As a massage therapist, unfortunately not only are there massage therapists who have been poorly educated and taught that this is true, but I’ve had countless clients repeat it back to me over the years enough times that I feel the need to attempt to reeducate if I think the person will be receptive to the discussion.
From my experience many people “learn” this because someone well meaning wanted to dumb things down a bit too much and the information wasn’t conveyed very clearly, or there’s practitioners of a variety of flavors that explain how “traumatic experiences are stored in the body’s tissues” and that’s why they have to (insert their brand of therapy.) Another group is surrounding athletes and trainers, who use the term as blurry language and people take them literally as they are then as experts.
It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal until you get a client who thinks that if you hurt them enough with an aggressive massage that it’ll “fix” a past trauma. I wish I were joking.
