The Depth You’re Seeking Isn’t In Deep Tissue Massage
This is not a take-down of Deep Tissue Massage. It is a cultural critique.
I think it’s worth noting that the roots of our modern Deep Tissue Massage can be traced back to ancient cultures where intense, directed massage techniques were used to prepare men for sports and war.
If you pause and think about this for about 10 seconds, you can probably get the gist of this article; but, it’s worth walking through the lineage to see how this story shaped what we believe and how we approach our healing today.
Here’s the quick-and-dirty Deep Tissue Massage origin story:
In ancient Greece around 800-700 BCE, gladiators received vigorous massage to prepare for combat. The ancient Indian martial art, Kalaripayattu, also incorporated intense body massage to increase warriors' flexibility and treat muscular injuries.
In the 1800s, Dutch physician Johann Georg Mezger integrated friction and pressure techniques with Swedish massage, creating the foundation for what would become modern Deep Tissue massage.
In the 1940s, Canadian physical therapist Therese Phimmer developed specific techniques of applying firm pressure to the deeper layers of muscle, detailing them in her 1949 book.
The term "deep tissue massage" was used to refer to a treatment modality that works layer by layer into the deeper muscles and connective tissue with slow, sustained, often static, very firm to intense pressure to break up adhesions, increase range of motion, and promote healing.
Deep Tissue Massage gained recognition in the 1980s due to a fitness boom and the growing visibility of sports massage. The number and quality of massage schools, professional organizations, and publications increased, altering the public's perception of massage.
In the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, massage therapy was being offered as a core treatment for the U.S. Olympic team, further legitimizing its use. When professional football and basketball players began talking about using massage to enhance performance and prevent injury, the practice gained wider respect and visibility. Consumer demand increased.
By the 2000s, Deep Tissue Massage was a common offering in the health and wellness market. It became an umbrella term for trigger point and neuromuscular techniques, and a kind of shorthand for “professional, serious, treatment-focused massage—none of that frou-frou spa fluff.”
The TL;DR of it is this:
The history of Deep Tissue Massage has a common thread: it’s always been about keeping the body functional for output: combat, sport, labor, profit. Massage, when practiced this way, is about utility: making the body useful again. (Useful to whom and to what end? Who benefits when our bodies compete, fight, produce, suffer? That’s beyond the scope of this article, but you can a know a thing if you want to.)
We can’t separate Deep Tissue Massage from our culture in the west. Our culture is in our massage therapy. And, our massage therapy reproduces our cultural mythos—reinforcing our beliefs that relief, care, even healing must be forced through our will, must be earned through our struggle. And that if it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t real.
The Lie: Pressure Equals Progress
We live in a culture addicted to power. To effort. To domination. This is the story of “push harder” while bodies break down under the weight of overwork. The same story that exalts acting over listening, productivity over rest, achievement over being. It’s capitalism’s gospel: there is no limit, no end point, no enough. Only more. Faster. Harder. Deeper
This story lives in us. In the jaw that won’t unclench. In the shoulders that carry the weight of the world. In the low back that aches from years of holding upright what warranted collapse.
It lives in the subtle architecture of our expectations, too. It teaches us the body is a battlefield, the nervous system a machine to be hacked, the self a never-ending optimization project. Even touch and healing are filtered through this lens: if it doesn’t hurt, if there’s no visible struggle, then it can’t be real.
This is the inheritance of a culture so obsessed with production and profit that everything but continual forward momentum is a failure.
And, so, when we arrive at the massage table—a space meant for restoration—we bring this cultural residue with us. We want more pressure because that means it’s working. We measure the therapist’s skill by the soreness we leave with. We measure ourselves by how much we can endure.
We forget that our bodies have limits.
Because we collectively collude with the myth that they don’t.
Pain Is Not Proof of Healing
Pain is not a reliable measure of healing change.
Pain triggers chemical cocktails designed to help you cope: adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin. This is survival, not transformation. The temporary relief we feel may be nothing more than a high, a body-wide trick that leaves us believing we’ve broken through when in truth we’ve only been flooded. The momentary lightness fades, and the same patterns of tension, soreness, and inflammation return. That is not healing. And when it’s mistaken for healing, it can become an endless cycle of socially sanctioned self-harm, dressed up and sold back to us as self-care.
“Oh, I can take it.”
“You can’t hurt me.”
“I have a really high pain tolerance.”
We’ve all been indoctrinated into the cult of “no pain, no gain.” We think if we aren’t sore, sweaty, bruised, or broken open, did it even count? Full body Deep Tissue Massage fits neatly into this creed. We imagine that the harder a massage therapist digs, the more effective the work must be. We think tension will yield if only it is overpowered. That if it hurts, it must be working.
But bodies do not open through force. They guard against it. They brace, they tighten, they defend. The nervous system does what it has always done to keep us safe: it protects.
The Myth of “Earned Healing”
The myth of earned healing isn’t really a myth. After all, we live in a society where we must earn shelter and food through our labor. We must literally earn our living. We must earn the right to stay alive.
So, in a very real sense, we must earn our healing.
Healthcare in the United States isn’t a human right guaranteed for all. We live in a culture where safety, health, care, rest and healing are for sale. Only those with the ability to work hard to earn will be rewarded with access. We learn from a tender age that we must compete, perform, push, hustle, prove. That healing is something to be worked hard for and won. If it doesn’t cost us, we didn’t earn it. And if we didn’t earn it, we don’t deserve it.
To stop, to rest, to receive care without first proving ourselves is to risk feeling unworthy. Every sigh of ease is shadowed by guilt, by shame:
Do I deserve this?
Did I work hard enough?
We carry this belief into the places where we should get to feel relief: into therapy, into massage, into recovery. We brace ourselves as if comfort must be justified, as if care is conditional. This is what the “myth” (cough cough) of earned healing teaches us: that rest is not a right, that gentleness must be bought with struggle, that our bodies must prove themselves worthy of tending.
Of course, none of this exists in isolation. The lived reality of labor, production, and survival is also braided through generations of ancestors who stayed alive by pushing and enduring and earning. It’s a story we all know in our bones and our breath long before we recognize it in our minds.
A Lineage of Survival
I understand why people ask me for deep tissue.
This is Casper, Wyoming. The wind here alone will scrape you raw, bend you low, teach you early that to live here you have to be rough and ready, strong and steady, or else you won’t last.
“Cowboy up.”
“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”
These aren’t just phrases printed on bumper stickers or dish towels, they’re actual words you hear in passing at the grocery store, at the gas pump, from strangers in line at Hilltop bank. Stoicism here is a civic virtue. Bearing your pain quietly and carrying more than your share is a measure of a person’s worth. Here in Casper, maybe more than most places a massage therapist could practice in this country, we double down on the idea that pain is good and enduring it without flinching is honorable.
I get it. I do.
I come from a long line of sun-up-til’-sun-down workers, can’t-stop-won’t-stop doers of what needs doing, people who knew how to keep their heads down and just keep moving through injuries, through grief, through weather. My great-grandparents immigrated with nothing and what they had was poured into survival, a future carved from scarcity working the land until their bodies gave out.
We have all inherited this story of the body as tool, as resource, as something to push until it bleeds, until it breaks.
The Body Is Not a Machine
People come to me asking for deep tissue, for elbows and knuckles, for pressure that hurts enough to feel like real work—because we’ve all collectively, mostly unconsciously, agreed that pressure equals progress, pain is necessary, relief must be earned through intensity, and the body will only yield when it’s overpowered.
This is the way massage therapy becomes one more tool of domination.
It’s important to understand that “Deep Tissue” is not a regulated term. It doesn’t mean the same thing to every therapist or client. For some, it is simply shorthand for “firm pressure.” For others, it is enduring a full-body assault of elbows and fists, a battle against tension, a rush to fix, a demand that the body be beaten into submission. (The confusion and blurred lines here are another beast for a different article, but absolutely part of what makes Deep Tissue Massage incongruent with my own trauma-informed massage practice.)
In any case, Deep Tissue Massage, as it is often packaged, sold and practiced, enacts the same cultural logic that wounded us in the first place: push harder, override limits, ignore the body’s quiet pleas in favor of our agenda to fix a problem, get us back on track, back to the grind, back to peak performance as soon as possible, right now, yesterday.
The demand for Deep Tissue Massage mirrors capitalism itself, which says productivity is worth more than presence. This is not neutral. In fact, it’s inherently traumatizing to insist that the body submit again to more than the nervous system has capacity for, to force, to pain. This is an echo of the very conditions that caused harm in the first place.
The body is not a machine. It can’t be bullied, tricked, or hurried to release by force. When we override it, we get resistance, not release. Muscles brace. Breath shortens. The nervous system shifts into defense.
Fascia, the connective tissue that surrounds every structure, responds best to attuned, sustained, slow contact. Not domination. Aggressive, intense pressure prompts contraction not relief. It contracts because it’s protecting, because it’s alive, because it’s remembering. And pain (especially pain without consent) is not therapeutic. It’s confusing to a system already wired for vigilance. For clients carrying trauma, chronic stress, or nervous system dysregulation, aggressive pressure can do more harm than good. Dissociation, emotional shutdown, delayed-onset pain… these are signals of survival stress. Not badges of honor. Not markers of healing.
The body is a living, intelligent ecosystem. It responds to safety, to attunement, to presence.
My Refusal to Be Complicit
I do not offer full body Deep Tissue Massage. I only ever use a specific Deep Tissue technique when necessary to treat an area of pain or injury.
Understand me: this isn’t a diss of the modality or throwing shade at massage therapists who offer it. It’s not a branding strategy or a mere preference either. It’s simply a refusal to replicate the same harm we’re all straining under. I won’t enact the same logic that breaks workers on assembly lines, that wrings more profit from flesh and bone, that tells us there is no rest, no stopping, no enough, never ever enough.
I will not be complicit. I will not touch people in the same way the culture touches us. My refusal to do full body Deep Tissue Massage is my inheritance turned inside out. My ancestors gave their bodies to the machinery of survival. I give my hands to the work of honoring their sacrifice by breaking with the story that the body is only valuable for how hard it can work, how much it can carry.
What I’ve found time and time again, is that when someone tells me they “want it really really deep,” there’s all of this cultural baggage and childhood conditioning in the room with us. To not acknowledge that and make space for it is not trauma-informed practice.
I believe that very often beneath the request for “more, harder, deeper” lies deep pain. An unmet need to be witnessed deeply in our hurt and struggle. A deep longing to be met in our lived reality. A desperation for deep relief and release from what feels hard and heavy. An aching to feel held in deep-down places that never ever get touched—physically, emotionally, energetically, spiritually. A rage and grief that we must get back to peak performance right now, because there’s no time to rest and no other choice.
I believe true depth dwells in presence, in attunement, in the permission granted to the body to respond when it’s good and ready.
I believe intuitive, intentional hands can reach places that brute force never will.
Trauma-Informed Massage as Ritual
So, here I am, palms extended in offering. My work as a Certified Trauma-Informed Massage Therapist is a ritual of remembering. Remembering what our bodies knew before they were fed into service of conquest, of the spectacle, of the dollar. Before rest was framed as laziness, and care as indulgence.
For me, massage is not something to be maximized. It’s a meeting, a listening, a vow to not cross what the body does not open to. What I offer is not the hard discipline of “working out the knots,” but the act of blessing a body, a life. Yours. Mine.
If there’s any hope of healing in this world, any possibility at all of undoing the generational curse of colonial capitalist pressure, I know it begins with gestures of tender strength. Not sheer force.
In a culture addicted to progress, performance, production and pain as proof that something important is happening… to consent to receive healing touch that is attuned, tender, non-demanding, and without any agenda is truly radical.
My work is not for everyone. By design, it’s slower, less visible, less “bang for your buck,” and so arguably less marketable. And in that way, I think it resists the very forces that wound us. It invites presence for those who sense that they don’t actually need more pushing through because they’ve pushed enough; they’re ready to receive deep care. .
If that’s you, and you’re in Casper, Wyoming, come see me.
