Leslie Nipps Counseling

Healers want to heal. People in pain or distress want healing. What a perfect fit. Right? Or maybe not…

Last fall, I herniated a disc. I developed very severe sciatica, and for those of you who’ve had this experience, you know the pain is quite extraordinary. I suddenly became willing to spend any amount of money to whoever could take away the pain.

I met a lot of incredibly skilled alternative body workers. But I found myself cycling through all of them. None of them seemed quite right, and they all, to be honest, kind of scared me. I was in a state of near-terror due to my intense and sudden pain, and I couldn’t find anyone who made me feel like things were going to be okay (despite a lot of reassurances that they could indeed fix my pain). I remember talking with one highly recommended practitioner on the phone who began to castigate western medicine, even though I had never brought up the topic, and I wondered what was going on and why I was feeling nervous about meeting this person.

Eventually, I found a practitioner with whom I immediately felt safe and I have been working with him since then. But a client’s experience of safety with us as practitioners doesn’t need to be left to blind luck.

Most healers focus their efforts on a particular healing framework that really feels like it works. They want to offer the healing that works so well to those who need it. People in need of healing are searching for just that healing you have to offer. But they don’t have the framework. What they’ve got is the pain or distress.

When these two people come together—the healer and the sufferer—there’s the potential for terrific engagement, but this potential often has to overcome an initial gulf: The client has the pain, the healer has the answer, but the client doesn’t know or understand the answer. They need, somehow, to be brought on board.

This gulf is usually obvious to the healer. The client doesn’t know anything we know about how energy moves and is blocked; or how posture is causing their pain; or that they need to balance their nutritional intake; or how to engage their core in order to feel healthy again. They know very, very little about these things. We want them as partners in their healing. We don’t want to just do things to them—which isn’t very useful anyway.

But let’s ask for a moment: What does the client want in the beginning? In addition to having their pain taken away, what do they want? What do you want when you become the client? Do you want to be initiated into a new healing framework?

What almost all potential clients want is for their pain and their experience of it to be met, seen, understood, and deeply respected. They also want their health and the rest of the meaning of their lives also to be met and respected. They don’t want feel that all that needs to be shoved aside in order to have the healing they most want. They want to believe that what they already value can be integrated into a healing framework.

It turns out that creating that reassurance is simple and can take place in the first few minutes of an interaction with a potential client. It’s done with something called “rapport.” Have you ever met someone who seems to create safety for almost everyone s/he meets? That person has an instinctive gift for creating rapport. They do it unconsciously in the way they stand, move, speak and engage with those they are with. But it isn’t mysterious. It’s a set of skills that are easily learned.

People relax and feel safe when they feel they are with “of like kind.” Imagine a gazelle on the savanna: anything that looks like a gazelle feels safe; anything that might not be a gazelle (even if it’s just a waving bunch of grass) might be a lion. RUN!

It turns out we are not much different from gazelles, and even though we don’t usually run, we find good excuses not to be with people with whom unconsciously we don’t feel fully “of like kind,” or fully safe. We suddenly realize we don’t have enough money for the service, or feel like it’s just not a “match” for us.

Rapport skills are what make it possible to help almost anybody feel safe with us. We give people the assurance that we are, indeed, “of like kind,” and fundamentally okay. Through learning a few easy, concrete skills, we can increase our ability to create rapport and help others feel really, really good with us no matter how different they may be.

Rapport is not “people skills,” warmth, friendliness, good listening skills, or any other version of sociability. It involves specific cues we give to others’ creature neurology that we are safe for them. It’s a remarkably respectful way to be with others: instead of asking people to get on our map of the world, we kindly move onto theirs, and work with them on their map—and this works so much better.

After establishing rapport, if we’ve done that well, we can start telling our clients about our healing framework and how we are inviting them into a new way to feel better. But let’s start with letting them know they are safe with us, no matter what. We get a whole lot more clients that way.

Mt. Diablo Rapport