Back pain? You’ve got it because your friends hate you!
Meet the Harley Street specialist who says your aches have EMOTIONAL causes
MOST of us have aches and pains: a niggling crick in the neck, tightness in the lower back. A keen walker and horse-rider, I have always put the twinges that afflict me down to physical exertion.
The tennis elbow in my left arm? Driving a 4x4 every day. Stiff neck? Sleeping in the wrong position. Gnawing tightness in my lower back? Trotting up and down in a saddle up to four times a week — right?
Wrong. According to holistic therapist Sophia Kupse, backache is caused by emotional rather than physical injury. Painful experiences — even those as far back as childhood — can be stored in our muscles, causing them to ache.
The self- styled Muscle Whisperer has pioneered a technique called Langellotti Tri-Therapy, LT therapy for short. Favoured by celebrities such as Liv Tyler, it combines psychotherapy with massage.
Just another celebrity fad or a groundbreaking new treatment for an affliction that blights a third of Britons?
While I’m sceptical, I’d love to do away with the Voltarol, Deep Heat and boiling hot baths, so decide to give it a go.
Sophia designed the alternative treatment and named it after the first person she successfully treated for back pain: her Italian-born mother. She practises in London’s Harley Street and Bradford.
When I arrive for my appointment I am, naively perhaps, looking forward to nothing more than a nice, relaxing massage.
I have already filled out a form describing my symptoms and sleep patterns (bad) and stress levels (equally so).
When Sophia calls me into her softly lit consulting room, she is not at all what I expected. Cheerful and down to earth, she immediately puts me at ease.
We sit down to chat and in seconds I find myself telling her about my menopausal hot sweats and insomnia, and the fact that I have trouble sleeping.
She presents me with a complicated looking map of the back, where each muscle corresponds to a loved one, an era of your life or an emotional problem.
The right side pertains to the feminine — female relatives, friends, yourself if you’re a woman. The left to the masculine. The top half relates to your adult self, while your lower half reflects the ‘inner child’ or childhood experiences.
This is based on the belief in Eastern medicine that the front of our bodies represents our present state and our back our past. ‘When I look at a person’s back, it reads like a book and like a book the spine divides the pages; the left side of the body being male energy, Yang, and the right side female, Yin,’ says Sophia.
By pressing certain points, she can discover the cause of discomfort — detecting emotional or physical trauma by the tightness of the muscle.
The theory is that when we have a negative response to an event, muscles go into a state of shock. The more stressed we are, the more our bodies release adrenaline and cortisol, which convert to lactic acid in the muscles.
THISbuilds into knots affecting sensory nerves, causing pain. Feeling slightly uncertain, I undress and climb onto the massage table.
Sophia starts spreading essential oils on my back, but then her hand pushes hard towards the base of my spine. Cue a deep bolt of pain: ‘Ow!’ ‘That’s your father energy,’ she says, as her fingers kneed around the far left side of my lower back. She then pushes the opposite point on the right hand side and says: ‘That’s your mother energy.’
It doesn’t feel as tight. She says: ‘Was your mother around more? Father working?’
It is a fair guess. I am 43 so parenting in the Seventies would usually be like that. But I can’t help feeling the tightness is actually the result of me resting more weight on my left side when sitting. I catch myself doing it in the car and inthe saddle.
What Sophia is asking me to believe, however, is that it relates to painful memories of being separated from my dad while he was running the family business. I feel this is unlikely, but try to keep an open mind.
She works upwards, pressing on the right hand side of my back. ‘0-10 years old,’ she says, pressing somewhere around my kidneys. It feels a bit stiff.
‘10-20 years old,’ she says, pressing higher up. ‘Ow!’ I cry.
‘Those were more difficult years,’ she says.
‘Yes!’ I blurt out. ‘I wasn’t all that happy at secondary school.’
And I recall struggling to make friends and being the odd one out a lot, the last to be picked on the netball team and so on.
The usual petty torments of youth, but I suddenly feel really emotional about them.
She starts pressing around my right shoulder blade. ‘Now we’re into females in the family, female professionals, female friends …’ I am plunged into agony. ‘Ooooooowwwwww!’ I howl. The pain is so sharp and fresh I have to move away from her. ‘Disappointment,’ she says. ‘Lots of disappointment and betrayal. Let down by females.’
As Sophia works on that spot, I shout ‘Damn it!’, surprised at how cross I feel. Though I cannot quite pinpoint which women in my life I’m most angry with.
I wonder whether it’s something to do with the girlfriends I used to ride with recently cutting me out of their circle. Or whether it refers to girls I struggled so hard to bond with at school.
Sophia moves up to my neck and presses a point at the base of the neck that feels very sensitive.
‘The mother knot,’ she says and explains this area relates to my current relationship with my mother, while the right side of the base of my spine represents our history together.
‘Oh dear,’ I moan. ‘What on earth has my mother done?’
‘It’s probably just that because you’re so close to her she’s on your mind a lot,’ says Sophia.
Sophia moves to a point on the other side of my neck, ‘the father knot’. There is no pain.
‘You have a much better relationship with your father now than in childhood, am I right?’ She is right, but again I feel this is a fair guess as most people do.
Sophia presses on the male family energy on the top left-hand side of my back, but when I say I don’t have a husband, brother or son we do not linger there long.
Sophia presses between the shoulder blades, where feelings about animals are apparently stored. I have a dog and three horses. There is no pain, but then animals are the joy of my life.
In the left shoulder area, where male friends and colleagues are located, it feels pretty good, too.
However, below my left shoulder blade, she manipulates the area relating to finance, work and legal affairs and I wince. Sure enough, I am struggling with money matters.
It all sounds rather far-fetched, but Sophia insists that during 20 years as a holistic practitioner, more than 80 per cent of her patients with back pain had never suffered physical trauma.
In that case, the pain must be caused by the emotional stress.
But how to heal the damage? After identifying my most painful muscles, Sophia applies hot volcanic basalt stones, which are meant to loosen lactic acid.
Then she sweeps down the area with a cold marble stone. She says this ‘ restores positive energy, resets the muscle memory and acts as an anti-inflammatory’.
ASSOPHIA talks to me about my life, she obviously uses a lot of intuition. Being treated by her feels as much like being with a gifted clairvoyant as a masseuse.
I can’t help but feel the power of suggestion has a part to play.
Most clients, she says, end up in tears as they release old traumas. I hold it together: probably as I am not entirely convinced. Or maybe I just don’t want to let go.
Normally, treatment involves an initial session to identify problem areas then a follow-up appointment within four weeks with more massage, if needed.
Treatment costs £95 an hour in Harley Street or £60 at her Bradford consulting room. She does a 25-minute session, too.
Now, over a week later, I fancy my back is less painful.
Philip Sell, consultant spinal surgeon at Leicester Royal Infirmary and a member of the Society for Back Pain Research, tells me that this is probably down to the relaxing effect of the massage.
‘ The concept of childhood memories being held in muscle is simply bizarre,’ he says.
‘Until there is clinical evidence to suggest benefit, it is a treatment that cannot be recommended by the medical and scientific community.’
My rational side says he may be right — but if shedding stored-up resentment has helped relieve my backache, why complain?
DESPERATELY Seeking A Pain Free Self by Sophia Kupse (CreateSpace, £7.99) is available via Amazon and Kindle; themusclewhisperer.co.uk