The client on the table is in a suggestible state
In the Boulder 1975 advanced class, the senior practitioners were trading stories about offhand comments that had landed too hard. Norm, in Mill Valley, had described what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a massage and then to be told something — anything — by the person whose hands were on him. The point was not that the comment was wrong. The point was that the ordinary filters were down. Pain, touch, exposure, the dissolution of habitual body sense — all of it converged into a state where the subconscious accepted what was said without the usual triage. Ida's circle had begun to recognize this as one of the structural features of the work, not a side effect. The conversation that follows is one of the clearest statements in the archive of what is at stake when a practitioner opens their mouth in the middle of a session.
"somebody while you're offing them because you are putting them in a place where they're wide open to any suggestion that might come out from you. Particularly when you add the component of pain to the component of physical touch, it's like the subconscious just goes Right. And very often there's no sense of humor there. I mean, that you say something which normally, you know, would be ho, ho, ho, and it goes right in there and sticks. And 10 later, you know, they're still running that program."
A senior practitioner in the 1975 Boulder class summarizes what Norm had said in Mill Valley about the practitioner's verbal field.
What the passage names is not mystical. It is a working assumption about the state the client occupies during a session — a state in which the normal cognitive distance between hearing a sentence and evaluating it has narrowed. The practitioner's job, on this account, is not to refrain from speaking — speech is part of the work — but to recognize that what is said while hands are on a body has a different half-life than the same sentence said across a kitchen table. The Boulder discussion goes on to recommend Jay Haley's Uncommon Therapy on Milton Erickson's clinical use of suggestion. The recommendation matters: Ida's circle was not warning against words. They were pointing toward a literature in which words had been studied as part of a craft.
Throw it out if it doesn't fit
Ida's working solution — the one she taught explicitly in classes and modeled with her own clients — was not a rule about what to say. It was a meta-instruction to give the client out loud at the start of the relationship. Tell them you are not a guru. Tell them they have paid for your services and your observations, and that they are free to discard anything that doesn't fit. The framing is partly legal-ethical and partly practical: by naming the asymmetry of the situation, the practitioner gives the client a verbal handle to push back against suggestions that don't apply. The instruction also performs something about the practitioner's own self-understanding. The work is a service rendered for a fee, not a transmission from authority.
I tell I tell people, if if I say something to you that you think doesn't fit, throw it out. I'm not, you know, I'm not a guru. I just you know, you paid me a good fee for my services, and and you can do with them what you want. But I wanna feel free to to to make whatever observations I think are relevant. And if you don't think they're relevant, don't, you know, don't take them to heart. Just throw it out.
The practitioner describes the explicit verbal contract he sets up with new clients.
Note what this instruction is not. It is not a denial that the practitioner sees something. It is not a refusal to comment. It is not the false modesty of saying nothing matters. The practitioner reserves the right — even the obligation — to name what they observe. What changes is the client's relation to the observation. By being told in advance that observations are not edicts, the client retains the discriminating capacity that the suggestible state would otherwise compromise. The instruction reinstates, by verbal contract, the cognitive filter that touch and pain have temporarily lowered. This is the closest Ida's circle came to a doctrine on the matter, and it has the virtue of being practical: it is something a practitioner can do, out loud, in the first session, and refer back to.
When the comment sticks: an example
The 1975 Boulder discussion was prompted by a practitioner recounting an actual moment from his own experience as a client. Michael Kilgore had said something to him while he was on the table — something that, in retrospect, landed at exactly the right time, in exactly the suggestible state the section above describes. He could not, years later, recall the other things Kilgore had said in the session. He remembered this one. The example is offered not as a cautionary tale but as evidence that what enters the client's mind during a session can be load-bearing for years afterward. The implication is straightforward: if a single sentence can become a structuring memory, the practitioner has to take seriously what they say in those minutes.
"feeling about it? About that. It just made me it it made me feel, you know, made me feel more like burying myself like a person who had been wrong, basically. Basically. And I I think that like, I've never forgotten that statement that he made. I I don't remember a lot the other statements that before that? When he was I felt like, you know, I'd just taken my clothes off and I was standing there and he was looking at me and I felt really, really small and scrunched up. And he came across with just the right statement at just the right time. And I looking back on it, it was in a in a very suggestible state. Who was that? It was Michael Kilgore. And like, I I guess what I'm trying to say is that it seems to me like the the kind of feedback you give the the Rolfi on his body, especially right at first, is gonna be really important. And, I just want to emphasize the impact that that statement had on me. Well there's a tendency for practitioners, especially the early ones, to spend a lot of time with their clients showing them what's wrong with their bodies."
The practitioner recalls a comment from his own session with Michael Kilgore that stayed with him for years, and uses it to set up his own rule about feedback to clients.
The pivot the practitioner makes — from the story of being on the receiving end to the rule he derived for his own practice — is the operative move. He stopped enumerating what was wrong with the bodies in front of him. He stopped saying *your leg is short, your shoulder is down, your head is over here*. Instead he laid out the photographs and showed the client the trajectory: this is where we are going. The change is partly aesthetic and partly ethical, but it is also a precise response to the suggestibility problem. If the client absorbs what the practitioner says during the session, then a list of structural defects becomes a list of facts about the self that the client now carries. Reframing the same observations as a direction of travel respects both the accuracy of the seeing and the openness of the hearer.
Positive framing in practice
The Boulder practitioners worked out, in the 1975 class, a small repertoire of habits that operationalized the rule. Show what you are going to be able to change. Speak of the future shape of the work, not the present catalogue of failures. Do not say *look at that back*. Do not say *we don't have good luck with backs like that*. Do not say *how long has your back been like this*. The repertoire is not a script — it is a set of negations, things to stop saying — and behind each negation is a recognition that the client on the table will hear the comment in a state that magnifies it. The practitioners are also aware of the opposite trap: promising too much, building up the practitioner as an authority figure who can always tell what hour you've had, which then becomes a setup the next practitioner has to live up to.
"That they would come in and I'd say, here's where you're going and not here's where you are. You know, not spend a lot of time talking about what I saw in terms of their problems, but saying, okay. What we're working for is verticals, horizontals, and Yeah. You know, taking the photographs and laying them out and showing the person what I was attempting to do rather than dwelling a lot on how they were unbalanced. Mhmm. No. We get it. Tell them to come on up. Come on up. 10:31. 10:31. Okay. Thank you. Put the kettle on somewhere. Yeah. I have a well, one of the things I do is I'll show them the things I'm gonna be able to change. Also, instead of saying this is crummy, I'll say this is gonna have a nice look to it. This is gonna That's what I mean. You're gonna have you're gonna have a better movement through the feet that I I'll talk about as a positive in a positive sense. I don't go, oh, look at that back kind of stuff. We don't have such good luck with backs like that. Curvatures never come out. You know, you can How long has your back been like this? The other thing is I like to caution you on is the way you talk about promising the moon."
The Boulder practitioners discuss positive framing and the parallel trap of over-promising.
The over-promising trap is the inverse of the suggestibility problem, but it operates on the same mechanism. The same openness that absorbs a stray negative comment also absorbs the inflated claim. If a practitioner tells a prospective client that a practitioner can always tell what hour they have had, that becomes a fact in the client's mind which the next practitioner is suddenly responsible for. The Boulder discussion is striking for how mundane its conclusion is: *be positive, be humble, roll up your sleeves.* It is the verbal equivalent of the doctrine that the work itself does the work. Words frame; they do not substitute.
Don't analyze the client
A specific habit the Boulder practitioners warned against was the impulse to interpret. A client says something during a session — *there's pain in my chest* — and the practitioner offers a meaning. *Yes, there's pain there.* What is wrong with this is not the truth-value of the comment; the practitioner is, after all, the one with their hands on the chest. What is wrong is the role the comment performs. The practitioner has stepped into the position of someone who tells the client what their pain means. In the suggestible state of a session, that interpretation becomes part of how the client subsequently thinks about their own chest. The practitioner has installed a reading. The Boulder rule was to stop doing this, on the grounds that the client's body — not the practitioner's interpretation — is the authority on what it is doing.
"Mean, the world can really tangle people up. Just be positive. Be humble. Roll up your sleeves. Where we are now is wanting to create more agreement that rauling is a valuable thing and that's always, you know. I hear a lot of raulers analyzing the people, you know, Like, like telling them what something means. Like, oh yes, there's a lot of pain in the chest or something like that. And I just cringe when I hear that. I just don't like that at all. Because we're not a nobody to spell it."
The practitioners object to the habit of interpreting what a client says or feels during a session.
The objection is partly epistemic — the practitioner does not, in fact, know what the client's chest pain means — and partly ethical, in the same way the over-promising warning is ethical. The client is in a state where the practitioner's words become reference points. To use that state to install interpretations is to use the work for something other than the work. The Boulder discussion does not produce a clean alternative for what to say when the client volunteers a meaning. It produces a discipline: notice when you are tempted to interpret, and decline.
Stop the screaming, not the screamer
Among the most striking passages in the archive on the verbal dimension of sessions is Ida's account, from her 1971-72 conversation with a journalist, of working on an elderly woman who suddenly began screaming on her mat. The story is sometimes cited for its content — a memory of an automobile accident surfacing during work — but its bearing on the present topic is in what Ida actually said to bring the woman back. She did not interpret. She did not name what was happening. She asked the woman what she could see, what she could hear. The questions were directional but not interpretive: they were tools for moving the woman's attention. The story illustrates a verbal posture under duress that maps onto the doctrine the Boulder class would later articulate as a rule.
"Well, I remember very definitely the first very serious, shall I call it, problem that I had when I was working on a little lady she was about, oh, I don't know, may perhaps a 70 year old. And all of a sudden, in the middle of my rolphin, she was lying on the on the mat on the floor where I rolfing there on at that time in on the floor mats. All of a sudden, she started screaming. Simply at the top of her lungs, she started screaming. And I started being terrified because after all was said and done, were the neighbors gonna send to the cops? And what was I gonna tell the cops when they knocked at the door? And could I leave the woman to open the door to the cops? And etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And she kept right on screaming. And when I finally got the thing on unlatched, I did it by saying to her, now what do you see? And she saw cars coming down the road. Well, what do you hear? Well, she heard this a bell, and this bell developed into the ambulance bell. And she had been in a an accident in an automobile accident where she had been very badly hurt, and she had been thrown out of the car, and this ambulance was coming to pick her up. And the cop was bawling the driver out and saying to him, you don't know how to drive. You'll never know how to drive, etcetera, etcetera. And all this this unconscious woman lying on the ground was hearing. And this was what she was reproducing on my mat. Now was that because you had manipulated part of her body that brought that back?"
Ida recounts the first serious episode she encountered of an emotional release on the table, and the specific words she used to bring the woman back.
What Ida did with that woman is consistent with the rule the Boulder class would later articulate, even though it was not articulated as a rule yet. She did not say *you are remembering something*. She did not say *let it out*. She asked the woman what she was perceiving — and the woman's own perceptions led her back through the memory and out of it. The verbal posture was a kind of careful neutrality: words used to orient, not to install. Twenty years before Milton Erickson became part of the Boulder syllabus, Ida had been practicing a version of the same discipline by intuition.
What the work does without words
Ida was insistent throughout the 1971-72 interviews that the practitioner's verbal map of what they were doing during a session was largely irrelevant to the client. Asked whether the practitioner should tell the client what they were working on and link it to possible mental changes, Ida said she personally would not. The reasoning had two parts. First, she might be working on the shoulders from the feet — fascial connections do not obey the verbal anatomy. Second, the client's job is to feel what is happening, not to receive the practitioner's narration of it. The position is, in effect, an argument that the verbal channel is overrated. The work transmits through tissue. Words around it can clarify or distort, but they are not the medium.
"We're going to work on your shoulders today and this is what seems to be the imbalance. Will vary with the roofer. I personally don't wouldn't think of doing that. Now why not? I certainly wouldn't teach them because I think it's the job of the individual to feel what's going on. And I don't see why I should tell them I'm gonna work on their shoulders today because as a matter of actual fact, I might be working on the shoulders from my feet. Now that's an interesting point. How could you work on the shoulders from the feet? You'd be surprised. Ask Bob how I work on the shoulders from the feet. I I don't let me see. That might I don't know if there could be something that you could put into that, Doctor. Rolfe, possibly, and that's talking about how you educate someone about movement. How do you get a person to understand and to to experience the relationship between their shoulders and their feet and how what you're doing is you know, that's part of the Well, they feel the change. That's all I can say. Yeah. I don't know I don't know how to give an answer to that, Bob, except to say that they feel the change. Yeah. And many times, you'll be working on their, say, on their their legs below the knees, and they'll say, oh, those thing funny things are happening in my shoulders. And we don't know why, but at least there's somehow there's a connection."
Ida explains why she would not tell a client during a session what she was working on or what it meant.
Ida's position here cuts against the natural reflex of newly trained practitioners — the urge to explain themselves, to make the client a partner in the diagnosis, to demonstrate that they know what they are doing. The reflex is not wrong in itself; it becomes a problem when explanation crowds out the client's own perceptual learning. If the client is told *I am working on your shoulders today*, they orient their attention to the shoulders. If the practitioner says nothing, the client may discover that the work in the foot is producing a change in the shoulder — and that discovery is part of what the work is. Verbal narration, in this view, can pre-empt the experience it is supposed to support.
The body's awareness, not the practitioner's words
In a 1974 Open Universe lecture, Ida pushed the point further. The kind of self-awareness the work can produce in a client — the sudden recognition that their body has been holding patterns they could not previously feel — is, she argued, beyond what verbal teaching can accomplish. A lifetime of being told to relax does not produce the experience of actually relaxing on the floor. The work, when it lands, makes the contradiction available as a felt thing: *I think I am relaxed, and everything is going to pieces.* That self-awareness arrives through the tissue, not through the practitioner's exhortation. The implication for verbal practice is consistent with the previous section: the practitioner's job is to make the felt experience possible, not to describe it.
"And I have seen this in people who could not hear themselves, who could not become aware of what was going on, who were lying their stiffest boards when they had ever I mean, lying on flat on the ground in a fine cushion. Gives you all the support. And if I can't lie on the ground, letting go and accepting support, this probably is an eye opener. Am I really this tight lying on the ground? Well, it's not me on the ground. It's you on the ground. How does it feel? Well, I'm so relaxed. I it's marvelous. And all the time, everything is going to pieces. Well, this is a self awareness that no amount of talking and teaching could ever do, and I suspect that the experience that people have with Rolfing is maybe very much of that order. Yeah, I think so."
Ida contrasts what verbal teaching can produce with what felt experience on the mat produces.
What the practitioner can do verbally, in this frame, is narrow. The practitioner can orient, ask perceptual questions of the Ida-with-the-screaming-woman kind, name a direction of travel, decline interpretation, and tell the client at the start that observations can be discarded if they don't fit. The practitioner cannot install awareness through speech. The temptation to try is the same temptation as over-promising and as interpreting — the temptation to use the suggestible state of the client to do work that the work itself should do.
Pressure for change and the client's resistance
There is a second dimension to the verbal problem that emerges across the advanced classes: the client's own speech back to the practitioner. Clients in a suggestible state are not only receptive — they are also actively engaged in negotiating the pressure for change that the work is applying. They can produce, on the table, all kinds of rationalizations for why this particular pressure is too much, why this is not the time, why the practitioner should ease off. Some of these are accurate self-reports the practitioner should honor. Others are escape moves. The discipline Ida is asking for is the capacity to tell the difference — and not to take the client's verbal feedback as a final authority any more than the practitioner's own interpretations should be taken as final.
"that a patient the person who is the patient can't always be trusted because he does all kinds of things to escape from the pressure of change and the pressure for change. You see the same thing in the psychotherapy world."
Ida names the limit of trusting the client's verbal feedback during pressure for change.
The symmetry is worth noting. The earlier sections of this article have insisted that the practitioner not impose verbal authority on the client. This section insists that the practitioner also not surrender judgment to the client's verbal output. Both errors arise from a confusion about what speech does during a session. Speech is information, not command, in either direction. The client's *that is more pressure than you need* may be true; it may also be the body finding a way to delay change. The practitioner has to listen and also to keep working. The same ethical posture — humility, attention, refusal to install meanings — applies equally to the practitioner's reception of the client's words and to the client's reception of the practitioner's.
Stop thinking and act
Embedded in the 1976 discussion of pressure for change is a wider observation about the verbal dimension of professional work generally. Ida and the senior practitioner recount watching physicians in hospitals running circles around cardiac patients because nobody stopped to think — or rather, because everyone was thinking and nobody was acting. The point cuts in a particular direction for the work of structural integration. The practitioner has to know when to stop deliberating and to put the hand down. The verbal channel can become a way of postponing the manual act. The same suggestibility that makes the practitioner's speech consequential to the client makes the practitioner's own internal verbal monologue a potential distraction from the work the hands are supposed to do.
"And it's this is one of the things. The last few years, whole discipline has arisen around this one point of getting people to stop thinking and act. And this way, people are being saved before they're just, you know, dying."
Ida names the discipline of stopping thought and acting, drawing on her observation of hospital practice.
The doctrine has two faces. Outwardly, it says: speak less to the client, because the client is open and your speech has more weight than you realize. Inwardly, it says: think less to yourself during the session, because deliberation can become a way of avoiding the decisive action your hand is supposed to make. Both faces are consistent. The session is a perceptual and manual event. Speech, whether external or internal, is a tool that supports the event when it is used sparingly and that distorts the event when it crowds in.
Working your own buttons
A subtler version of the suggestibility problem the Boulder class identified is what happens when the practitioner's own emotional patterns get involved in the verbal exchange. A practitioner can convince themselves they are *working their buttons today* — engaging their growth, doing their work on themselves — when in fact they are using the client as a substrate for their own processing. The 1975 conversation surfaces this directly. The client paid for structural work, not for the practitioner's psychological exercise. The verbal posture has to be vigilant against the drift into self-involvement, which the suggestible state makes easier to slip into, because the client is unlikely to register what is happening and may even ratify it as part of the work.
"Intelligent person. You know? And he really learned a lot by going through that. On the other hand, really I think Jan's approach is totally valid because you can only take so many of those people on and you get lost as to who you are. Know, you're working on your buttons instead of working on people. You know, I think this whole thing about buttons is great as long as you don't get carried away with that too. See, that can be your mind. Your mind can fool you and say, oh, great. I'm working my buttons today. Are you Ralphie or what are you I've seen that that happen too. Not only that, but if it is truly a preference that you have that isn't changing that you may put some negativity into that person without being aware of their intentions. I don't know that you can really put negativity into somebody else. I say it is that they all they have a responsibility to either accept or not to. I tell I tell people, if if I say something to you that you think doesn't fit, throw it out. I'm not, you know, I'm not a guru. I just you know, you paid me a good fee for my services, and and you can do with them what you want."
The Boulder practitioners discuss the trap of using the client as material for the practitioner's own emotional work.
Whether or not unconscious projection actually transfers something to the client — the Boulder practitioners disagree on this — the practical point holds. The practitioner whose attention is on themselves during the session is not doing the session. The verbal channel during a session should be directed outward, toward orientation and direction, and should be modest in volume. If the practitioner finds themselves narrating internally — *I am doing well, I am being patient, this is good growth for me* — the inward turn is itself a sign that the verbal apparatus has gotten in front of the manual one.
Clients hearing themselves at the silent level
A counter-current to the warnings about practitioner speech runs through the 1975 Boulder class: the recognition that as practitioners gain clarity, clients begin to articulate the work in their own words before the practitioner says anything at all. The teaching beat is precise. The practitioner's clarity — clarity of seeing, of touch, of intention — registers in the client without verbal transmission, and the client then produces the verbal account themselves. This reverses the usual asymmetry. The practitioner does not have to install language about the work; the client supplies it, often more accurately than the practitioner could. The implication for verbal practice is that the practitioner's silence, when paired with clarity of perception, can be more communicative than speech.
"Not just I feel better, but gee, now this goes here and that goes there. And people that that really haven't been into movement or anything are are connecting with those things from the silent level to their own verbal level before I say anything. And that that brings them off one notch ahead before I start talking, and I found that that's been a good experience. So most of you are feeling satisfied that you've really gotten somewhere. Pat, what do you think about life? Well, this morning is great as usual."
A practitioner reports the change in client feedback that came with his own growth in clarity.
The passage complicates the earlier doctrine in a useful way. It is not the case that the practitioner's silence is sufficient or that any verbal intervention is suspect. The variable is the practitioner's clarity. A practitioner with clear perception transmits something the client can then articulate; a practitioner without it produces noise the client either ignores or absorbs as suggestion. The verbal discipline this article has been gathering is, on this view, a function of perceptual discipline. Words spoken from clarity orient the client. Words spoken from confusion become projections the suggestible state then installs.
Tell them where they are going
The most usable formulation that emerges from the Boulder discussions is the simple instruction to show the client where they are going, not where they are. Lay out the photographs. Name what is going to change. Speak of the vertical, the horizontal, the next stage of integration. The instruction operates at the level of verbal habit, but it does real ethical work. By orienting speech toward the future of the body, the practitioner removes the temptation to enumerate present defects — which, in the suggestible state, become facts the client carries forward. The orientation toward direction also serves the client's perceptual learning: they are being asked to imagine and feel toward a target, not to inventory deficits.
"Well there's a tendency for practitioners, especially the early ones, to spend a lot of time with their clients showing them what's wrong with their bodies. You know, now you're rotated this way and this leg's short and that shoulder's down and your head's over here and the person starts freaking out. And what I decided was that I wasn't going to talk to people about what was wrong with them. That they would come in and I'd say, here's where you're going and not here's where you are. You know, not spend a lot of time talking about what I saw in terms of their problems, but saying, okay. What we're working for is verticals, horizontals, and Yeah. You know, taking the photographs and laying them out and showing the person what I was attempting to do rather than dwelling a lot on how they were unbalanced. We get it. Tell them to come on up. Come on up. Thank you. Put the kettle on somewhere."
The practitioner formulates the working rule on positive framing as he uses it in his own practice.
The rule has the virtue of being teachable. A practitioner can hear it once and apply it in the next session. It is also self-correcting in a way the more abstract doctrine of *be careful what you say* is not — because a practitioner can ask themselves, in real time, *am I describing where this person is, or where they are going?* and adjust. The simplicity is not a substitute for the deeper attention to suggestibility, but it is a way of operationalizing that attention into a daily habit.
Fritz Perls and the place of insight
Across the 1974 lectures, Ida several times quoted Fritz Perls on what he said about the work: *you just can't believe the insights I have had since I have been working with them.* The quotation is important for the present topic because of what it implies about the location of insight. The insights Perls had did not come from things Ida said to him during sessions. They came from the structural changes the work effected, which then made certain experiences and recognitions available to him afterward. The verbal practitioner who tries to install insights during a session is competing with the work itself for the same effect, and doing it less well, with the added risk of installing the wrong insight.
So This question. I'd like to quote Doctor. Hunt directly here, so I'm looking for my notes. As those two energy fields parallel one another, it is then that gravity becomes a supportive factor. As the nervous and glandular fields of the man are less bedeviled by gravity, the man apparently changes. His behavior changes. The man, we might say, becomes more human. He differentiates more. He feels more. He feels his own mental processes as being less confused, as being more adequate. He suddenly feels himself as the subject of more and more important insights. This is what Fritz Perls used to say about structural integration. He says, You just can't believe the insights I have had since I have been working with them. As a new technique, we know that we need validation, a fitting into conventional acceptances. One of our attempts at validation is going on in the laboratory of UCLA right now, and is stopping right now. And I think that later Doctor."
Valerie Hunt reads from her notes the description of what changes when the body approaches vertical, including Fritz Perls's comment on the insights structural work produced for him.
If insight is a downstream effect of structural change rather than a thing the practitioner inserts during the session, then the practitioner's verbal restraint serves the client's intellectual life as well as their psychological one. The client who is told what the work means has been deprived of the experience of discovering it. The client who is left to feel the change and then to find their own language for it owns the discovery. Ida's quotation of Perls makes the point indirectly: the insights belonged to Perls, even though the work that made them possible came from Ida's hands.
Anxiety, openness, and the energy of the session
Valerie Hunt's electrophysiological studies of clients during sessions added an empirical layer to the suggestibility argument. Her testing showed that subjects entered the laboratory in significantly higher states of state-anxiety than the controls — and that after sessions, this difference disappeared. The clients were anxious because they were going into the unknown, into the possibility of pain, of emotional flashback, of changed consciousness. The verbal practitioner is meeting a person in a heightened state and leaving them in a calmer one. The transition is what magnifies the impact of what is said: words spoken to an anxious person being touched stay differently than words spoken in a settled state.
"We found that there was no significant difference between the trait anxiety of the experimental and the controls. And that was lovely. It was as though we matched them. But when we tested their state, when they came into the laboratory to be instrumented, We tested them before they were instrumented and after they were instrumented to see if the instrumentation and just working on them changed their anxiety, if they were anxious about being electrodes. We found that the experimental subjects were significantly more anxious than were the controls at the 1% level of significance. Now I don't know whether after they finished rolfing they were not there was no significant difference. So the rolfing subjects changed in anxiety. The experimental did not. Now I don't know at this stage whether the experimental were more anxious because they were going into the unknown, whether they were going into pain, possible flashbacks, possible changes in consciousness, whereas the controls knew they weren't going to go through this experience. Or whether, as my laboratory man says, The rofting people that got experimentally roughed sure needed rofting more than the control. But it's one of the two."
Hunt reports her finding that subjects coming in for sessions were significantly more anxious than controls.
Hunt's data converts what could otherwise be a vaguely intuitive claim — *the client is suggestible* — into a measured fact about state-anxiety levels. That conversion matters for the practitioner's working relationship to their own speech. The practitioner is not addressing a person in a neutral state. They are addressing a person whose nervous system is registering the encounter as a significant event. The asymmetry of attention is not metaphorical.
The practitioner's field, not just the practitioner's words
Hunt's later studies of aura and energy field — whatever one makes of the metrics — make a related point that broadens the topic beyond literal speech. The practitioner is being received by the client through a wider channel than the verbal one. The practitioner's posture, attention, emotional state, tone of voice all enter the encounter alongside the propositional content of what they say. Hunt found that practitioners' hands and arms during work were consistently in a particular color range that shifted in response to the client's experience of pain. Whether or not the photographic technique was reliable, the implication for practitioners is independent of the measurement: clients receive much more from the practitioner than just the words.
"The other I don't know whether it's by the process of structural integration they become transducers, whether it's the people of that are chosen to be Ralfords or whether Ida Zapsums. But I'm sure they're transducers and it is a relationship between two people that makes what happens happen. It is in addition to the technique. I think this cannot be duplicated by exercise, by oneself. I'm quite sure it cannot be duplicated by machines or gadgets that exercise us, that make changes in the body. There are many, many aspects of what goes on in structural integration. I believe the very personal element of the roffer is major in facilitating energy flow. In other words, if you get roffed, it's great if you love your roffer. I think it will happen if you don't, but I think certain energy flow will take place faster. My final reports will be worked on this fall and this winter for the professional group as well as for lay groups through the Rolf Institute."
Hunt summarizes her conclusion about the personal element in the practitioner-client encounter.
Hunt's claim is consistent with what the Boulder practitioners had been working out independently: that the client receives from the practitioner more than just propositional content. If that is true, then the suggestibility problem is not solved by tightening the practitioner's words. It is addressed by the practitioner's whole disposition during the session — calm, attentive, oriented to the work, not internally narrating or self-referring. The verbal habits this article has gathered are a subset of a wider discipline of how to be present during a session.
Teaching versus therapy
Ida repeatedly drew a sharp line in the 1975 and 1976 classes between teaching and therapy, and the line bears directly on what practitioners say during sessions. The practitioner is a teacher, not a therapist. They are using their hands and, where necessary, their words to give the client access to a felt experience of vertical and balance. They are not engaged in interpretive psychotherapy. The distinction matters for verbal practice because much of what new practitioners are tempted to say drifts toward therapy — interpreting the client's emotional response, naming patterns, offering meanings. Ida's instruction is to use the verbal channel as a teacher would: orient, direct attention, name the target, not interpret.
"But I'm saying to you, find out who you are, where your place is, where your place as a teacher, because you are not therapists, basically. You are teachers. Where is your place? Now you can function over a wide spectrum. You can take the level of this little three year old or six year old that Pat is working on where you're not appealing to a mind at all. You're just moving along with it, or you can take very highly sophisticated, intellectually developed people, And you've got a technique that fits them all. What doesn't fit them all is what comes out of your mouth. That you have to try on carefully and get the right words. I once saw Ida work on a lady who had been who spent four years with Anna Freud. And she went through more psychological changes in four hours with Ida than she ever did with four years with Anna Freud. Well, Sheila Adler. CP lady. Don't It doesn't? It doesn't really matter. But at any rate, was just a dramatic thing. You could clearly see her life changed right there."
Ida names the practitioner's primary role as teacher, not therapist, and locates the verbal challenge in finding the right words for each client.
The teacher-versus-therapist distinction also addresses the temptation to inflate the verbal channel. A therapist's primary medium is language. A teacher of the work's primary medium is the manual and perceptual encounter — what the hands do, what the client feels, what they come to know about their own body through being touched in particular places in particular ways. Words support that pedagogy; they do not replace it. The practitioner who treats sessions as occasions for therapeutic conversation has misidentified the discipline they are practicing.
Coda: the verbal discipline
What emerges from the archive on this topic is not a set of rules but a posture. The client on the table is open in a way they will not be again until the next session. Whatever the practitioner says in those minutes lands with magnified force. The practitioner cannot prevent this by saying nothing — speech is part of how the work proceeds — but they can shape what enters by limiting interpretation, avoiding the catalogue of defects, declining to oversell or analyze, telling the client out loud that observations can be discarded, orienting language toward where the body is going, and remembering that the discipline they are practicing is teaching, not therapy. The wider posture, the one Hunt's data points toward and the one Ida modeled with the screaming woman on her mat, is that the practitioner's whole presence — not just their sentences — is what the client receives.
"And you see, they in that first ten hours, they practically never can get into their souls, the let it aspect, the allow it aspect. They don't believe it. They believe that coming to you for manipulation and that manipulation and only manipulation is going to change them. And you all have had enough experience now, I think, to know that what I say is true, that you will never get it with manipulation alone. You will never get it. That it is impossible to strike the body with only manipulation. They have to have some sort of consciousness of what is the value of that vertical line. They have to have a willingness to go through it."
Ida names the limit of manipulation alone and the necessity of some consciousness in the client.
Ida's final position on the verbal dimension is therefore not a doctrine of silence. It is a doctrine of proportion. The work needs both the hand and the word — but the word in its place, in its measured volume, with its eye on what the work itself is doing. The practitioner who speaks too much misuses the client's openness. The practitioner who speaks too little leaves the client without the consciousness the structural change needs to take hold. Between those two errors is the discipline Ida and her circle were working out in the advanced classes: a verbal practice as careful, as observed, and as ethically considered as the manual one.
See also: See also: a 1975 Boulder discussion (RolfA4Side2) where the senior practitioners and Ida work out the relationship between practitioner authority and client autonomy in the context of pressure for change, and the way clients verbally negotiate that pressure. RolfA4Side2 ▸
See also: See also: a 1975 Boulder discussion (B3T4SB) on the question of whether the work accelerates psychological development and the appropriate verbal posture for practitioners working with clients already in psychotherapy. B3T4SB ▸
See also: See also: a 1975 Boulder session-floor discussion (B3T5SA) on the practitioner-client field, where the senior practitioners discuss establishing their own territory verbally while the client's persona emerges during structural work. B3T5SA ▸
See also: See also: a 1975 Boulder discussion (B3T7SA) on the dialogue between practitioner clarity and client articulation, in which senior practitioners report that as their own seeing sharpens, clients begin connecting from a silent level to their own verbal level before the practitioner speaks. B3T7SA ▸
See also: See also: a public-tape discussion (RolfA5Side2) where Ida and the senior practitioners wrestle with the inadequacy of available vocabulary for describing what the work is doing — a verbalization problem internal to the practitioner community that bears on what they can convey to clients. RolfA5Side2 ▸
See also: See also: a public-tape session (RolfB1Side2) in which Peter Levine describes the body as a system of coupled energy oscillators and the first hour as the introduction of elasticity into a previously damped coupling medium — an account that gives a physical reading to why clients report changes in distant regions during work on the superficial fascia. RolfB1Side2 ▸
See also: See also: the 1971-72 conversation (PSYTOD2) where Ida discusses the broader goal of bringing a person toward the vertical, with a brief exchange on how the body's plasticity makes verbal explanation secondary to felt change. PSYTOD2 ▸
See also: See also: a 1974 Open Universe demonstration (UNI_043) in which a practitioner narrates to observers what they are doing under their hands, modeling a particular verbal register for talking about the work in the client's presence. UNI_043 ▸
See also: See also: a 1971-72 discussion (PSYTOD1) on practitioners and resistance, in which Ida acknowledges that clients sometimes verbally resist the work in ways the practitioner has to learn to recognize. PSYTOD1 ▸