The challenge isn’t noticing everything a client presents — it’s knowing which details actually matter for the session.
A client walks into your space. They say their shoulders are tight. They mention they slept badly. You notice they look stressed. Their breathing is shallow. Their shirt is wrinkled. Their shoes are untied.
Here’s the dilemma: which of these details belong in your therapeutic frame, and which are just background noise?
Why It’s Tricky
If you try to account for everything a client presents — down to the wrinkles in their shirt — you’ll never get started. But if you ignore too much, you risk missing the very signal that could make the session effective, like shallow breathing that reveals nervous system tension.
This balancing act has a name in philosophy and AI research: the frame problem. It describes the difficulty of updating what you know after each action or observation without drowning in irrelevance. Humans face it naturally in daily life; therapists confront it every session.
Massage as Constant Filtering
Every touch, every observation forces you to decide what’s significant.
Shoulders tight? Probably relevant.
Bad sleep? Likely important context.
Shallow breathing? Definitely worth attention.
Untied shoes? Almost certainly not.
The art of practice is in filtering — updating your frame as you go, discarding what doesn’t matter while staying open to signals that might.
Why This Matters
Getting lost in irrelevant detail can make your work mechanical or confused. Ignoring too much can make it careless. The craft lies in navigating the middle ground: selective attention that stays alive to what might matter without being paralyzed by noise.
The Takeaway
Massage therapists face the frame problem every day. The difference is, unlike a machine bogged down in calculations, you have intuition, presence, and experience to guide your choices. That’s what keeps your work human: not noticing everything, but noticing the right things at the right time.