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The Call to Help
We are often drawn to the massage therapy profession or other helping professions when we feel the call to help. Our lives often get buried in dead-end jobs that are unrewarding and unfulfilling. When we think of helping people, we think that it will provide us with meaning and inspiration. When the need to help calls us, we think that helping will make our lives better by making us feel better. While this can be true, it is often filled with deeper issues that are more about helping ourselves. Often this need to help others is really the call to help ourselves. When we help from a place of needing more ourselves it often leads to depletion, burnout or injuries. This side of the profession is usually not addressed in massage school or even brought up when you register for massage school.
The need underlying the call to help is usually the disguise to mask our own pain and discomfort. We are driven to learn to "fix" others pain, when in reality we can only "fix" ourselves. We think that by helping others, it will make us better people or will fill our need to be loved. We feel compelled to "fix" others or give others our advice, when what they usually need to have is compassion - they need to feel understood and feel like their pain matters. The techniques we learn are just tools to give us a framework for following the "path" of the pain or dysfunction (path -ology). Physical pain is often a manifestation of emotional and spiritual pain. When we touch others it has a tendency to bring up those hidden parts of ourselves. Our body armoring has kept those parts hidden. Our defense mechanisms are challenged. We have the choice of learning to respond (taking responsibility) or react from our own pain. In reality we can't really "fix" anyone butourselves. We can't go with anyone where we haven't gone ourselves. We can witness and facilitate healing. We can learn techniques to support the healing process. But what really heals is compassion, love and understanding - the relationship that we build with clients. We first need to have a solid relationship with ourselves before we can have it with others who we are working with. Before considering a career in massage or any other helping profession, I highly recommend that you begin the process of really examining your role as a "helper". You will find yourself challenged by this throughout your career. You can also get ongoing support professionally by joining or forming a peer supervision group where issues like these can be explored. When we can learn to be of service rather than focused on fixing, we are able to be present and share in the healing process. As a professional, learning to be of service is a challenge and ongoing process that can be facilitated by the process of supervision and peer supervision groups. I first started thinking about the idea of being of service after reading an article by Dr. Rachel Remen called "In the Service of Life" I think it should be required reading for every health care professional. "When we help we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity and wholeness. When I help I am very aware of my own strength. But we don't serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves." Rachel Remen, MD That one article has lead me to find out everything I could about the helping professions in general and what drives one to help. There are many signs of helping such as always giving advice (which massage therapists seem to be notorious for), sacrificing one's own needs to help others (co-dependency) which all lead to burnout in the helping professions. Since then I have read many more books and participated in many group situations to look at my own helping behaviors and learn about the need to help. I am now sharing what I know through my writings here and at my other websites. To further explore your role as a helper and learn to be of service, I recommend the following books and online articles and websites in the
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