I trust that as a bodywork practitioner, you are keenly invested in the welfare of your clients and devoted to providing them with the very best care. With this in mind, I write to you from a client perspective about a vitally important issue in the therapeutic relationship: ethical standards. I ask that you read my personal story and consider ways in which the experience I share might help you to improve your own practice and profession.
Practitioners of the alternative healing arts are invaluable resources for those of us who are suffering emotionally, physically, and spiritually. I have benefitted greatly from massage, shiatsu, craniosacral therapy, acupuncture, and energy healing over the years, and I remain deeply appreciative of the therapists who have provided me with good care. I have also had the misfortune of receiving treatment from a bodyworker who exploited my trust to manipulate me into a sexual relationship. The experience was life-shattering. I would like to share this experience with you to bring increased understanding of what happens emotionally and psychologically to a client whose trust is abused by an unethical therapist; and, more specifically, the impact of such actions on clients like me who have backgrounds marked by childhood trauma. Having now reached the point of recovery, it’s clear to me that my childhood traumas—early abandonment, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse at 9 years old—played a key role in my inability to protect myself from this abusive therapist and also in my struggle to heal from the experience.
Power differential and transference—concepts you learn in your ethics training—are magnified in clients who have suffered childhood trauma. My hope is that by witnessing the tainted therapeutic relationship through the story I am sharing, you will gain an enhanced appreciation for why it is essential that you always honor and hold sacred the trust your clients invest in you.
In all healing professions, trust is central to the therapist-client relationship. In the somatic healing professions, trust holds even more power. Ben Benjamin, co-author of The Ethics of Touch and author of numerous articles about ethics in the bodywork field, writes that bodywork, “by its very nature, violates the normal boundary that exists between most people. Once this boundary has been crossed, it is easy to imagine that maintaining a clear separation between professional touch and personal intimacy can be confusing and difficult.”1
Energy-based bodywork may pose even less clear boundaries, as the part of our system that is being treated—energy—is intangible and subtle. It carries a mystique for the client who is unfamiliar with this not-yet-mainstream practice. As a gifted bodyworker may exploit a client’s emotional and psychological vulnerabilities with physical touch, so can a gifted energy worker exploit a client by manipulating his or her energy. The combination of the two is potentially devastating, as I can personally attest.
Our First Session
At 56 years old, I went to “Mr. D.,” master bodyworker/therapist, for my first appointment. I had received many massages previously, but was new to alternative healing practices that treated the movement of energy. I was eager to try them, wanting to explore holistic treatments rather than drugs and surgery to address my chronic pain. Mr. D.’s website looked impressive: extensive training in a variety of somatic and energetic techniques and a reported passion for the work he did. I was enthusiastic and intrigued.
In our first session, Mr. D. did not ask questions nor did he take notes as I described the physical issues for which I was seeking help. He evaluated my body posture as I stood in front of him, at one point touching my abdomen and lower back. When I asked what he would be doing in our session, he responded, “My clients’ bodies speak to me.” I thought this a somewhat unusual response, but since I was unfamiliar with alternative bodywork practices at the time, I accepted it as appropriate. He instructed me to “take off everything” for the 90-minute session. He began with a back massage and continued with other techniques that I assumed were craniosacral therapy, shiatsu, and energy work. The treatment was different from anything I had ever experienced. Aside from the physical feelings, I also experienced the sensation of being cradled like an infant and surrounded by comforting, divine love.
After the session, I asked him, “So what did my body tell you?” He replied, “Nothing I didn’t already know.” He didn’t discuss the treatment or the issues I was seeking help with but, oddly, he asked me if I was still menstruating. Noticing my surprise at this question, he explained that he sometimes “sees things” in clients and has to be careful about what he says. He then hugged me, took my face in his hands, and said, “You look beautiful.” The entire experience spoke to my childlike longing for the nurturing parent I never had, unconsciously drawing me toward him; I left that first session feeling light-headed and inexplicably good, viewing him as a kind, gentle, and nurturing parental figure.
In retrospect, the red flags from that very first visit are now clear: Mr. D. touching me during the evaluation without my verbal consent; not providing information about his techniques so that I could give informed consent concerning which areas of my body I did or didn’t want touched; giving me no choice in the level of disrobing; his overconfidence in knowing what I needed rather than communicating with me about the treatment; and engaging in undue physical and verbal intimacy at the end of the session. At the time, I had no understanding of professional boundaries, and even though I felt that something was off on a gut level, I accepted his unusual remarks and conduct as evidence that he and his work were special—and that I was special, too. I trusted him, and I could not have known that his abuse of power began in that very first session and would escalate in the sessions to come.
Over the next few weeks, I had three more appointments with Mr. D. I was starting to feel a strange shift, like something spiritual was happening, something indefinable; and I attributed it to his work. My feelings were validated by other clients’ testimonials on his website. And Mr. D. himself reinforced this feeling in me by writing to me in an email that my “mind and spirit have been waiting a long time for this.” Yet, certain things also left me feeling uneasy. In one session, I opened my eyes slightly while on my back; his face was only about 2 inches from mine, and he was breathing over my mouth. Though startled, I thought, so this is energy work.
In another session, he laid on top of me as I was lying face down on the table. Again, energy work, I figured. After that session, though, I felt strangely disconnected from everything around me, as if in a dream, while feeling increasingly drawn to him. He then started checking in on me via emails, wanting to know how I was feeling after the treatments. I thought the attention was a bit unusual but, again, I ignored my discomfort and told myself that he was only being a caring, attentive therapist. I was depressed at the time and very unhappy in my marriage, so the attention felt comforting. I wanted to trust him; I felt I needed to trust him, in the way a child trusts his or her caretaker. I submitted a glowing testimonial to his website, as did my friend “Charlene,” whom I had referred to him. She, too, felt similarly drawn to him and believed he was a “holy man.” And she, too, was unhappy in her marriage and in her life in general.
In my fourth session with Mr. D., he lowered the draping sheet to completely expose my bottom while massaging my back. He then slowly slid his hands down my torso and cupped around my pelvic bones. I instinctively felt something was wrong, but at the same time it felt good. I pushed away any thoughts that what he was doing was wrong. After all, this is energy work, it’s different, he knows what he’s doing, he wouldn’t hurt me, he’s nurturing … I had no frame of reference for making a judgment about what an appropriate boundary was in energy work, so I accepted what he was doing as part of the treatment.
After this session, he sent me an email expressing more than professional interest. Troubled and confused, I ended the treatments with him, writing him that I felt some boundaries were being crossed and that I didn’t want to compromise the professional relationship. He was quite angered by this, and responded that he is often misunderstood. Am I wrong, I wondered, did I overreact? Maybe he really does care for me. I don’t want to hurt him … Oblivious to his manipulation in this first of many attempts to place responsibility on me, I agreed to meet him for lunch to clarify things.
In that meeting, I shared my traumatic childhood experiences and expressed the feelings of loneliness and abandonment that enveloped me throughout my life as a result of those experiences. He told me, “You need to understand that watching someone go through changes, as you are, is seductive,” again placing blame, and responsibility, on me.
Within a short time, Mr. D. started pursuing me romantically through emails. He wrote that we had a spiritual relationship that was “begging to be expressed physically,” and that he could see how affection was missing in my life “so, naturally I want you to have it.” My journal from that time reflects how conflicted I was, at once uncomfortable and questioning his sincerity, yet also wondering if this man, whose touch was so nurturing in the bodywork sessions and who expressed such tender sentiments in emails, was my soul mate. After several emails and another session, he persuaded me to come to his house.
I had envisioned some conversation, getting to know each other, perhaps over a cup of tea in a cozy, warm home; but the experience was quite different. Entering his cold, dark house, I suddenly felt in danger. My heart was racing and pounding so hard that I could hear it, as I realized that this man was a stranger rather than the caring, gentle, spiritual man he led me to believe he was. Almost immediately, he started kissing me, then reached to lock the door. I experienced a trigger memory of my uncle locking the door before he would molest me. Get out now, Emma!, a voice in my head warned. But I froze. Instead of listening to that voice, I robotically allowed him to guide me into his bedroom. After all, he cares for me … I’m special … the needy child in me thought. In the sexual encounter that followed, I felt disconnected from the event, like I was watching it from above in disbelief. When I returned to my home several hours later, I was sobbing, shaken, panicked; I couldn’t feel my legs. I now recognize that my experience that day was one of sexual violation and that the freezing and dissociation I experienced are common physiological responses to trauma.
After that encounter, I tried to end the relationship. But in my diminished state of mind—and wanting to believe that Mr. D. cared for me and that this was a “real” relationship—I eventually succumbed to his persistent appeals to return. Throughout the following six-month involvement, I became increasingly disengaged from my surroundings: my home, my friends, my family, and my regular life. After time spent with him, I’d burst into tears as soon as I entered my house. I was incredibly confused and experienced frightening bodily sensations I didn’t understand or recognize: an overall feeling that I was slowly dissolving, my legs weak and ungrounded. When I’d try to talk about my confusion with Mr. D., he’d tell me that I needed to change my thinking, that the relationship was a “gift,” and that I should be putting energy into it because in turn I would receive energy from the Universe. I was like a captive in a cult, under his spell, powerless to break away even though I attempted to several times.
This nightmarish experience ended abruptly when he told me he was leaving town to try to reconcile with his ex-wife. I was distraught and in shock, feeling betrayed and abandoned like a helpless child. Just a few weeks later, my friend Charlene revealed to me that Mr. D. had also exploited her trust by inviting her to his home for a session, telling her he had another treatment office there. After taking money from her, he led her to his bedroom and coerced her into having intercourse with him. She, too, responded by freezing and dissociating, and even became suicidal after the encounter.
Many professionals I spoke with about Charlene’s and my experience advised us to go to the police. But we couldn’t. We struggled, as most sexual assault victims do, with feeling ashamed and responsible, afraid and confused. Since he was a “healer,” we wanted to believe there was a meaningful, positive reason for what happened. Both of us had difficulty accepting the truth that we had been so cruelly manipulated and callously used by someone we trusted—someone we had gone to specifically for healing.
It took a very long time for me to see things for what they were: Mr. D. exploited my trust and vulnerability to not only rape my body but perhaps worse, to rape my heart, mind, and soul. In the aftermath of his abuse, I experienced a terrifying sense of having completely lost my Self, like I literally had holes in my body, accompanied by a drowning fear that I’d never find my way back. I cried several times a day, every day, for months—“meltdowns” I called them. I spent many, many months—and thousands of dollars—working intensively with a variety of caring, respectful therapists and doctors to find my way to the beginning of recovery. I couldn’t comprehend how I had fallen so far: how could this happen to me, a smart, responsible, middle-aged woman with a graduate degree?
Along with therapy, a key factor in my recovery was education. As I started to learn about professional ethics and the psychological dynamic that takes place within a therapeutic relationship, I also began to see more clearly that I had been horribly violated—and that it wasn’t my fault. All of those gut feelings along the way were now validated as I began to understand that this was a case of abuse, not a consensual affair. I also began to understand how my early childhood traumas directly related to the experience. The body holds traumatic memories, and those strange and terrifying bodily sensations I experienced during the involvement were triggers of my own early traumas. They consequently distorted my ability to accurately gauge Mr. D.’s actions, triggering feelings that left me confused, fearful, and powerless.
A Lifetime of Experiences
Clients come to healing professionals with their own individual history and a lifetime of experiences. For clients like Charlene and me, with histories of childhood trauma, touch therapies can take us into deep wounds that need healing, making us exceptionally vulnerable. We, in particular, open our trust to healing professionals because the wounded part of us is longing for the safety and love that we did not have as children. Our early experiences leave us emotionally handicapped as adults, with unclear and distorted boundaries. When someone we come to for healing abuses our trust, the consequences are particularly devastating. In my case, Mr. D. stole three years of my life, and more than two of those years were spent in painful recovery from his abuse. In Charlene’s case, Mr. D.’s actions came close to causing her to end her life. Though I was unable at the time to report Mr. D. to the police, I did, on the advice of several bodywork professionals, report him to our state’s licensing board. Since Mr. D. is not licensed in the state, I could only report him for nonlicensure. It took two long years for the case to finally be resolved, and Mr. D. has been sanctioned. Unfortunately, since the board in my state oversees only licensed individuals, Mr. D. could not be directly sanctioned for his ethical misconduct.
Respecting Professional Boundaries
I believe personal stories are powerful, and I hope mine gives you a sense of the profoundly harmful impact an abusive bodywork therapist can have on a client.
Thank you for the work you do and for taking the time to read and consider what I’ve shared with you. By respecting professional boundaries, you not only respect your commitment to your clients and yourself, you respect and uphold the integrity of a profession that is essential to the health of our communities.
Notes
1. Ben E. Benjamin, “Sexual Abuse Within the Health Care Field,” Massage Therapy Journal (Spring 1990).
2. RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) website, accessed July 2015, https://rainn.org/get-information/types-of-sexual-assault/sexual-exploitation-by-helping-professional.
Emma K. is a pseudonym. Please forward your responses to editor@abmp.com.