Mary Beth Johnson on Persistence and Life after Certification

A look at SCS as the perfect long game with Mary Beth Johnson, PT, MPT, JSCC

As thousands of business owners shut their doors at the height of the pandemic, Mary Beth Johnson chose to go for gold. A manual therapist whose work relies on physical touch, she could have let fear and uncertainty guide her Solvang-based private practice. Instead, the 25-year master of physical therapy saw an opportunity to hone her craft. It was finally time to get certified in the Jones Strain Counterstrain method.

Early career: from burned out to reignited

Mary Beth hadn’t always set her sights on Strain Counterstrain (SCS). Her PT career began as it often does—a direct path to outpatient PT with traditional modalities that worked only half the time. Burnout came quickly, causing her to pivot to home health where she worked for three years treating post-op patients too weak to visit a clinic. Ultimately unsatisfied, she returned back to outpatient care, settling into a career that felt good enough. 

As fate would have it, Mary Beth’s introduction to SCS came from her own dysfunction—severe back pain from years of carrying children. A single visit to a local Counterstrainer was all it took. Within one hour Mary Beth was walking upright, free from pain.

“I didn’t know what he did but I wanted to do that,” recalls Mary Beth. “I had never heard of Counterstrain prior to my treatment.” 

Navigating Strain Counterstrain as a novice

Though she couldn’t have predicted it at the time, Mary Beth’s first treatment would alter the trajectory of her career, beginning with the first Jones Institute course, SCS for the Extremities (now SCS Complete Body). Due to the sheer number of techniques covered, Mary Beth decided to reverse-engineer the clinical application of SCS. Starting with the most common conditions in her caseload—primarily knee and hip replacements—she worked backwards, selecting only the SCS techniques most relevant to the dysfunction. It didn’t take long though to discover that her communication skills were just as important as the technical kind.

“In the beginning, I didn’t quite know how to tell patients what I was doing,” she says. “Even though I had my own experience, to me it was just another modality. I was skeptical Counterstrain would work for other people. 

“People expect a certain thing from PT sessions. The joke is that PT stands for ‘pain and torture’”, she laughs. “It took a while to gain confidence and not fall back on traditional modalities.” 

The challenge was that in order to gain confidence, she needed to practice. Her attempts to do so were regularly thwarted by stringent outpatient protocols. And yet despite not being able to implement SCS as often as she’d hoped, Mary Beth patiently made her way through the curriculum, repeating courses as needed. It wasn’t until SCS Cranial that she felt more inspired than ever before. To learn how to change leg length differences by releasing tiny muscles in the head was a lightbulb moment. 

“I really wanted to set myself apart from others and hone something that worked,” says Mary Beth. “SCS is a really powerful technique. People get better all the time! It’s really fun to be a part of that and facilitate that. It feels like magic.”

The road to SCS Certification

Years later and far more proficient in SCS, Mary Beth still felt like something was missing. Owning a private practice meant that direct feedback was non-existent—there was no one with whom she could talk shop. So when the coronavirus took the entire world by storm in 2020, she created a whirlwind of her own. 

Mary Beth learned she could apply for the SCS Mentorship Program to get the one-on-one experience she desperately needed to progress. Under the guidance of Jones Institute founder, Randall Kusunose, PT, OCS, JSCCI, she mastered SCS and went on to take the Jones Strain Counterstrain certification test alongside four peers—all of whom earned the same designation.

Now, less than one year later, Mary Beth enjoys the kind of success she could only have dreamed of at the start of her journey. For one, she’s looking to transition her newest clinic, Fiore Physical Therapy, to a cash-based business as one of the few expert Counterstrainers on the central California coast—a move she wouldn’t have considered without SCS. That she hasn’t had time to hang her new JSCC certificate on the wall is perhaps another indicator of her success. To Mary Beth, however, the only validation she needs is right on the table. 

“One of my patients has had ringing in his ears for 40 years. He tried everything under the sun and nothing worked—chiro, nerve treatments, stuff I hadn’t even heard of. After our second visit, he had no ringing in his left ear and was 50% better in the right.” 

You might say Mary Beth Johnson is fluent in the language of tenacity, the art of making a name for yourself in an industry overrun by cookie-cutter PT clinics. She knows firsthand how overwhelming SCS techniques can be. And so when she offered words of advice to new Counterstrainers, it wasn’t hard to recognize an unintentional nod to her former self. 

“Stick with it—it works” she says simply. “Persistence pays.”