Beyond “Safe Touch”
The body remembers.
It holds the echoes of past experiences, the weight of old tensions, the quiet hum of emotions we can’t name. For those of us living with trauma, anxiety, depression, chronic pain, chronic illness, and the list goes on… our bodies and lives can sometimes feel like a cage. So we shrink ourselves down to fit inside and try like hell not to touch the edges.
Trauma-informed massage therapy is not about “fixing” the body or erasing its history. It is about listening. It is about restoring relationship. And, most importantly, it is about returning choice to where it was once taken away.
The dominant conversation around trauma-informed massage often centers on making clients feel “safe,” using gentle techniques and carefully chosen words to avoid triggering discomfort. This matters. But safety isn’t the same as feeling comfortable or coddled. True safety is the presence of choice, clarity, and consent. A space where you can notice your internal experience without pressure to override it.
In my massage therapy practice in Casper, Wyoming, autonomy is central. You aren’t a passive body being worked on. You are a whole human being with a lineage, history, needs and preferences, here to receive what feels good and right to you today.
Trauma leaves an imprint in the way we relate to our own sensations. We may avoid discomfort at all costs, or become so familiar with overwhelm that we hardly recognize what ease actually feels like to us anymore. Both are natural adaptations to chronic stress. But, healing can’t happen when we are told what to do and feel. When we are made to lie still and accept without question. Healing happens when we are supported in noticing what is stirring in our bodies/minds/lives, and we can start choosing how to engage with it.
Choice becomes the practice.
Discomfort, in this context, isn’t something to push through or eliminate immediately. It can be information. There’s a difference between sharp pain that signals withdrawal and the quieter sensation of tension shifting or softening. Learning that distinction is part of trauma-informed care.
You may be invited to stay with a sensation briefly, or to move away from it.
It’s your choice, always.
Trauma-informed massage can be so much more than just a massage. I view it as a conversation. Between you and me, yes; but, much more importantly, between you and your body.
Drawing breath into an area of tension. A subtle rocking movement to remind the body of its own fluidity. An invitation to notice, rather than to fix. A non-judgmental wondering about the image you visualized or thought that popped into your head when your lower back was touched.
This is how you practice re-learning to pay attention and honor the subtleties of your experience. This is how your body and your life begin to shift and change.
What happens in the massage session is where it begins, but the deeper work is in how you carry this awareness into the world. What might it be like to listen to your body with the same attentiveness outside of this space? What might it mean to honor your own limits, not as weaknesses, but as wisdom? To know when discomfort is tolerable and maybe even growing, and when it is unsustainable and serves no positive purpose? To listen to body and be able to discern what it needs? To live whole, well and free to choose what’s for you and not for you?
Experiences of trauma, grief, stress, pain and illness show us that the body is something things happen to. Healing reframes the body as a place we can belong to.
This work is not about returning you to who you were before life happened to you. It’s not about about promising a quick fix or a cure for everything that hurts. It’s about relating differently to the body you live in now: with curiosity, agency, and the freedom to choose how you meet whatever comes.
