Psycho-technologies in physiotherapy

Lately, I've been conversing with a kinesiologist about constructed ways of thinking about treatment. 
He came up with a system for assessing biomechanics of people who are unhappy with their bodies, how they are moving. It's all based on the supposed architecture of the human body. Five ways fascia holds us up and together. The neurology side of it focuses on only the output side of the nervous system and the only afferent aspect of interest is proprioceptive feedback from structure. It very much reinforces the whole 'body as machine with moving parts' perspective. 
I know that perspective. I learned it in physiotherapy school once upon a time. I was hoping I'd never have to encounter it again. 
Anyway, I was crustiferous. Slightly grouchy. I was a 74-year-old retired person with a get-off-my-lawn attitude because good grief, I guess that's what I have turned into.
Unless I ponder deeper on things. 

I did, am still doing, a lot of reflecting. 
I remember my life and how being a physio was how I got through it. 
But I was never completely comfortable in it either. 
I always wished it had had more to teach me.  
I remember at a physio congress in 1982 in Winnipeg, finding a bit of anger inside to help push me, speaking up at some meeting about how the profession had taught me all about the body but nothing about people and how to interact with them. 
Nothing came of that, of course. 

Later when I was preparing myself for private practice, to calm my nerves about it, who I would be interacting with, responsible to, 1992, I managed to get myself enrolled in a Peter Levine, "Somatic Experiencing" training workshop series. It wasn't easy, being around a lot of high-emotional-octane-sensitive people, mostly psychotherapists, but I really really liked what I learned. 

The thing I found most ethical about SE was that even though I was just a "physical" therapist, I could address the emotional containment issues people were being beset with and overwhelmed by without ever having to know the actual verbal content of them or interact with any of it, which was a big relief to me. Because I did not want to be a psychologist.

To me, it was a relief to know I did not have to be.

I did not have to be a neurosurgeon, just a skilled paramedic.

I loved the play involved. The SIBAM of it all. How predictable Peter Levine had made the outcomes. How to help people focus away from their "story" onto a new story about what they were experiencing in their body, where, and what that would look like if they could see it, colour, size, shape, texture, what it would feel like if they could touch it, temperature, dry or damp or slippery, all the details. It was fascinating! How they could just sit with it, contain it, hold it with their hands (usually in the torso somewhere). If they started to wander into story again, asking them what was going on with the shape, size, colour, etc. of their body experience. They would recognize the change in their emotional "pain" as change occurred.

We learned to sit still and shut up and just watch. (Levine said, be a cat, kill time by licking your paw. My translation: You're working with nature here and nature needs time and for you to shut up while it does its own thing.) You do your job by persuading the person to focus on sensation, and that is the only key interventional bit.

If people drifted off they would need to be gently brought back by asking them to describe their sensations, "And what are you experiencing in your body?"

He called it "titrating." He said, you want the nervous system to integrate but not all at once because that just reinforces the trauma story. He made the analogy with sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid (I think), two horribly caustic compounds. If you just dump them into each other, they explode or something. But if you slowly drip them into each other, titrate them, they turn into salt and water, two compounds essential for life. (I can't confirm because I am not a chemist, but it sounded good.)

And invariably the horrible sensations would turn into golden lights and lovely stuff like that and people would feel so much relief.

That was when I learned that nervous systems can do their own heavy lifting and I could be free of feeling responsible and anxious about "fixing" things in other people. After that training, I was able to figure out how to be a way kinder manual therapist.

SIBAM = sensation, image, behaviour, affect, meaning.

It's such a lovely way to be with people. I wish the physio schools taught this kind of thing along with all the (mostly irrelevant) anatomy.