Victims of Abuse Given Gentle Touch

Massage therapist Linda Husar uses her strong hands to ease the pain suffered by women who have been physically and emotionally abused. Some have bruises all over their bodies and others have survived attempted strangulation.

Clients are referred to Husar, of Valencia, by the Assn. to Aid Victims of Domestic Violence, a nonprofit agency in Newhall that provides short-term shelter and support for abused women.

“I’m demonstrating that hands can be healing rather than hurtful,” Husar said recently from her office at the Valencia Wellness Center.

Husar, 48, began providing massage therapy for battered women on a volunteer basis in 1996 and has never turned anyone away, she said.

She developed a private practice in the early ‘70s while earning her bachelor’s degree at the University of Delaware. She left the profession for almost 15 years to marry, raise a family and sample other professions, such as teaching and real estate.

“But there were always tugs at my heart to return to this,” she said.

She and her family moved to Santa Clarita in the early 1990s. Most recently, she shared office space with a group of doctors, including a neurologist and two sports medicine specialists, at the Henry Mayo Clinic in Valencia. She moved into her own space in December when the office disbanded.

Although she has never been beaten or battered, she said she strongly empathizes with women who have. “The more we can support one another, the better off we all are,” she said.

Husar most often uses a technique called Manual Lymph Drainage to treat the battered women. Developed in Europe in the 1930s, the process involves gentle intermittent touching of the skin to help release waste products from body tissue. The tissue has become restricted by a lack of blood flow caused by tight muscles, which are tense “because these women are in a fight-or-flight mode,” Husar said.

Her treatments can run as high as $80 an hour. But for these clients, the services are free.

On a recent afternoon, a client in a volatile relationship with her husband lay on the massage table in Husar’s softly lit, sage green treatment room. The sound of a gentle tabletop waterfall filled the otherwise quiet space.

Husar’s hands moved gently over the woman’s arms and legs. The woman, in her mid-40s, suffers from carpel tunnel syndrome and shoulder and neck pain.

“Women in [her] situation take on a protective stance where the shoulders round forward and the posture is poor,” Husar said. “Some of [it] also stems from poor self esteem.”

The client said her physical and emotional state has improved since she began seeing Husar a few weeks ago.

“[Since] coming to Linda,” the woman said, “I never felt better about myself.”

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Another client, who held back tears as she talked about her verbally abusive and rage-prone husband, has been seeing Husar nearly daily since early January.

The woman in her late 50s suffers frequent headaches, blurred vision and numbness and pain in her face. “Her face was so sore, she couldn’t even touch it,” Husar said. “People with this kind of emotional stress have frequent bouts with pain.”

The thought of someone else touching her face seemed strange at first, the woman said. “I trusted Linda,” she said. “And if she said it would help, I believed her.”

“How’s that pressure? How’s the tenderness?” Husar asked the woman frequently during her 1 1/2-hour treatment. Having finished treating her temples, Husar began pressing a Q-Tip on the woman’s eye muscles behind their sockets. This technique has helped relieve the woman’s headaches.

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Every Thursday night, Husar volunteers as co-facilitator for a women’s support group at the Assn. to Aid Victims of Domestic Violence, where she meets many of her clients.

Many of the women stay in abusive relationships for financial or religious reasons, she said. Others would rather stay in relationships, no matter how abusive, than have no relationship at all.

But helping to relieve their pain enables them to more easily consider new lives for themselves, Husar said. In time, the feelings might translate into action, to leave the violence behind, she said.

“I consider the work I do a real honor,” she said. “I believe we need to be there for one another. That’s the way you can change the world one person at a time.”

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