Guest speaker: Valedictory address, medical massage therapy school

My wife has been a psychotherapist, a Child Protective Services investigator for six years, a medical massage therapist for ten years, and has now been a nurse for ten years. This was her Valedictory address at the Commencement ceremony for The American Institute of Alternative Medicine, Columbus, Ohio, March 1997. I thought I'd share this speech in case anyone out there believes massage therapists only think skin deep.

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There are certain schools of psychotherapy that have grown from our understanding of child development. Unlike the cognitive therapies, such as Reality and Existential Therapy, whose premise is that individuals should march into life as rational and responsible adults, developmental theory recognizes that we all have deep roots in our earliest days, that we are historical beings. And that a painful or abused or deprived history (sometimes called our "inner child") permeates the whole self, and makes us who we are – which is more than just "rational" and "grown-up."

One of the crucial discoveries of the developmental psychologists – going back to the days when Rene Spitz studied and filmed the shocking deterioration of neglected, institutionalized babies, is that touch saves lives and forestalls the degeneration of body and spirit. Holding a child in warmth and care, not just talking to her – or at her – or mechanically servicing her needs – or feeding her by the clock – fosters life and healing and breaks down the walls of silent anger and sadness that many children have built up. Caring touch – or the lack of it – is one of the prime energies that help to write our history.

Today, knowing this truth, even the many humanistic child-centered therapies must neglect the importance of therapeutic touch in the clinical setting. The historical prestige of insight and catharsis – added to the ethical strictures placed upon counselors, psychologists and social workers – continues to keep the client's body-self out of bounds.

There is much to be said for empathic, insightful work that can hold a client's hand with words, and open up deep caverns of pain and tension through verbal techniques such as potency, disclosure, empathy and immediacy. But any healing process that does not embrace the holistic being – mind and body, feeling and spirit – can only be a partial good. And it is true that most if not all talk therapies have disowned the word "cure," and look only to "improvement."

We, as medical massage graduates, are in that right place, and that right moment, to join the unfinished circle of human healing and make it more complete. Beyond the worthy goals of somatic healing and relief and nurturance, we may help memories and feelings stored in the body be released, to be understood and healed with therapeutic dialogue. Tensions, whether they're circumstantial or lifelong, can be sensitively guided out of the system, bringing relief from pain, and opening up great energies for other kinds of healing. Massage, when it is imbued with the knowledge that we've acquired, and the power of our own wisdom and experience, is the touch that's worth a thousand words.

As we enjoy and reflect on this Commencement, it may be a good time for us to clarify – each for him- or herself – the personal meaning we bring to this healing profession. Are we here because – after our own struggles and experiments in living – we have found ourselves? . . . or because we haven't, and this seems like the right path to walk on our journey. Are we here primarily to give care and attention to our clients, or to receive care and attention from them? So much of what we will do comes from the internal us – the fulfilled or the needy, the confused or the serene, the angry or the joyful – manifest in our touch and in our words. We should know  – first – about ourselves what our clients will come to know about us through the language of our work.

This graduation is an important moment for me. Like all of us, I've worked hard to learn about the human body and the healing skills of massage. I value that this knowledge will flow outward to those we help and educate, and inward, as a source of self-knowledge, self-improvement, and especially, self-healing. For it is the health of the healer that is one of the most reverberant and curative forces in the therapeutic relationship. Health inside and out, from our selves, to those who come to us in need. With our hands, we join the circle of healing, and it joins us. Good luck to everyone.