This post was originally published in May 2022 by Jamie Griffiths Massage Therapy
Getting a massage for the first time, or from a therapist you’ve never met before, can be a nerve-wracking experience. Let’s face it: getting near-naked in a room with a total stranger for an hour or more while said stranger touches you all over your body – sometimes in places where nobody has touched you for a long time, or perhaps ever – well, it’s just a bit… extraordinary, isn’t it? If you’re the kind of person for whom the thought of this provokes anxiety, then don’t worry – you’re not alone.
In fact, I’ll let you into a little secret. I only got my first proper massage – one where you undress and get on a couch and a trained professional puts oil on you and moves your tissues around – three years ago! No, that wasn’t a typo. Despite giving and receiving lots of massage during my time as an actor – in rehearsals and warming up for shows – I never thought I was the getting-near-naked-in-a-room-with-a-total-stranger type. The thought of it – the intimacy, the vulnerability, the potential awkwardness – sent shivers up my spine. No thanks – when those muscular aches and pains called, I’d just grit my teeth and pop a couple more paracetamol thank you very much.
But over time, the aches and pains got worse. They started to come accompanied by fatigue, lethargy, apathy. I fell into a deep slump. At this time, I was newly a parent of two small children and struggling to bear the responsibility, working in a career which gave me very little pleasure and which saw me hunched over a laptop for 30 hours per week, losing touch with my body, losing touch with my feelings, losing touch with my joy. I tried a lot of different things to try to jostle myself out of that slump. Psychotherapy, hardcore mindfulness meditation, microdosing psychedelics, cannabis, sensory deprivation in a flotation tank, macrodosing psychedlics… Nothing seemed to make much difference. I couldn’t make the connection between the mental and emotional symptoms I was experiencing and the physical symptoms. My aching joints and muscles gave me the excuse to pay even less attention to my body, to retreat further into the mind.
But then my partner bought me a gift certificate for my 38th birthday for an hour-long massage at a local clinic. I still didn’t think I was into it, so the certificate gathered dust, shoved between two jars on a shelf in the kitchen until a week before its expiry date. Only then, because I’m a typically tight-fisted Welshman, did the prospect of wasting the money spur me to book an appointment. I didn’t know it then, but it was the light at the end of the tunnel.
I booked with a male therapist because that felt like it would be less exposing somehow – at least it would avoid the possibility that a female therapist might think I was there for sexual reasons (yes, I too was hung up on the unfortunate but ubiquitous massage-sex association). I arrived for my appointment a few minutes early and the receptionist offered me a seat and some water before my therapist emerged from a staircase which led to the basement level. He was pointed in my direction by the receptionist and when his gaze fell on me I was sure I detected a hint of disappointment or revulsion or annoyance or something in his expression. I shoved the thought aside as he introduced himself. He showed me into a softly-lit room where relaxing music was playing and calmly asked me some questions about my medical history and what I wanted to get out of the massage before explaining how much I needed to undress and how to arrange myself – on the couch, under a sheet – and that he would leave the room while I did this. A couple of minutes later he knocked on the door and asked if it was okay to come back in.
At this point I was still anxious and not at all convinced that I was going to enjoy the experience. So I had a strategy. I was going to treat the massage like an exercise in mindfulness – I would focus my attention as much as possible on the physical sensations produced in my body so that I wouldn’t get carried away by self-consciousness, awkwardness or anxiety about what the therapist thought of me. I’d like to attribute this choice of winning strategy to my wisdom. In truth it was dumb luck, but it worked a dream.
Looking back, it wasn’t the greatest massage ever. The therapist was very competent with good technique and a well-timed routine which covered the whole body, but it wasn’t exactly personalised. I felt like he brushed aside my complaints about upper back and neck soreness, saying there was very little to be done about that in a single session so would I be okay with him treating the whole body (Me: “Oh, okay, sure”). Once he’d made contact, he never once asked about whether the pressure was suitable. In short, the client-therapist relationship was an afterthought.
Nevertheless, the experience was life changing.
On the blank screen behind my closed eyes, spaciousness. In this space, sensation happened. Long sweeping strokes from somewhere over there that make my whole body rock back and forth. Then deep pressure somewhere else that borders on painful but feels somehow regenerative, as if ripples of energy spread out from the point of contact, healing the surrounding tissues. Joints are manipulated in a way that makes it feel like extra space is unfolding within my body. Parts of me that I hadn’t consciously experienced sensation in for who knows how long are jumping up to say things like ‘Hi! I’m that stringy bit between your calf and your ankle, remember me?! You use me a lot for walking and standing up and stuff, but we never really hang out.’ My nervous system is being switched on in an entirely new way. Slowly but surely, in the space that the massage therapist is holding for me, my body is becoming an integrated thing again. Connections are being made between what, up until now, seemed like disparate, separate parts. My upper back is no longer just a bit that gets sore sometimes and annoys me with its pain – it is me, and I am my upper back. All is one. I am whole.
I also have a really stuffed up nose from lying face down for forty minutes so it’s a relief when my therapist asks me to turn over onto my back to work on the front of my body, my feet (who knew feet could feel like this!), abdomen (seriously?!) and neck and head. In his final move, he cradles my head in his hands, the weight of it resting in his upturned palms and on fingertips placed under the base of my skull. He applies a slight traction, elongating my neck. My head feels weightless as the pressure from the bottom of my skull reverberates outwards, finding echoes in every part of my newly awakened body. My body which is, for these moments at least, no longer a too, too solid lump of flesh that I drag around the earth to keep my brain from falling on the floor, but a capacious receptacle of my being, a vibrating, fluxing, undulating, snap, crackle and popping manifestation of consciousness itself.
It would be a neat little tale if I’d decided then and there, on that couch, that I was going to become a massage therapist too, so that I too could help people feel that good. But that’s not the way it happened. It was over a year, a good few massages and a couple of lockdowns later that I took the plunge and signed up for my holistic massage diploma course. It was only there that I really started getting over my touch-and-being-touched issues (and if I’m 100% honest, I’m still working on them). It was there also, that I learned that massage therapists are just people too, that they also feel anxious and awkward when treating a new client for the first time, that they make mistakes, that they aren’t always confident about what to do, how to do it and how to communicate their plan to the client so that the client feels safe and relaxed and in control of the experience.
It’s only now, after nearly a year of practising that I’m getting a handle on that last bit. As a massage therapist I can’t fix you. I can’t magically make your pain go away, or eradicate your scar tissue, or change your posture or unfreeze that stubbornly frozen shoulder. I have a good knowledge of physiology and anatomy and pathology, and I have some skills, some techniques I can apply that have proven successful in the past. And consistent treatment combined with good self care can help to make incremental changes in all those areas. But ultimately the massage experience is about you and your relationship with your own body. What I hope to do is to help you safely explore that relationship, to perhaps welcome back parts of your body, your experience of yourself, that you’d banished to the edges of your consciousness, or perhaps even exiled completely. To help create a space in which your body can reconnect with itself, acknowledge itself, begin to heal itself. A space where you begin to feel more like you.
So it’s okay to feel nervous about your first massage, or first massage with a new therapist, but don’t let that nervousness stop you. Just remember that your therapist is a human being too and probably feels just as nervous. Remember that you’re in control of what happens to your body throughout the process. Don’t be afraid to explain to your therapist what you do and don’t like during a massage beforehand (they won’t be shocked) and don’t be afraid to speak up during the massage if you’re too cold, too hot, need a tissue, or a pillow or if it hurts or if there’s any other aspect of what’s happening that you don’t like and is preventing your enjoyment of the experience. And remember to experience the experience in all its fullness – you’ve paid the money (or at least committed to) and blocked off the time for you and your body, so try to stay with it instead of letting thoughts about what’s happening elsewhere, or in the past, or in the future, rob you of your enjoyment.
A good therapist will put you at your ease. They will do their utmost to ensure that you are the driver of the experience, making space for your insights and preferences to co-create a treatment plan that you both agree on. They will use their expertise to inform that plan and deliver it effectively and consensually, rather than forcing you to fit into a predetermined routine or idea about how to ‘fix’ you. They will recognise that the real space in which healing occurs is within you – all we can do is help point you in the right direction.