Try Integrity Before Trying Me

Professional massage therapists are required to create a safe and ethical space in their studios for the protection of their clients. We are bound by HIPPA standards, just like your doctor’s office.

Unfortunately this creates a dangerous situation for the massage therapist. 

Your doctor brings another professional into the room while examining you so they are not falsely accused of unethical behavior, but also to protect the patient by providing a witness to anything deemed unethical. 

In the massage studio I am alone with you. You tell me things about your body that will never leave the room. Nothing is shared. If your wife also gets bodywork from me, I don’t even share with her that I saw you, when I saw you, how often you book appointments, or for how long. Unless you specifically sign permission, I do not even admit you are a client. If I see you in public, I will let you say hello first. If you are with people, I must let you lead as to how we know each other, or I will merely say that we work together. 

Boundaries are incredibly important in my business. This is why I don’t tolerate jokes about massage therapists giving happy endings. The only happy ending I provide, is when someone walks out of my door knowing how to heal their bodies. Don’t say something to me that you wouldn’t say to your dentist. 

I had a client who booked with me every two weeks. He was a talker during our sessions. 

I encourage clients to stay quiet, breathe into the work that I’m doing and communicate with me about their needs throughout the session. I let them know that this is their time, and they are not at all to feel obligated to talk to me. However, sometimes bodywork inspires people to share about their past traumas, physical, spiritual and emotional. It can be a purging for them released through muscle memory. Some people want to talk as if I’m their counselor. There are not many situations where a person has your undivided attention for two hours in a way that validates everything you are going through without judgment or opinion. That’s a lot of intimacy. I am honored to hold that space. I fiercely protect it due to that honor.

In addition to upholding that space, my partner is given the exact same respect so there is not one thought in their head of what transpires in my massage studio as I am alone with a naked person on my table. The massage table is my altar. No matter who you are, you will be treated with the respect of a client while on my table. My boundaries respect my partner and yours. 

It does not take much to encourage a man with ulterior motives. When I recognize those motives, I set the record straight, because I will not put myself in a situation that feels emotionally and physically unsafe. “If you are booking because you want a date with me, please ask me on a date. If you want to date me, you cannot be my client. Furthermore, I am not dating.”  

The last part is because there’s no way in hell I want to date a guy who can’t be honest about his intentions. Men with ulterior motives will say things like, “Oh, no, I wasn’t trying to ask you out.” These men are already telling you that they are not comfortable taking accountability for being sneaky or even of having difficult conversations. You don’t want them in your life, and you cannot afford them as clients. 

This particular client of mine began sharing about his life during sessions. He spoke of his child, his wife, his hobbies, his work, his friends, his medical issues, and anything that happened that he felt necessary to express. I would listen as I worked. I would not agree nor disagree with him. I would simply listen and ask questions that allowed deeper processing. He would thank me at the end of our sessions and hug me. I realized that his regular appointments with me were fulfilling a variety of his needs, especially emotionally. He would show up, hug me, we would talk about what I needed to work on during our session, and then he would get on the table after I left the room.

Sometimes he sent his wife to me for appointments. If one asked about the other, I would let them know it was best to talk to their partner directly for that information. 

I noticed a shift when his hugs began to linger, so my hugs became more of a side hug. His conversations became more about the difficulties he was having with his wife, so I started avoiding that subject and redirecting. I stopped hugging him altogether, keeping the massage table between us whenever he entered the room. He knew that my home was under construction, so one day he randomly showed up to see progress. In response, I brought my partner out to meet him. I realized that I needed to bow out of this client relationship and was trying to figure out how to word it.

The next appointment I was not as talkative. With 20 minutes remaining in the session, he got an erection. I looked at his face for information. His other arm was bent supporting his head in an upright position that would allow him more presence and eye contact. I ignored it and went deeper to make him physically uncomfortable. He wagged his member at me from beneath the loose sheets. This was the first time for me dealing with this in my studio, so I was shocked into silence as I panicked thinking of ways to keep myself safe. I played it off by massaging his foot, and backed away from the table telling him the session was over and that I would meet him outside in the public hall. 

He walked out and I curtly said goodbye. I was afraid to talk about it. A man wanting to avoid accountability will become angry, which could quickly turn to physical violence. 

That night I constructed an email that I rewrote several times, firing him as a client for his inappropriate behaviors and my intolerance for that in my professional space. “When I see you in town, I will treat you with kindness, respect and love,” I assured him. “I will not be telling your wife and she is welcome to continue booking with me.” 

He emailed back, apologizing for my discomfort and assuring me that he had no idea why that happened, and that he probably became inappropriate due to his traumatic brain injury. 

There it was. Rather than take accountability, he would defer to his “TBI”. 

I didn’t hear from them again. She had just given birth to a child who would live with a chromosome defect. The birth itself was traumatic. 

Four years later I was leaving my parked truck in the grocery store parking lot when a woman carrying a 4-year-old child approached me smiling and saying hello. I recognized her and smiled broadly, excited to meet her son. 

Her voice was kind when she said, “I know what happened between you and my husband,” she began. “We aren’t together any more. All of it was too much. I forgive you for what you did.”

I was in absolute shock, choked with rage and disbelief. I stared in confusion, feeling just as shocked as that moment with him in the massage room. 

Yet still in this moment I felt it necessary to uphold HIPPA standards. 

“I can assure you that absolutely nothing that you are implying took place in my massage room,” I began. “A lot of things come out during bodywork sessions, but I assure you that I maintain integrity.” 

She nodded with a smile assuring me that he told her what happened, and because he was drunk when he admitted it, she knew it to be a true confession. 

“Yes, Bettina, lots of things come out during a session, including my breast milk,” she said, referring to a session at which time she was nursing and had leaky breasts. 

With that, she turned away leaving me unheard and falsely accused, me terrified of my professional reputation going down the tubes. I was a wreck on many levels. She was also a yoga teacher in our small town.

I sought advice from my mentors. They insisted that in this situation I did not need to uphold HIPPA standards in order to protect myself. I reached out to the spurned woman and left her a voicemail asking if we could meet for tea and a conversation. She declined, saying that she was fine with it now and had moved on. I was furious. A year later at Valentine’s Day I sent her a card telling her that she was a beautiful woman who deserved great love, and that I was forgiving her for using me as a means to leave a relationship that wasn’t working for her on many levels. 

I never heard back. 

It made me realize that I had let him get away with too much before moving myself to safety. It would be one of many examples to myself of how taking care of people at my own expense would only harm me later. My experiences have taught me that it is better to trust myself than trust someone else. My business was now teaching me lessons about loose boundaries. It was teaching me to drop my fear and put myself at physical risk in the moment to confront exactly what I knew to be true, because it would be far less painful to fight someone off than suffer the consequences of their manipulation tactics further down the line. 

People don’t receive rejection well, and emotionally immature people do not receive negative feedback with integrity or honesty. They will deflect, lie, point out your faults, and shift the blame to you before they admit their unscrupulous intentions - before being faced with their shame. 

That’s what it’s like being a massage therapist, but that’s also what it’s like being a woman. 

When you tell me to take a joke, you’re telling me to ignore my intuition so you can behave like a bully, get away with it, and keep manipulating me until you get what I don’t want to give. 

Sorry. I’m booked.