TREATING THE THERAPIST

tination, yet when it comes to health people are more than happy to hand over the responsibility to someone else.

Certainty? As therapists our interpretation of what we see and feel may be entirely different, but equally as valid. For example, a physiothera- pist doing a mobilisation technique over the soft tissue of a facet joint may say they are working on the joint, but an acupuncturist may say they are addressing the bladder meridian. It would depend on your belief systems as to which you chose. Both may work or one or the other or neither! So what I used to say with certainty I now say with humility. I can offer an answer but I cannot be sure. SEARCH FOR THERAPEUTIC CERTAINTY My original search for certainty arose as I had three unanswered questions:

1. Why was it some of my clients didn’t get better? I measured success by the number of clients that got better. Piece of cake, I thought, find a therapy that works really well, then everyone will get better, I won’t be drained of energy, and the third question would be rendered obsolete. I explored as much of the physiotherapy world as it had to offer at the time, but this search didn’t reveal the answers. I decided to try some of the ‘alternative therapies’ and to my surprise they worked. It gave me a whole new perspective on the human being and of being human. However, although they worked for me significantly better than the therapy I was using at the time, I still had patients/clients that didn’t get better and I was still being drained of energy. I still believed that the answer lay in what I needed ‘to do’ better as a therapist. The answer lay in knowing more techniques, or so I thought.

2. Why was it these patients drained me of energy? It was at this time that this question was gaining momentum; I was working as the clinical specialist in a chronic pain hospital department and quite frankly, as you already know I was in a worse state than half my patients.

I became a therapy junky, doing

courses on all the different therapies under the sun. I acquired more tools that enabled me to achieve significantly better results again, but still no answers. People were still not getting better and I was still being drained of energy.

3. Why did those patients that did get better, get better? The answer to this question I thought was a little more straight forward and indeed ‘who cares’ what the answer is. My rationale was that if I treated a different body system and if that system was

where the restriction lay, then the patient would get better.

However, over a period of months, maybe years, things changed in me as a therapist that negated the desire and need to answer these questions. I am now happy with not knowing what it is that pre- vents those patients from not getting better. I finish a day’s work now energised, revitalised, enthused and that is a great place to be given the place I had journeyed from. If we think we know best then this can be problematic. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, medical treatment is the third lead- ing cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the United States. The eureka transformation I underwent, although slow, was not due to the gaining of new knowledge or techniques, it was due to the shedding of long-held and cherished beliefs constructed by the ego (and the collective ego of the medical profession as a whole). The dissolving of my beliefs enabled greater clarity, insight and understanding into the relationship I had with the people I worked with. ‘I’ became the difference that made the difference, not what I did.

BELIEF SYSTEMS Your beliefs as a therapist will influence the way in which you work. Your beliefs of your client/patient will influence the way in which you think and feel about how you work, and in turn have a bearing on your effectiveness and efficiency as a therapist. At least this has been my experience when I professed to know what I was doing.

My training background was as a physiotherapist. We were taught how to assess for dysfunction in joints and muscles, and when I first qualified that is all I used to assess. That was what I was taught to believe. I then discovered the world of the viscera, this was so exciting I was able to treat people who had back or neck pain by treating the connective tissue that enveloped the inter- nal organs. I was able to ‘cure’ some of the chronic pain patients that up until that point I had been unable to fathom. This was a lesson I had to share. I ‘knew’ that this had helped make me a much more effective practitioner. However, the response I got from a large section of the physiotherapy community was one of disbelief. They viewed this ‘new’ approach not on its merits but from a stand point that was coloured and skewed by their own beliefs. When we have absolute certainty in our convictions our flexibility diminishes and when challenged we adopt a position of being ‘right’, and our challengers being ‘wrong’. I truly believed on qualifying as a physiotherapist that I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it.

‘When the archer shoots for no particular prize, he has all his skills. When he shoots to win a brass buckle, he is already nervous.

When he shoots for a gold prize, he goes blind, sees two targets, and is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, but the prize

divides him. He cares! He thinks more of winning than of shooting, and the need to win drains him of power.’ Tranxu, great Chinese sage

12 www.sportex.net