Shiatsudo Blog

One of the things that complementary therapy really excels at is providing an environment where the therapist is completely focussed on you and your problems. In the UK, where our national health service is over stretched and doctors have very little time to give to each patient, this is increasingly important. Often, just having someone listen and take seriously the sore back or neck ache or lack of energy you have can do wonders towards helping you get better. The old “problem shared is a problem halved” factor really shouldn’t be overlooked in health care.

The idea of continuous partial attention is not new, but more and more, it is the norm. I mean - how many email accounts do you check every morning? Social network sites like Facebook and MySpace? Business networking like LinkedIn? How many browser windows do you have open at the moment? What about your actual work? Continuous partial attention is how we operate. We continually scan the peripheral of our network to see if something more important should get our top portion of attention. An email comes in while you are reading my blog, you quickly read it, maybe follow a link to YouTube, dash off a reply and then back to reading.

Apparently, we do this because we have a desire to be a live node in a network. And it puts us on a state of high alert. Always trying to scan for better opportunities and contacts. It is a fairly stressful way to live. Watch people network in a social situation as well. Do they really pay attention to each other? or do they half listen, scan the room for more important people to talk to, or more important conversations to join in. The upshot of this is that apart from never really paying full attention to one thing ourselves, we know that nobody is really paying full attention to us.

And so, one of the key skills of the therapist is to really listen. I still remember the classes we did on this when I was studying - a very basic introduction to counseling. I thought the classes would be rubbish, but I found them fascinating. There is a definite art to turning your attention fully to someone else. It really isn’t easy to listen without having your own internal dialog going on and in a non-judgmental way, but all the good therapists I’ve seen have this skill.