I teach classes on depolarization. People usually associate polarization with politics, but the same dynamics show up in academic and professional discussions. They certainly show up in massage therapy.
There are plenty of subjects in our field that can generate surprisingly charged conversations. What does massage actually do to tissue? Are we moving fluids? Stretching fascia? Releasing something? What should we make of energy work? How much should research determine what we believe? What counts as evidence in the first place? I have strong opinions about some of these things, and I regularly find myself in conversations with people who have very different ones.
I could summarize some of the main principles I teach in my depolarization classes, but what I want to share here is something a little more personal. It’s related to those principles, but it’s about what actually goes on inside my head when I’m having these conversations. The things I remind myself of, the reactions I notice, and the ways I try to orient my thinking so that I can get the most out of a discussion with someone who sees things differently. These are some of the things I try to keep in mind.
Reality is a genuinely difficult nut to crack.
We’re trying to figure out what is happening in the world, and that’s hard. Massage may be an especially difficult thing to understand because we’re dealing simultaneously with touch, sensation, pain, expectation, attention, movement, physiology, relationships, context, learning, memory, emotion, and subjective experience. We can control some variables in a laboratory, but the more tightly we control them, the less what we’re studying may resemble an actual massage. Then we have to take findings from those studies and decide what they mean for something as complex as one human being touching another human being for an hour.
I try not only to remember that difficulty internally, but to convey it in the way I talk. I want there to be some wonder in the conversation. Some genuine curiosity about what we know, what we don’t know, and how apparently contradictory pieces might fit together. We’re all trying to understand something that isn’t particularly easy to understand.
I try to stay very clear about what I actually know.
This becomes especially important when I disagree strongly with someone. Has the thing we’re discussing actually been studied? What did the study find? How strong was the finding? What conclusions can actually be drawn from it? A finding is not the same thing as the implications we draw from that finding, and something I happen to believe is not the same thing as something that has been demonstrated.
I also try to distinguish between “there is evidence against this” and “there isn’t evidence for this.” Those are different claims. And even when there is good counterevidence, that doesn’t mean some future evidence couldn’t change the picture. None of this means every possibility deserves equal credibility, or that we should pretend there is evidence where there isn’t any. If someone makes a claim for which there is no evidence, or for which substantial counterevidence exists, I think it’s entirely appropriate to say so. But I want to be careful not to claim more certainty than the evidence actually gives me.
I try to remember why an idea makes sense before explaining why I think it’s wrong.
Most of the ideas we argue about in massage therapy didn’t come from nowhere. Many of them make intuitive sense. It feels like we’re pushing things around when we massage someone. It feels like tissues stretch. After massage, something may feel as though it has been cleared out, so it’s not difficult to understand how people arrived at the language of “toxins.” And even if you’re about as anti-woo as a person can possibly be, I think we can understand why human beings might wonder whether there are invisible forms of connection or influence between people.
Understanding why something seems true is different from believing that it is true. After all, it was perfectly sensible for people to believe that the sun revolved around the Earth. That’s what it looks like from where we’re standing! The fact that we now know otherwise doesn’t make the original observation foolish or the conclusion incomprehensible. I try to bring that same understanding to conversations about massage. Even when I’m convinced that someone’s explanation is wrong, I want to remember why it seems right to them. And usually, that’s pretty easy to do.
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I pay attention to what we mean by our words.
One thing I’ve learned to watch for is the possibility that two people are using the same words to mean different things. Sometimes the differences are subtle, but they can have enormous consequences for a discussion. What’s particularly tricky is that we often don’t realize it’s happening. We think we’re disagreeing about an idea when we’re actually using a word differently, or we think we agree because we’re using the same language even though we have very different ideas in mind.
Massage therapy is full of words like this. Treat, fix, help, release, relax, and even massage itself can mean quite different things depending on who’s using them. Sometimes the differences depend on other beliefs the person holds. Two therapists might agree that massage “helps” someone, for example, while having entirely different ideas about what that means, what is happening physiologically, or what would count as evidence that it helped. And two therapists might disagree about whether massage can “fix” something, only to discover that they’re using fix to mean two different things.
I try to notice when a disagreement might be resting on one of these differences, and when I suspect it is, I ask what the person means by the term they’re using. Sometimes that question reveals that we don’t disagree nearly as much as we thought. Other times it reveals a more substantial disagreement that had been hidden beneath apparently shared language. Either way, we’ve made progress, because now we’re discussing what we actually think rather than what we assume the other person thinks.
I remember that I haven’t always believed what I believe now.
Some of my ideas about massage, pain, neuroscience, trauma, and the body are different from what they were ten years ago. Some are different from what they were a few years ago, or even a few months ago. So it doesn’t make much sense for me to criticize someone simply for where they happen to be in their thinking today. They may believe something I once believed myself.
They may have encountered different teachers, books, experiences, or evidence than I have. They may change their mind next year. I may change mine. If I allow myself the dignity of having learned things and changed my thinking over time, I should extend that same dignity to someone else.
I watch for my own tendency to polarize.
Human beings are remarkably good at sorting ourselves into groups, and once we’ve done that, ideas can become markers of membership. Someone says something that sounds like it belongs to the other “tribe of thought,” and before we’ve even fully considered what they mean, we can feel the impulse to push back. We also like binaries: evidence-based or woo, scientific or unscientific, traditional or modern, with us or against us.
I don’t think I can simply decide not to have these tendencies. I can notice them, though. I can notice that little internal reaction when someone says something that sounds like it’s coming from the “other side,” and recognize that my reaction is itself information worth paying attention to. And recognizing these tendencies in myself makes it easier to have patience when I see them in someone else. They’re not displaying some peculiar intellectual defect that I escaped. They’re doing something human beings do, including me.
I ask myself what I’m trying to accomplish.
Sometimes I notice that I’m more interested in winning a disagreement than in understanding the other person’s thinking. There’s something satisfying about finding the flaw in someone’s argument, coming up with a particularly compelling counterexample, or presenting a piece of research that seems to settle the matter. I think it’s worth asking why those things feel so satisfying. Perhaps it’s the pleasure of being right, of demonstrating what we know, or of defending an idea we’ve become attached to. Whatever the reason, the satisfaction of winning can become a goal of its own, even when that wasn’t what we originally wanted from the conversation.
So I try to ask myself what I’m actually hoping to accomplish. Am I trying to convince this person that I’m right? Am I trying to understand why they see things differently? Am I hoping we’ll both come away with a better understanding of the subject? There’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to persuade someone, and sometimes that’s an entirely appropriate goal. But in most collegial discussions, I think there’s something much more interesting available to us than simply trying to win.
If I’m genuinely interested in exploring an idea together, that changes how I participate. I want to find out what the other person actually thinks and why they think it. I look for the parts of their thinking that I agree with, or at least the observations that make their conclusions understandable. Then I can introduce what I know, including research or alternative explanations that might challenge their ideas. Ideally, we’re putting pieces on a table together and asking how they fit, rather than searching for the biggest intellectual club we can find and waiting for an opportunity to pummel each other with it.
The person across from me isn’t the enemy. They’re a co-explorer.
None of this requires pretending that every idea is equally well supported. It doesn’t require withholding criticism, avoiding disagreement, or acting as though we can never know anything. In fact, I think disagreement becomes much more interesting when we don’t have to protect ourselves from it. We can say, “I don’t think the evidence supports that,” while still being interested in why the other person thinks it does. We can challenge an inference without needing to diminish the person making it. We can even discover that the person we disagree with has noticed something important that our preferred explanation doesn’t adequately account for.
Two people can look carefully at the same question, bring different information and different assumptions to it, challenge each other’s thinking, and leave with neither person entirely convinced. That’s not a failed conversation. That’s a successful one.
Author
Dr. Mark Olson, Ph.D., LMT, is a neuroscientist, educator, and massage therapist whose work bridges neuroscience, bodywork, trauma-informed practice, and human experience. He holds an M.A. in Education and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Illinois, with training in cognitive and behavioral neuropsychology and neuroanatomy. He is Education Director at the Sarasota School of Massage Therapy and chair of the advisory committee for the Boulder School of Massage Therapy. His work focuses on pain science, the neuroscience of massage and bodywork, trauma-informed care, and bringing contemporary science into massage therapy education. He is also a NARM® practitioner and develops continuing-education courses for massage therapists and other health professionals through Dr-Olson.com.
