Image credit: Breathe the Pain Out, Hafsa Idrees
Children require consistent love, attention, and touch from their caregivers. They need to experience warm loving touch, to be hugged, held, and cuddled. Basic childhood needs are primarily met through touch.”(1)
Walking from our car through the parking garage towards the building entrance, my 11 year old son reached for my hand and I felt the warmth from his body heat as our fingers intertwined. Throughout the morning, as we engaged in our weekday federal holiday tradition of visiting his favorite museum, he intermittently looped our arms together or wove his fingers through mine. The unconsciously casual contact conveying and delivering far more than casual meaning.
Comfort. Safety. Companionship. Trust.
It is the effect of the “love hormone,” oxytocin, that is released upon the experiencing of affectionate touch and in so doing, promotes bonding, emotional connection and a sense of wellbeing.
I honestly can’t recall, whether at his age or any other, having that same experience of casually comfortable and consistent physical contact and affection with or from my parents. I don’t recall much in the way of regular physical affection at all. The memories that are notable are so because of being exceptional.
Yet, from the moment an infant is placed upon their mother’s chest immediately after birth, touch is a critical component of both physical and emotional stability and growth.
For babies born prematurely, touch - particularly maternal touch - can be the pivotal difference of whether or not they survive.
Institutionalized children who do not receive regular sensory stimulation through one-on-one physical interaction can experience debilitating and irreversible developmental damage in cognitive function, language and motor development and even death through “failure to thrive.” In fact, “a hundred years ago, 99% of babies in orphanages in the United States died before they were seven months old” as a result of lack of touch.(2)
Touch deprivation can be devastating.
The importance of “contact comfort” was famously identified in the experiment from the 1950’s with infant rhesus monkeys that were presented with both a surrogate wire “mother” that provided food or a soft, cloth-based “mother” that did not. The monkeys consistently opted for the cloth mother, revealing that when faced with a choice, there was an overwhelming preference for attachment through tactile contact over nourishment.
The fundamental human need for touch, as vital as it is in infancy, does not diminish as we age and develop. Even in situations far removed from the extremes of institutionalization, children deprived of their needs for physical affection may be more predisposed to aggressive, anti-social behaviors and anxiety disorders that can persist through to adulthood.
In fact, long-term touch starvation can be a contributing component to developing cPTSD as a result of prolonged or repeated emotional and physical neglect.
Like anything else, it is important to note that something that is a fundamental need can also transform and present danger as well. While touch can convey and generate the emotional and relational connectedness necessary for wellbeing - and it can also be contorted to deliver harm.
For those of us who have had to remove ourselves from our dysfunctional families, our experiences with touch can range from the smotheringly invasive to abusive or manifest on the opposite end of the abuse spectrum through inconsistencies or deprivation.
Regardless, the development of protective mechanisms can be the same - an emotional armoring up and walling ourselves away for lack of trust or safety.
Even though we desperately want and need touch, our childhood experiences with it - whether as a source of harm and danger or of lack and neglect - can lead to a confusing and conflicting relationship with it in adolescence and adulthood. No matter the end of the spectrum associated, those experiences can lead to indiscriminate, risky, attention-seeking behaviors to get it, falling prey to those who would abuse our need for it or isolating behaviors as protection from rejection. Or a devastatingly harmful mixture thereof.
If we never had healthy, secure attachment as a child and we did not feel safe physically or emotionally, not only can there be impairment to the development of our sense of self as explored in a previous educational series article, we may also hold ourselves back from engaging with others as fully as we might want to. When attachment needs are not met, the nervous system becomes attuned to an experience of aloneness.
That can manifest as appearing cold and aloof to others with an “I don’t need anyone” defensive posture resulting in denial of our own relational yearnings. We may mistake the grooming behaviors of predators for true care and comfort or fall into repetitive patterns of unhealthy relationships that further erode our sense of self and esteem.
In any case, touch can simultaneously be something keenly desired and yet never trusted - whether to engage in, to believe as authentic, to feel safe within.
Whether walling oneself off from touch because what was experienced was abusive or because its absence required dissociation from that inherent need within ourselves, the result can be an avoidance that is isolating, lonely and self perpetuating.
Recovery from not only the foundational damage but also the resulting experiences deriving from those coping mechanisms can become yet another area of concentration in our already overly full curriculum of healing.
Outside of meeting some of those needs for mutually consensual tactile contact with our families of choice and creation, there are other ways to explore attainment that have the potential to maintain a sense of self protection and may help us learn how to release what is holding us back.
“Touch is a primal way of communicating togetherness, comfort, and affection, including interspecies relations, of humans and other mammals.” (3)
Image credit: AdobeStock_409100686
All creatures respond to touch as those of us who have become the caretakers for cherished pets fully understand and appreciate. The bonds and physical affection experienced with those adopted family members can be among the most treasured, enduring and healing.
Mindfulness can be another practice that can incorporate and leverage the sensory nature of our daily lives. “Touch is constantly ‘on’ - we cannot help but always be touching something… the body is always literally bound to the environmental settings and material objects that carry and cover it, and which the body weighs, grasps and strokes.” (3)
Sometimes it can simply be a matter of being attentive to what elements of nature personally resonate and bring peace and comfort - be it the sensation of the wind, the feel of earth beneath your toes, the rough bark of a tree against your hand or the full body embrace of water whether from an early morning lake swim or from sinking into a warm bath.
Alternatively, perhaps soothing touch comes from a weighted blanket. A massage.
There are self-administered practices to explore such as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) - otherwise known as “tapping” - or reflexology using pressure points to bring comfort through generating a serotonin release.
From a therapeutic perspective, somatic therapy is an approach that incorporates both mind and body and works to release the unresolved emotional experiences that are “trapped” inside. The goal of somatic therapy or somatic experiencing is to “resolve symptoms of stress, shock and trauma that accumulates in our nervous systems.” (4)
This therapy modality can include anything from breathwork and meditation to grounding, movement practices and therapeutic touch. Through such practices, those that have been most impacted through touch deprivation or trauma associated with touch can learn to regulate their nervous systems. This work can help achieve stronger mind-body connection to release the tensions and self protective mechanisms that have been built up over decades of being immersed in dysfunctional and unsafe relationships and environments.
Whether scientific or not - and there is a wealth of science behind the importance of touch in many areas of personal health and wellbeing - there is certainly something magical about the impact of a good, deep, safe hug. Even - or maybe especially - for those of us who have had trauma around too much or not enough physical contact.
It’s why we tend to stop and watch those videos of children at theme parks lingering and clinging to their favorite characters who are following the perhaps official, perhaps unofficial rule to never let go of that hug first.
As Walt Disney is purported to have said, “you never know how much that child may need that hug.”
Sometimes, we see ourselves in those videos. We see that inner child that still yearns, without having to hold any doubt or hesitation, to allow themselves the release of being warmly and enthusiastically engulfed within the arms of someone with whom they feel viscerally safe and loved. Someone real. Someone from whom we could never imagine ever wanting or needing to have to let go.
Image credit: @Paxcooley21
[Please note: This article is a reflection on the annual February 12th observance of "Hug Day." The educational series columnist is not a licensed mental health professional. The articles under this series are written from a peer to peer perspective.]
Sources/References
Davis, Issac, Rovers, Martin, Petrella, Cassandra. Touch in the Helping Professions: Research, Practice and Ethics. 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv5vdcvd.5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv5vdcvd.5?seq=3
Benjamin, Ben. “The primacy of Human Touch.” https://benjamininstitute.com/public/media/pdfs/the-primacy-of-human-touch.pdf
Maria Nätynki, Taina Kinnunen & Marjo Kolehmainen (2023) “Embracing water, healing pine: touch-walking and transcorporeal worldings,” The Senses and Society, 18:3,299-316, DOI: 10.1080/17458927.2023.2180864
Somatic Experiencing 101. https://traumahealing.org/se-101/
“Harlow’s Classic Studies Revealed the Importance of Maternal Contact.” Association for Psychological Science, 2018.
McGreevy, Suzy, Boland, Pauline. “Touch: An integrative review of a somatosensory approach to the treatment of adults with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.” European Journal of Integrative Medicine. July 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.eujim.2022.102168
Cirino, Erica. “8 Pressure Points on Your Hand” Healthline.com May 30, 2023
Glasper, Edward Alan. “Romania’s Forgotten Children: Sensory Deprivation Revisited.” Comprehensive Child and Adolescent Nursing. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694193.2020.1735250