Is There An Artist in the House?

“Art is not what you see,

But what you make others see.”

~ Edgar Degas

Degas neatly summed up the dichotomy that exists for artists in defining what it is they do and how their creations affect those who view or participate in them. This dichotomy is true in all forms of art - painting, theater, music, sculpting, or any other discipline, including manual therapy. Yes, I do contend that manual therapy is an art. It has a scientific aspect to support it just like the chemistry of pigments for painting, the metallurgy for casting bronze, or the mathematics inherent in music. The art part is the coupling of scientific knowledge with the creative energies of the human spirit.

Every one of us makes up our experience of reality from a myriad of parts, each combination unique to the individual. No one inhabits the world like anyone else.  More to the point, we have no way of knowing if someone experiences the world as we do. We have language to agree on things such as calling light of a particular wavelength “green,” but do you see the same color as I do? I have no way of knowing. The same is true of the experiences of the strains and tensions in our organism, be they mechanical, energetic, emotional, or spiritual.

What does that mean for me as a manual therapist?

Therapeutic interventions centered on the science end of the equation have an important role in helping people. For example, if I break my hip, I am very happy to have someone pin it together so it heals with the bone in a good mechanical orientation as defined by the engineering perspective.  However, that is not the whole picture. I have to learn how to walk on a leg that feels, and is, different than before. That is when a therapy artist may help me to understand how the old pattern of using my leg may not work for what I want to do with the new leg. Even better is if this artist assists me in staying in that understanding long enough for me to change my balance, sensory expectations, identity, and everything else that I rely on to tell me I am walking on the new leg in a way that now suits me completely. 

Through my hands as a manual therapist, I can sense the tensions, strains, and structural connections in a client but if I just stretch tissue, shift alignment, and “do therapy” on them, I am only showing them what I see and what I think would be “healthy.”  As soon as they leave the session, they do what they did before just as often as not.  Why?  Because the reasons they have that structural configuration have not changed. Reasons to which I usually have only the thinnest of clues. I have come to appreciate that the art part of manual therapy lies in enabling a client to perceive those reasons.

What I can provide as a therapy artist is a novel sensory experience to my clients so they can sense their world differently. From that perspective, they are able to perceive what they are doing and why and decide for themselves what to change (or not) and how. Most processing of the novel experience is not conscious, but it happens and is noticeable.  This is no different than how a piece of music brings us joy or pleasure. I am not telling clients what I see or what they should experience any more than Beethoven tells us how to experience his 7th symphony. The clients get to it their way.  

The critical aspect of being a therapy artist is to supply appropriate, targeted information to the clients in a way that gets them to engage with the underlying organization of their organism in order to re-adapt to how they want to be in the world. Because this is an information transfer, the input comes primarily through the nervous system, which requires very little energy to be activated. The nervous system is always on the lookout for novel input as part of the program to identify risks early. You don’t have to use a lot of energy or force to get the attention of the nervous system. In fact, too much energy will drive the system into defense - a whisper is accepted by the ear much better than a loud shout. Effective intervention techniques can be very light and gentle.

Guidance in providing targeted sensory experience can be done through many approaches. I favor ReTensioning® because it is entirely based on providing sensory input to assist clients to change in a manner and rate that integrates with their entire organism. There are other systems that can be adapted to provide such guidance, including some approaches to Cranio-Sacral therapy, the Alexander Technique, and even Muscle Energy, to name a few.

In order for manual therapists to be artists like Degas, we need to recognize that we do the best art when we simply hold open the door for our clients so they can create the organism in which they live, in the way that fits who they know themselves to be.