Question Hi! I am writing a research paper for my freshman english class. One of the requirements for this paper is that we e-mail an expert on our topic, specifically from allexperts.com and print out documention of our response.
I would appreciate it if you could give me your expert opinion on the emotional affects of massage therapy; specifically on people who have gone through a significantly traumatic event (such as a loss of a loved one or a car accident.) I have heard that massage therapy has just as many benefitial results on mental and emotional health as it does on physical health.
I hope you consider giving me a detailed response. I have had no replies from several others that I have e-mailed. Thank you for your time!
AnswerGreetings. I hope that you really want a long answer, as I have a lot to say about this. Massage definatly has strong effects on emotions, even for people who have not had any traumatic events. The muscles seem to collect and emotions store emotions, often in knots. I think that drs and scientists are unsure about how/why this happens. And massage somehow seems to bring these emotions back. I think that the sense of touch reminds the brain that these spots are there and brings attention back to the emotion or memory. This tends to happen when you have been receiving massage for a while, and not on the first one.
Examples: In massage school after one class, one girl went to get up from sitting on the floor, then simply collapsed back onto the floor in tears. The two girls that worked on her sat with her and let her cry. Her massage had somehow accessed sadness that she had been storing, and it suddenly bursts out.
One of my teachers told a story in school, and then I actually had it happen in a massage: in describing the effect on the emotions, she gave a hypothetical story about a person having an "emiotional release" after massaging a spot on the foot. A client in my first year was silent throughout her massage, until I hit one spot on her foot. All of a sudden she begins a story about a time when she was 12 involving her dog. After she reminisced, she exclaimed "Where did that come from?!" It was kind of nice being able to describe the effect.
I had this happen to me personally. In one class, I had two very dear friends working on me. The first girl did a technique across my shoulderblades. I sat up and she asked me how it felt. I told her that the technique was good. She could tell something was wrong, and she asked what was going on. I told her that I got so ANGRY at her that I almost called her a few choice names and came close to hitting her, purely out of reaction. Being familiar with this process, she knew that the anger was not directed at her. I realized that it was the anger that I usually felt before a panic attack, and must have been storing it in my shoulderblades. After a few minutes of breathing through and experiencing the emotions, she repeated the technique, and I had only a tiny emotinoal reaction.
The best example of this process I felt during a class on rockiong. Our partner would rock our bodies; holding the arms and gently swinging them, the legs, slowly and gently rocking the head, the hips. After the first minute, I began to sob. I was so sad, so depressed, all I could do was cry. I had gone to this from feeling perfectly normal. My partner asked if I was all right and if I wanted her to sotp. I told her to continue, as I was obviously purging something from my system. I continued to cry the next 45 minutes, and I am not ashamed to admit it. I also then spent the last 15 minutes of the treatment laughing. I got so happy that I looked around the room and thought "I love everyone here." In Eastern terms, you could say that my Heart Chakra had opened. It was a bit of a rough process, but was very cathartic as I felt like I had gotten rid of a lot of sadness that I had been bottling up.
I think that a lot of times it is the emotions and memories that we bottle up, the ones that we don't allow ourselvesw to fully experience, that get stored in the muscle fibers.
Besides having a direct link to emotions and bringing them out for us to process, massage also has an effect on other areas, emotionally. Massage seems to help in a person getting more comfortable "inside" their boidies. It can help people feel more in tune with bodies that might be feeling alien from some disease or disorder. Basically I think that the touch "reminds" the brain about a certain part, and that returns awareness of the body to our conscious minds. Our brains tend to block and ignore points of pain or tension after a period of time. It does this because the information coming into the brain is not going to change, and it is too much to process. We only remember these parts when they flare up or when someone presses on them. A great example of this happenning is when you massage someone, and they are suprised at how tight they are. Their brains have ignored this information to limit how much it needs to process. Massage helps correct this problem.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence for the fact the massage has an effect on emotions. About the only thing that Western medicine can agree on is that massage seems to release endorphins, natures pain killers and mood elevators. And while this does lift up the mood, it is not enough evidence of how it can directly help us process somethings that we had not been working on before.
I hope this was of some help. Please feel free to write back if you have any other questions.
Sincerely,
Christopher Hall
