December 12th, 2007 Julie Onofrio
Or do they???
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that Massage therapists warn state: Hands off our rights!
A group of health-care providers are suing state officials over a law prohibiting relationships with former clients.
For once I am agreeing with the law in some respect. Massage therapists are in the role of power whenever anyone makes a phone call to make an appointment that person is looking for help - whether it is for stress reduction, to help with pain or an injury - whatever the reason for visiting a massage therapist - the client is automatically placed in a role where they look up to the massage therapist as the one who can help them or solve their problem. The act of looking to others often is hidden with many agendas and projections. Clients look to the massage therapist as if they were their parents. It is a very unconscious process and many would say that it just isn’t true. The thing is you don’t really know when it is true or not.
Dating a client who is in the state of transference would be like dating your child. The client sees the therapist as their parent who never gave them what they wanted or met their early childhood need. The client who finally gets seen by the massage therapist projects their feelings onto the massage therapist.
This is a common law for psychologists and doctors who are engaged in therapeutic relationships. While it is a case of the law getting into your personal business, it does bring up the fact that massage schools do not teach boundaries or the therapeutic relationship effectively. I am sure the client/therapist who married don’t think it is a problem and it may work in some relationships to keep projecting parent figures onto each other, it is really something to consider carefully and not take lightly.
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November 21st, 2007 Julie Onofrio
I am trying something new and learning to have multiple authors on the blogs. If you are interested in writing for the massage profession. please contact me and let me know what your interests are - what topics would you like to write about and any past experience with blogging and/or writing. ( It isn’t necessary but I am just wanting to know what level you are at.
Thanks
Julie
Posted in News | 4 Comments »
November 19th, 2007 Julie Onofrio
The Holidays are here and it is a great time to think about selling gift certificates and promoting your massage practice.
There are many templates and pre-made massage therapy gift certificates available or you can just make your own with word processing programs.
Each gift certificate should have on it a blank place for the name, amount of the gift certificate in hours and any expiration dates if they are allowed.
You should also set up a gift certificate page on your website and allow users to pay with paypal or google checkout and get their address to mail out gift certificates. I sold many gift certificates for my regular clients from out of town friends and relatives.
Gift certificates may or may not have expiration dates on them. Here is a list of the various states and their regulations regarding gift certificate expiration dates.
You will need a method for keeping track of the gift certificates you sell by either putting some sort of numbering system on them or just getting the persons name and keeping a list of them and who you sold certificates to.
You will also decide if you want to offer a special offer to encourage people to get them -like selling 3 and getting an half hour free, getting $10 off of each when you buy 5, or something. It isn’t necessary to do this. Some think it sells more. I sometimes think that offering such specials devalues our work.
The thing about selling gift certificates is that many do not get redeemed because the people who are giving them are usually trying to give them to people who are not regular massage people. Most give gifts to others that they would really rather have for themselves. I once had someone who came in to redeem a gift certificate who was so ornery and did not really want to be there and had never had a massage before. She didn’t want to fill out the intake form or do anything. It was only for a half hour massage. I got her on the table and she hardly said a word the whole time. At the end she was so very thankful.
I also had another person who got a gift certificate and he had never had a massage before. He brought a book with him to read while he was on the table ( I am not joking!) I am not sure if he enjoyed it or not but he never did come back.
Bosses will also get gift certificates for their employees. I had a guy one year who bought a few thousand dollars worth and gave about 5 each all to his employees. Some of those people never came in and they ended up buying them from each other. Most employees would rather have the cash at Christmas time unless they are already massage regulars.
There are those who do enjoy getting massage gift certificates.
Posted in Building Your Practice, News, Starting Your Practice | No Comments »
November 12th, 2007 Julie Onofrio
As a massage therapist, clients come to you to help them find a solution to a problem they are having - whether it is pain, stress, an injury or other disease. They are seeking an expert to help them with their condition.
Whenever someone is seeking another for help, it creates a power differential in the relationship meaning that the client perceives the massage therapist as having some answer or solution to their problem. It starts from the second they make the effort to find someone to help them. The role of the massage therapist is to provide massage as a solution - to meet the clients needs.
Often in a relationship where there is a power differential it creates a dynamic called transference - the person tends to think of the authority in the way they related to their parents or other significant caretaker early in their life. Without knowing it, a client will often be acting or speaking from an early childhood wound where their needs for attention, nurturing, appreciation and respect were not met. It is an unconscious process and it happens in all relationships. Some signs of transference include but are not limited to:
a client tells you their whole life story in the first session
a client wants to see you socially as a friend or even as a date
a client asks questions like “how many massage have you done today?” or asks more about your personal life.
There is another short list in this article in which
Ben Benjamin defines transference as
In transference, unresolved needs, feelings and issues from childhood are transferred onto the helper
The thing with transference is that it happens constantly in relationships like the one that is created between the massage therapist and the client as well as with other relationships where there is an imbalance of power - boss/employees, teacher/students. Because we have the added influence of touch and how it can relax a person along with the fact that people take their clothes off and feel more vulnerable from the start, the transference is really high in the massage profession. While massage therapists are in no position to do psychological therapy with a client, what they can do is learn more about themselves and understand your own issues around being a massage therapist which are not often clear and straight forward.
Countertransference is when the therapist transfers their feelings and issues from childhood and transfers them onto the client and tries to get their own needs met through the client relationship. Countertransference begins the minute one starts thinking about becoming a massage therapist. The reasons that someone chooses the massage profession where they take on the role of the expert or person of power are usually filled with deeper agendas that are usually unconscious. Countertransfence is what usually brings many to the massage profession. They want to find a job that they are more appreciated in, that they can find more meaning in and help caretake others. Feeling like you need to always have results or you are not doing a good job can be a sign of countertransference along with these other things:
wanting to be friends with clients
thinking you have to take every client that calls
working with cancer patients exclusively because of your past with cancer or any other specialty (working on abuse victims because you were abused, working on sports teams because you wanted to be a athlete or were one)
thinking you need to work longer on a client than the assigned time to get better results
or make them happier so they will come back
feeling resentful of not getting a tip or gift
feeling unappreciated after all you do
thinking your work is better than everyone elses and if people go to other massage therapists it will be their loss
feeling drained after a session or day of work
thinking you have to resolve the clients issues all in one session.
Transference and Countertransference are a natural part of the helping relationship. It isn’t a matter of if it is going to happen - but when is it going to happen.
It isn’t that doing these things is bad in any way for either the client or the massage therapist. It is just that these old ways of reacting and thinking are just that- based on old beliefs that just aren’t true. It is important to become aware of both sides of the dynamics of transference and countertransference and learn to get your needs for appreciation, attention, to be needed and nurturing met outside of your massage practice.
As a massage therapist we can best serve clients by becoming more aware of ourselves and our own countertransference issues which will allow us to stay more present with clients. In doing so we can serve their needs better as our own are taken out of the picture and met in our personal life rather than in our practice.
Peer Supervision is the best way to get in touch with this other part of being a massage therapist. Group or individual sessions are necessary to help become aware of these issues and it is also a place where the massage therapist can get their needs for appreciation and other needs met.
The Wounded Healer What’s in Your Baggage? By Arlene Alpert
Transference by Ben Benjamin
How Countertransference Jeopardizes the Therapeutic Relationship Nicole Cutler, L.Ac.
Posted in News, The Code of the Caretaker | No Comments »
November 7th, 2007 Julie Onofrio
I feel a little frustrated writing on here about Site Build It! and it’s many benefits and am wondering if you would take a moment and give me your feedback…
Are you sick of hearing about it?
Have you never heard of it?
Are you skeptical and don’t believe me?
Are you afraid to invest the money in yourself and your business?
Do you already have a website and it’s working out great for you getting you new
clients every day?
Do you have all the clients that you need?
Are you booked solid?
Do you think you don’t have anything to write about?
Have you just spent a few thousand on a website and it isn’t getting you any clients?
What exactly is it if anything?
The reason I promote and use Site Build it is that I was once like most of you- struggling massage therapists. Actually I wasn’t struggling - I just lived really simply and didn’t really care about making money. I of course just wanted to help people. When I started my first website -www.thebodyworker.com in 1999, it was only a hobby. I had been thinking about creating an apprenticeship program for massage therapists and had started collecting information to use in teaching. One day I decided I would just put all of the info online and see what happened. Back in 1999 I didn’t know anything about websites and even less about computers.
What started as a hobby has now turned into me being able to double my income in 2 years. I am making more than I ever could with massage and am reaching more people than I ever could by just doing 4-5 massages a day. Now I do massage only 2 days a week and most weeks see only about 6 people…that’s right. After nearly 20 years of doing massage, I am now writing all about everything I ever learned and experienced and making more by working less. And the thing is that the money from the websites will continue to come in whether I am writing or not. I guess it will gradually diminish over the years if I never do another thing.
The thing is the whole reason for my success is because of Site Build it! While I do make a small amount reselling the website business systems, the real reason I promote them is that I want everyone else to have the success that I have. And I guess a part of me wished someone would have told me about things like this and all of the other things I write about when I had started. Of course times were different then. We could bill insurance companies without any problems and they paid much more than they pay now. There wasn’t much confusion over masseuse/masseurs and prostitution as we were the masseuses/masseurs and prostitution was just that. There were only a few hundred massage schools compared to over 1500 today. I didn’t have any problem finding a place to start my practice and I jumped in having quit my day job almost a year before I actually started my practice. I believed in myself and knew I had to do it. I couldn’t go back.
Now with so many massage therapists, so much perceived competition, so many more things to learn about - transference and countertransference, dual relationships, new techniques, more skepticism - the internet is fast becoming our resource for all things. Massage therapists websites need to provide information - When people come to the internet they are looking for information. A simple site with 8 pages that include the history of massage and the benefits of massage will no longer cut it. People want to know if you can handle the problem they have. They are seeking a solution - not you (sorry to say). ABMP reports that:
Among the positive wave of response was the information that 16 percent of U.S. adults visited a massage therapist in 2006 and 38 percent have received a professional massage sometime in their life.
That is really not a lot of people getting massage - How do you reach the other part that has never received a massage or only had one in their life (and may have had a bad experience). Educating clients and the general public is needed. AMTA and ABMP have not stepped up to define our profession leaving us to do the explaining - but not many really are yet - at least not publicly.
What is by having a SBI website you could start writing about all of the things that you really do- not the standard increases circulation…what you really do from your heart?
What if you could get one new client a day who became a regular weekly client for life? What is that worth to you? $60 x 48 ???? x 18 years (as some of my clients have been regulars for this long?) What would you pay to get that?
Does $299 a year still sound too high or the whole concept seem undo-able?
or how about $299 for one site for your massage business and $100 to start your second site that will create for you that residual income that I am making? (No, it doesn’t happen overnight, you don’t have to create 200 pages today or even this year. SBI! is a process)
So be sure to let me know if you have any questions…
Thanks!
Posted in News, Websites for Massage therapists | 6 Comments »
