging them in another. With compassion we move to make the other feel differently. Compassion requires that we move outside of ourselves and forget about ourselves. That requires that we be strong enough inside of ourselves to do that. If we do that and sacrifice our needs being met over another when we aren’t strong enough inside, it can end up in compassion fatigue (burnout.)
The first thing in being kind to another lies in learning to be kind to ourselves. In learning to serve others, we will often be confronted by our own suffering. It provides for many opportunities for growth and understanding. Helping others will reveal where we ourselves need helping and can lead to the path of healing.
When we first start to act compassionately, it usually is to fill some of our own needs for attention, recognition and approval. We seek what we didn’t get early in life and it is usually unconsciously. We believed those stories we were told and that we told ourself about how we were not good enough or smart enough or pretty enough until we didn’t know the difference between the truth and what is real. We developed our egos to make us feel better about ourselves when our insides were suffering and wanting the world and our lives to be different. The stories we tell ourselves are revealed when we move to help others compassionately. We feel that we can never do enough or do the right thing. We are led into our own suffering to show us the place inside us that need healing. Taking the path can lead us to authentic compassion or egoless compassion where we can come to a place of just giving to receive and to the place where all giving is receiving.
In Oprah’s recent new show “The Big Give” one of the things that keeps coming up is that when the contestants go to give away all the money they often fail to find out what the family or organization is really needing and they give what they think would be fun or nice to give. They are giving what makes them feel best rather than what others really need. Like one guy gave a party to a family that cost $500 when the family could hardly pay the rent. It lasted for an afternoon, but the $500 would have paid the bills to help reduce the stress of the family. Some of the most memorable gifts were just gifts of time and small gifts of appreciation.
When we can keep our own needs to give in check and find out what people truly need by listening to them and their stories we find authentic compassion. As we learn to open ourselves to our own suffering and feel our own pain we open ourselves more to be present with others in their suffering thereby witnessing the pain which makes it go away. I know it seems contradictory. I have been trying to fix clients for the better part of 20 years of being in practice as a massage therapist. Once I was able to go beyond my own needs for fixing which were appreciation and a need for connection, I could see that all the scientific solutions for all of the techniques I have learned and applied suddenly laced any real importance other than just being able to have something to do with the clients. When I could see beneath the surface and acknowledge my own feelings that were underneath the need to help and fix, I could be still enough to see that clients really had their own power to heal and if given the chance to feel their own feelings and make contact with their true essence a deeper healing could occur. The techniques became just a way to help people feel. The techniques became the path for uncovering the seed of compassion that were the real key to health and healing.
It is that time of year to take a moment to look back at the year in review. Sometimes it doesn’t seem as good until you take a real good look at it all.
You did Great this year!
I did accomplish alot too and I feel much better than I ever have.
I started a multi -author blog to teach people how to blog and make money (still in testing stages - now just need to get more people interested in writing.)
I was a beta tester for the new Content 2.0 system that Site Build it! developed.
My traffic at www.massagetherapycareers.com is now about 500 people a day which is an increase of about 400. It makes about $500 a month just in Adsense income alone.
I did a few sites for other people - www.manalapanmassage.com, www.retractable-extension-cords.com and helped on a few others
I am starting an SBI mentoring Group at Yahoo Groups for people who want more help in creating their websites. It costs $25 per month to join and anyone with an SBI! site can join
As my way of saying thanks to everyone for reading and visiting my many websites through the years, I am giving away a years subscription to a Site Build it! webhosting and business building system.
