Why Do Some People Experience Lasting Change from Bodywork While Others Don’t?
The same approach can be deeply helpful for one person, make only a temporary difference for another, and seem to have little effect for someone else. Why?
If you’ve received bodywork, you may have experienced a session that left you feeling noticeably different. Perhaps your movement felt easier, your breathing changed, or an area that had been uncomfortable for a long time suddenly felt less restricted.
Sometimes those changes remain available for weeks, months, or longer. Other times, the familiar discomfort or tension returns relatively quickly. And sometimes, despite the practitioner’s best efforts, very little seems to change.
I’ve spent years considering these differences. I’ve seen people experience meaningful changes after relatively little intervention, and I’ve worked with others whose experiences have been far more complicated.
Even when I approach two people with similar concerns, their responses can be remarkably different. And the same person may respond differently to similar work from one session to the next.
There are many possible influences, and I don’t think any single explanation accounts for all of them. The following are some of the relationships I’ve found worth considering.
The State of the Nervous System
Our physiological state influences how we experience ourselves and the world around us. It can affect our sensitivity to touch, our sense of safety, our movement, our attention, and the ways we respond to unfamiliar experiences.
Someone who is exhausted, overwhelmed, or under considerable stress may experience bodywork differently from someone who arrives feeling relatively settled. Even within a single session, these experiences can shift.
But I would be cautious about suggesting that a nervous system must be in a particular state before change becomes possible.
People can experience meaningful changes while anxious or uncomfortable, just as feeling deeply relaxed does not guarantee that an intervention will be helpful.
What interests me is how we might recognize and respond to someone’s present experience rather than assume that a particular physiological state is the prerequisite for progress.
Our Histories and Habitual Patterns
The ways we move, stand, breathe, and respond to the world develop over time. They are influenced by our physical histories, environments, activities, injuries, relationships, and the many adaptations we’ve made throughout our lives.
Some patterns have been present for decades. Others developed relatively recently. Both can become familiar ways of organizing ourselves, often without our consciously choosing them.
It’s tempting to assume that the longer something has been present, the harder it will be to change. Sometimes that seems to be the case. Yet I’ve also seen longstanding restrictions shift surprisingly quickly, while more recent difficulties remain persistent.
The history of a pattern can offer useful context, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us what is possible in the present.
Sometimes exploring a familiar movement in a different way, changing how support is experienced, or working somewhere seemingly unrelated can reveal possibilities that weren’t previously apparent.
Awareness, Attention, and Participation
Awareness is an important part of my work, although I think it’s more complicated than simply noticing what is happening in the body.
Some people readily notice small differences in movement, tension, or sensation. Others find it difficult to identify what they’re experiencing, particularly when their attention has been directed elsewhere for much of their lives.
Neither necessarily tells us how well someone will respond to bodywork.
A person can be highly attentive to bodily sensations while interpreting them through familiar expectations or concerns. Someone else may notice very little during a session and discover later that something in their movement or comfort has changed.
I’m interested in the relationship between attention, perception, and experience. What do we notice? What do we overlook? How do we understand what we feel? And what becomes possible when we encounter something familiar in a different way?
Participation can take many forms. Sometimes it involves movement or active exploration. Sometimes it involves asking a question, expressing discomfort, or recognizing that something doesn’t feel useful. Sometimes it involves resting and allowing an experience to unfold without trying to direct it.
There’s no single way someone needs to participate for a session to be meaningful.
The Relationships Between Physical and Emotional Experience
Our physical and emotional experiences are deeply intertwined. Stress, grief, uncertainty, excitement, and other experiences can influence breathing, movement, muscle tone, attention, and how we perceive discomfort.
At the same time, physical discomfort can influence our mood, our sense of possibility, and how we engage with the world.
These relationships matter, but they can also be easy to oversimplify.
For example, tension in someone’s shoulders doesn’t necessarily mean they’re carrying unresolved emotional experiences there. A particular movement pattern doesn’t reliably reveal someone’s trauma history. And the presence of pain doesn’t tell us that something psychological needs to be uncovered.
Sometimes emotional or relational experiences are relevant to what someone is feeling physically. Sometimes they’re not particularly relevant to the work we’re doing.
I try to remain curious about these relationships without deciding too quickly what an experience means.
Expectations, Interpretation, and Meaning
What we expect from bodywork can influence what we notice and how we interpret our experience.
Someone who expects deep pressure or an intense sensation may wonder whether gentle work is doing anything. Someone who feels sore afterward may interpret that soreness as evidence that something important happened.
Others may experience a quiet shift in comfort or movement and initially overlook it because it doesn’t resemble what they expected change to feel like.
Of course, practitioners bring expectations, too. We have our training, theories, preferred methods, and ideas about what constitutes progress.
Those assumptions can influence where we direct our attention, what we choose to do, and how we describe what happens during a session.
If I tell someone that a particular sensation means they’re releasing trauma, correcting a dysfunction, or making an important breakthrough, I may be assigning a meaning that the experience itself doesn’t establish.
I think it’s important to leave room for uncertainty. We can recognize that something has changed without immediately deciding what that change signifies.
What Happens Outside the Treatment Room
A session takes place within a much larger life.
We return to our families, work, relationships, activities, responsibilities, and familiar environments. All of these can influence how we move, feel, and experience ourselves.
Someone may leave a session feeling considerably more comfortable, only to notice familiar tension returning during an ordinary activity or stressful situation.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the session failed. It may tell us something about the relationships between what happens in the treatment room and what happens elsewhere.
Sometimes a person discovers that a new way of moving or experiencing support remains available during everyday life. Sometimes familiar patterns return, but the person relates to them differently. Sometimes the changes are temporary, and we don’t know why.
There may be value in noticing these experiences between sessions, but I don’t think someone should have to follow a prescribed routine to make bodywork successful.
What happens outside the treatment room is worth exploring together, without turning the responsibility for lasting change entirely over to the client.
What does lasting change actually mean?
We often speak about lasting change as though its meaning is obvious.
Perhaps it means that pain disappears and doesn’t return. Perhaps it means moving with greater ease, feeling less effort, or having more options in how we respond to familiar circumstances.
Sometimes a meaningful change may involve experiencing something differently, even when the underlying difficulty hasn’t entirely gone away.
And sometimes temporary relief is valuable in its own right. A few hours or days of greater comfort can matter enormously to someone living with persistent pain.
I think we need to be careful about assuming that only permanent changes count as progress.
There may not be one answer.
The differences in how people respond to bodywork are part of what keeps this work interesting to me.
I bring years of study, clinical experience, and different ways of understanding the body. But none of those allows me to predict exactly how someone will respond or what a particular session will make possible.
The relationship between practitioner and client matters, too. How we communicate, what we notice, what we assume, the timing of an intervention, and whether someone feels able to participate in the process can all influence the experience.
Sometimes we discover something useful quickly. Sometimes the work unfolds gradually. Sometimes we need to reconsider our assumptions, change direction, or recognize that another approach may be more helpful.
For me, working together means remaining curious about what is happening, what may be possible, and what becomes meaningful in the context of someone’s life.
And perhaps that’s part of what lasting change involves: a growing capacity to encounter ourselves and our experiences with greater possibility, rather than simply trying to reproduce a particular result.
Curious about working together?
You don’t need to know what kind of bodywork you need or how your body might respond. We can begin with what you’re experiencing and explore from there.
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