Milton Teaching Softness

Excerpted from Jack Liskin’s Moving Medicine: The Life and Work of Milton Trager, M.D.

Again today, there is a child with cerebral palsy, a nine-year-old boy with beautifully tender and intelligent eyes, who uses leg braces, a walker, or a wheelchair to get around. Every move he makes, every word he uses, builds the child's trust and reinforces softness in his spastic muscles. Milton cannot impart this skill directly to students; it has grown out of long years of experience with children.

‘I want to teach you what softness is. Here, feel my arm. That's soft. All of these people are my students, nice people, my friends. I'm just going to see how soft your neck is, how soft, how nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing's going to happen. You can believe me.’

The child trusts him instantly.

‘I like the softness you're giving me. I like it. I like your soft touch on my thumb,’ Milton says as the boy's arm, at first retracted toward his head, gradually stretches out and relaxes. ‘What is soft?’ he asks, as always. To the boy, this is a novel question.

‘What is soft?’ the boy repeats, wonderingly.

‘What is softer than that?’ asks Milton.

‘What is softer than that?’ echoes the child with surprised curiosity.

He gives the boy images to use: being soft is sweet, like ice cream; being tight and hard is sour, like a dill pickle. Milton flexes and moves the child's legs slowly and with infinite patience. There is not a hurried movement or word. The palsied legs, scissored at the knees, steadily soften and increase their range of motion under his hands. If the slightest spastic reaction develops, he backs off immediately but unhurriedly.

Milton addresses the students. ‘He doesn’t like that movement; it causes spasticity, so I won’t do it. I’ll do what I can get away with, not a speck more. You have to breathe with them, get inside them. I feel like I am inside them.