Nobody Works Alone

I had a client — I’ll call her Cassandra — who had been through more massage therapists than most people have had oil changes. And every single one of them, according to her, did it wrong.

She’d walk in, point to a spot on her upper right back, and tell them exactly what to work on. And they would wander. Go somewhere else. Touch her hip, her neck, muscles she wasn’t paying them to touch. She’d leave frustrated every time, convinced she kept finding the one bad therapist in town. Then the next one. Then the next.

We were friends. She figured I’d be happy to fix all of this.

I told her no.

She was genuinely surprised. So I explained myself.

Nobody is going to spend an hour at full force on one small area — not without wrecking their own hands and getting you nowhere. But more than that, the spot she kept pointing to wasn’t the whole story. It was where the story was being told loudly. That doesn’t mean that’s where it started.

Your muscles don’t work alone. They never have. Every movement you make is a conversation — a whole chain of muscles, tendons, and soft tissue deciding who does what, how much, and for how long. When that conversation breaks down, somebody ends up doing too much. And that somebody is usually the one who ends up on the table asking to be worked on.

There’s also a cross-body element that still surprises people when I explain it. Pain in the upper left often has something developing in the lower right. Tightness in the front of the body tends to connect to what’s happening in the back. The anterior chain and the posterior chain are in constant conversation. So when your right shoulder keeps flaring up, your left hip might be the one that called the meeting.

Tom Myers mapped a lot of this out in his work on Anatomy Trains — the idea that muscles aren’t isolated units but part of longer lines of pull running through the entire body. Structural integration has worked with this concept for decades. Most experienced therapists understand some version of it, even if they call it something different.

What that means practically is that when a therapist works somewhere you didn’t point to, they might not be ignoring you. They might be releasing tension upstream so the spot you actually care about has room to change. You paid them to work on one area. A good one is paying attention to everything that area has been leaning on.

Cassandra eventually found a therapist she liked. I’m pretty sure that therapist also worked on her hip. I just don’t think she asked where they were going anymore.

The body figured it out. It usually does — once you stop asking it to solve everything alone.