I got tagged in a Facebook discussion this morning, with the accompanying image that I've labeled, because the image resolution makes the text hard to read in the original:
1: Emotional Energy Centers of the Body
2: Burden Area || Burdens & Reponsibilities || * Carrying a heavy load || * Weight of the world on shoulders
3: Throat Center || Self-Expression Issues || * Lack of Trust || * Inability to speak feelings || * Lack of Nurturing
4: Burden Area || Burdens & Reponsibilities || * Carrying a heavy load || * Weight of the world on shoulders
5: Heart Center || Grief, Sorrow, Sadness, Loss || * Emptiness of Heart - Lack of Love || * Helplessness, Aloneness, Disillusionment || * Embarrassment, Shame, Humiliation || * Repressed feelings, Disappointment || * Genetic or Ancient memory || * Cruelty, Meanness
6: Fear Center || Fears & Phobias || * Loss of Control / Fear of losing control || * Giving our power to another person || * Relationships
7: Anger Center || Anger and Rage || * Anger at others || * Anger at self || * Jealousy || * Resentment
8: Guilt/Shame/Unworthiness Center || * Unacceptance || * Self-judgement (sic); self-criticism || * Not deserving of the good life has for us || * Inability to accept and receive
9: Old Stuff Center || Family Sexual Issues || * Childhood conditioning || * Violation of body or personal space || * Something done to us / Something taken from us without our permission || * Molestation, abuse, rape || * Impotence, frigidity
10: Support Area || * Lack of Financial Support
11: Support Area || * Lack of Emotional Support
12: Rejection Center || Abandonment || * Criticism, judgement (sic) by others || * Self-rejection || * Abandonment - pain in the heart
13: Betrayal Center || * Betrayed by someone we trusted || * Self-betrayal
14: Survival Center || Feeling we won't survive a life-threatening incident || * Violations related to surviving (accidents, abuse, violence, rape) || * Impotence, frigidity || * First year of life / Basic Creativity
The discussion went like this (I've shielded the names of everyone except Christopher Moyer and myself, because at POEM, the policy is "no blame, no shame"--this is not about publicly embarrassing individuals for not knowing something; it's about working to solve the problem so that all of us can know something better):
Person A: Emotional ills are stored in the muscles of the body. When an MT releases the tension in the muscle, the body is on its way to better health as long as the client let's the emotion ill go. So yes, our emotions can make us very ill.
Person B: Excellent. I've been looking for a diagram or list like this. Thank you!
Person C: very interesting indeed.
Christopher A Moyer: Sorry, but this is highly inaccurate. While it is true that muscular states and activities can play an indirect role in memory processes, it is definitely not true that "emotional ills are stored in the muscles." An abundance of evidence from psychology, neuroscience, anatomy, and physiology clearly indicate that is not the case.
Person B: I completely disagree Christopher.
Christopher A Moyer: Fine - but based on what evidence?
Christopher A Moyer: Ravensara Travillian will be interested in this discussion if she has the time.
Person B: My own personal experiences throughout life; receiving acupuncture, massage and feeling those emotional releases.
Ravensara Travillian: "Ravensara Travillian will be interested in this discussion if she has the time."
Possibly I will be interested, and possibly not.
As you point out, I have limited time, and I have decided to invest that limited time with students who are actually interested in learning something new, as opposed to squandering it in useless arguments.
If someone is not interested in learning, engaging is a waste of my time and theirs, and does not interest me in the least. It will inevitably degenerate into "Is so!" "Is not!" "Is so!" "Is not!".
Nothing could interest me less.
So the questions for the advocates of the chart above include:
Is there any evidence that could possibly convince you that your unique feelings might not be an accurate guide to what is universally going on?
Are there any circumstances at all under which you might reconsider what you have decided to believe?
If the answer to the above questions is "yes", then I would be potentially interested in a calm, civil, professional discussion about:
* why the above diagram is an example of simplistic "vending-machine science" that turns its back on evidence from anatomy 101 and neuroscience 101;
* what the actual stories behind the psychophysiological processes in our bodies really are, and why they feel the way the way they do to us, so convincingly that the above chart seems plausible;
* what are our professional obligations to our clients not to pass along misinformation and pseudoscience; and
* what do we do about our genuine moral distress at learning that our teachers were mistaken in what they taught us.
If the answer to the above questions is "no", then there is not enough common ground intellectually or ethically among us to even begin to discuss these matters, and I'm not interested in arguments for arguments' sake.
Person A: As I stated in another post, this confirms muscle issues that I have seen in my clients and myself which in my opinion displayed as a result of an emotional issue(s). While energy work is not always defined or accepted by the scientific community, there is validity when field work sees results and breakthroughs in a clients wellbeing. Muscles are known to stay tense when we're stressed and they can freeze. When released, there is significant healing. A reoccurring issue oftens has a basis in an emotional issue such as stress, loss of job or loved one. Massage is known to release those muscles and promote healing which can deepen intuitive the emotion field. Which is sometimes why it is not unusual for clients to break down and cry on the table. This chart confirms some of my field experience. The field of massage therapy does not hold a patent on this. "Healers" of all peoples know the value of touch and the subtle bodies that massage touches.
Ravensara Travillian: You're entitled to believe anything you want to, and that's fine. But there's no point in discussing the evidence, so Chris was wrong on one point--I'm not interested in this discussion.
Christopher A Moyer: Very briefly - the muscles seem to do all those things for one reason and one reason only - because they are connected to the brain. The muscles themselves have no capacity to store memory. Memory occurs in the brain. There are so many lines of evidence to establish this that it is not even close to controversial.
Why do I bring this up, even though I know some people will think Raven and I are being killjoys? Because we think it is important for the profession to improve and build itself on sound information.
This graphic is not sound information.
Person A: In your opinion and that is fine. Others will disagree. And the client can choose whom they wish to go to. I did not post this for a slap down discussion, but simply an FYI/Sharing which resonated with me. You are most certainly welcomed to accept it or reject it if it does fit within your "learned" responses. Be well!
Christopher A Moyer: It's not a matter of opinion, which is why I weighed in. If you'd posted that peanut butter and jelly is the best sandwich of all time, I wouldn't try to convince you otherwise, but this isn't like that. And we're not having a "slap down" discussion - just a regular discussion.
You're entitled to your own beliefs, but in this case they run counter to a tremendous amount of evidence.
Person A: BTW, some people think it is their duty to improve the "profession" according to their opinions while forgetting the profession covers a wide choice of modalities that may differ in theory and practice.
I actually spoke a little carelessly--when I said "I'm not interested in this discussion", what I really meant was "I am not interested in wasting Person A's time nor mine in a discussion that will inevitably get into an endlessly repeating loop at best, and at worst will devolve into name-calling and unprofessional behavior, as these discussions so often do".
But I actually am very intererested in the meta-discussion here, or the discussion about the discussion itself, because in a relatively brief exchange, quite a few issues of importance came to light.
Since these issues are directly related to POEM's mission of providing high-quality and evidence-based educational materials for massage stakeholders, let's go through the discussion and examine what they mean for us.
Person A: Emotional ills are stored in the muscles of the body. When an MT releases the tension in the muscle, the body is on its way to better health as long as the client let's the emotion ill go. So yes, our emotions can make us very ill.
Let's take the last sentence first, so that we can begin with the most correct thing they said.
So yes, our emotions can make us very ill.
Emotions can play a large role in physiological and pathological processes in the body; that fact has been recognized for a long time, and we refer to interactions between body and psyche as "psychophysiology".
As we explore evidence-based psychophysiology of massage here at POEM, we'll talk about why it feels as though
Emotional ills are stored in the muscles of the body.
Because, in reality, they're not. This is a classic example of where what it feels like to us can mislead us into believing something that is not true.
It's such a convincing illusion, though, that you can see very big names in massage therapy--people whom you would expect to have a great deal more anatomy, physiology, and neuroscience education--fall into that very same trap.
Why is this belief a trap, and what can we do to escape falling into it?
Think back to the first day of "Anatomy 101" in massage school--what was one of the first things you learned?
The names of the four tissue types, right?
Epithelial tissue, connective tissue, muscle tissue, and nervous tissue, right?
But were you taught just to remember the names, or were you taught what the differences between those tissues really mean?
Similarly, when you studied the brain, did you learn just to write words about the brain on anatomy tests? Or did you actually feel the disorientation that can come from the realization that how the brain really works is so breathtakingly different from how it feels like it works, and that the reason our senses inevitably mislead us on that fact is because we're "inside" them--using the very brain processes that we're trying to understand, in order to actually understand them?
If you truly understand the difference between muscle tissue and nervous tissue, and you truly understand the way the brain operates in multiple complex ways on the sensory information it processes, then you know why muscles can't store emotions: muscles simply are incapable of that same kind of complex processing.
No blame, no shame--it's not your fault if you were taught anatomy and the body in a rote memorization way. We're all in this together, and the only question is, now, what are we going to do to fix the situation?
When an MT releases the tension in the muscle, the body is on its way to better health as long as the client let's the emotion ill go.
This is an example of what I call "vending-machine science"--someone understands the body to be like a vending machine, where you always get the same things out when you put the same amount of money in.
In this example, MT pushes on muscle ==> emotional release ==> better health: in other words, a vending-machine model of psychophysiology.
Instead, to examine it through a systems-science lens yields a much better understanding of what is really going on in the interactions among massage and psychophysiology. Systems science tells us that, rather than one same output for one same input, that people are complex, and can experience the same input in very different ways. And yet, they do not need to follow exactly the same process as one another in order for each individual to derive a great deal of psychophysiological benefit from massage in their own unique ways.
I would recommend that approach, rather than relying on an outmoded vending-machine model that actively contradicts centuries of evidence from anatomy, psychophysiology, and neuroscience.
Having critiqued the errors in Person A's understanding of psychophysiology, I'd now like to switch gears, and praise them unreservedly for their willingness to share information. It is very generous, if you think you have something of value, to want to freely share it with others, and if I am going to point out where Person A is wrong, it is only fair that I also point out where they're right.
There are many massage teachers in Person A's situation--they are teaching to clients and students in good faith exactly what their teachers taught them in good faith, and so on up through generations of teachers.
One of the important decision points facing massage now is how do we encourage teachers to look at the quality of the information they are passing along to students, and how do we support them in developing better information and understanding?
We have to face this question head-on, and plan how to deal with it in a client-centered way, if we truly want to become a healthcare profession.
