Table Talk: Hold the Line

Starburst (mixed media) by Phillip Hoyle

Some images are just dazzlers getting your attention immediately. That's how I felt when I first saw this design carved in a rock near the top of the north escarpment of Shavano Valley. I worked with it a couple of times but my best try was this one in which I added color, the color I saw in this explosion. Some people have affected me in the same way.



     The expression “hold the line” is not always an allusion to war or football. Sometimes it serves as a child-rearing image: the parent draws a line at certain behaviors and holds the child to it. Many children stand right at or even on the line in a posture that may be taken as either a show of defiance or a need for the security that comes from knowing the parent will hold the line fast. These parent/child images have proved helpful to me in massage.

     Jeremy wanted to cross a line I was trying to draw. The line related to our signed agreements: no sexual advances or language are to be tolerated in massages at the clinic. But while I massaged his shoulders, he reached over and placed his hand on my calf. I moved out of range. He touched me again when I was working at his side. I took his hand off my leg and, patting it, told him he had to keep his hand and arm relaxed or the massage wouldn’t work. We made it through the massage just fine. The next month, in our second massage, I had to repeat the same line drawing. When the massage was completed, we talked. I reminded Jeremy we had both agreed “not to be bad.” He took well the mild discipline, which combined my accepting attitude toward him with my patient insistence that the line hold.

     The conflict had started right at the outset. That first day, as I opened the therapy room door to say good-bye to one client and to greet the next, there stood Jeremy. He was dressed in what Denverites sometimes refer to as the Boulder look. He sported a red tank top, lime green cutoff sweats, and brown Birkenstock sandals with wheat-colored socks. Tall, with wavy red hair and body-builder muscles, Jeremy introduced himself and said in a caricatured sexy voice that he had come for a “butch” massage. I was amused. While I’m not feminine in appearance or manner, I certainly am not butch! Perhaps the seeming absurdity of his request signaled play acting and cast me in a parental role. I listened to him with interest and carefully kept my laughter aimed at what he said, not at him. I read Jeremy as both sexually promiscuous and humorous. He appeared to have ill-defined personal boundaries. What a challenge.

     I would give him a massage to remember, butch or not. Images of strength, aggression, and even pain flitted through my imagination. I thought, “Too bad I don’t have on my hiking boots. He might like that.” I chose to supplement my regular Swedish massage technique with some dramatic stretches and deep glides I had learned in a sports massage workshop. At one point, I clambered up onto the table with Jeremy and planted my knees in his buttocks. I pushed my fists into the muscles alongside his spine and glided from his lower back to his shoulders. He loved it, and his muscles started to relax. I repeated the glide, this time with my elbows one at a time, and the muscles softened even more. While I felt tiny atop this tall, muscle-bound man, I knew I could deliver a helpful and memorable massage.

     Ethics, goals, and personal strength come into play in every massage. My training established standards and offered methods for dealing with difficult clients and tricky situations. It emphasized that I know what I am trying to achieve in massage and that I avoid situations that will detract from that goal. I was instructed, if I should not have enough strength to control a situation, to announce I was ending the session and walk away. One cannot always anticipate the needs and desires of a new client or even of a therapist’s own developing interests. I learned to recognize behaviors, phrases, and non-verbal clues in both the client and myself, and I was encouraged to be alert to their potential for small or large disasters.

     Superficially, there are similarities between massage and sex. Two people are alone together. One gets naked; the other rubs his or her hands all over the first one’s body. But the point is not to move the feelings engendered toward orgasmic relief, to communicate love through sexual contact, or to enjoy the other person’s body. Rather, the massage employs skilled touch to invite muscles into relaxation, the mind into rest, and the person into a caring relationship that will result in self-care. While there is physical intimacy and often a loving climate in both massage and sex, the outcomes sought in massage contrast clearly with those of sex.

     Jeremy was a strong, insistent person who seemed to want to have sex and to be worshipped. Perhaps I could note and praise some aspects of his body while I massaged his muscles, but I would keep to the conventions of common modesty and professional ethics. He didn’t need sex with me; he needed my skill to bring relief to his body. He needed massage to provide him new experiences of his body, not to repeat old ones.

     I believe I was prepared for this interaction with Jeremy years earlier by watching my wife Myrna, when she successfully took on the task of youth work in a congregation. She confided in me that her training and experience in preschool education prepared her to work well with teens. She was gentle, playful, accepting, and at the same time, firm. Her instructions were clearly enunciated, her expectations lovingly presented, and her acceptance of failure graciously offered. The teens responded to her with enthusiasm and trust. Under her direction, they achieved peer leadership and group success. She was especially helpful to kids who were the most wild. She gave them her unconditional love, encouraged their participation in socially constructive projects, and showed her genuine interest in their whole lives. I took my cue from her experience.

     Jeremy seemed to me like one of those wilder kids who would respond best to acceptance with a clearly marked line lovingly, humorously, and consistently enforced. I knew I wasn’t going to cross over the line with Jeremy. I was his massage therapist, not a buddy or a mate. When he persisted in touching me, I figured it was compulsive behavior on his part and so treated the behaviors in relationship to how they helped or detracted from the massage. For a year and a half of massages, Jeremy persisted in pushing at the line. He quit touching me but from time to time crossed the line verbally. He got great massages and, perhaps, some parent-like security from knowing that I would hold fast. He wanted the massage enough to keep his appointments, and while he may have lacked one kind of respect, he did praise me to myself and others as a massage therapist and a healer. Jeremy never did learn to keep consistently on his side of the line. Perhaps more time would have helped him grow into this, but his life ended before that happened. In response to his consistent pushing, I learned to hold dependably, with loving candor, laughter, and firmness. Now anytime someone pushes too much, I think of Jeremy and remember both the need to let massage be what it can be and how to hold the line for myself and my client.