“What can I expect to get from this?”

I saw a new client last week, a lovely woman who was really primed for the work.  She was ready to make a change in her life, and hadn’t found psychotherapy to be all that helpful to her.  She was looking for some other way to heal, connect, and shift her life in the right direction.

It’s still amazing to me what clients find when they come to this work, not sure where it’s going to take them, but with a willingness to be open to it.  It’s also always inspiring to see how powerful touch can be.  Once she was on the table and paying attention to her own body, even before I made contact, it wasn’t long at all before she was in touch with herself: with the emotions she had been holding back, with the ways she had been holding herself together with the tension in her shoulders.  Tears flowed, and I made contact with her feet, helping her to feel grounded and safe.

Throughout the rest of the session, she kept being surprised by the power of the touch: how comforting it was to have her knee cradled, and how rare was that feeling; how defensive her body became when I first made contact with her hip; how contact with her hip on the other side, after her body had adjusted, made her feel safe to open and be vulnerable to what she was feeling.  “Do people always get emotional?” she asked at one point, laughing a little.  Not everyone, not every time, to be sure, but it is remarkable the way safe, boundaried touch can help people access their pain and let it flow through.

At the end of the session, she asked the title question – what can I expect to get from this – and I couldn’t help but smile.  It was so clear that she had gotten so much already: a sense of safety, a place where it felt good to be open and vulnerable, an opportunity to be touched – in both senses of that word.

Everyone gets something a little bit different from this work; the process is as individual as the people who seek it out.  But in my experience, everyone gets to feel safe, everyone gets loving, non-sexualized touch, and everyone gets a chance to spend real, focused time on and with themselves, in a holistic way.  These fundamental things about Rubenfeld Synergy Method have more value than can really be properly expressed, and can translate into greater comfort, greater freedom, greater safety and deeper living of life.