Being in Touch
Touch is the most fundamental of human experiences. It is also likely the most under-researched of our five senses. Most art therapists have little awareness of its importance being overly focussed on the optical experience. You can live a successful life being blind, deaf, lack smell and taste, but without touch, we most likely die. Lack of touch for infants means lack of affect regulation, lack of attachment, lack of love and safety. We have all seen the shocking images of the Romanian orphans in the nineteen-eighties. Those who did survive developed a list of life-long problems stemming from such neglect, which “reads like the index of the DSM: poor impulse control, social withdrawal, problems with coping and regulating emotions, low self-esteem, pathological behaviours such as tics, tantrums, stealing and self-punishment, poor intellectual functioning and low academic achievement.” (Weir 2014)
The fluid, rhythmic environment of being held in the womb sets the base line for a child’s nervous system. (Perry, Malchiodi and Perry 2020) The embryonic state is an all-encompassing touch experience. Once we are born, tactile skin contact is the first mode of communication between infant and caregiver. A mother’s touch shapes our unquestioned, lifelong implicit identity of being loveable or unworthy of attention. Our earliest body memories and our core attachments were formed when we relied on sensorimotor feedback to feel safe and loved. The sensorimotor cortex in the brain regulates the feedback loop between reaching out with a motor impulse and being met with a sensory response. As I touch, I am being touched. (Elbrecht and Antcliff, Being touched through touch. Trauma treatment through haptic perception at the Clay Field: a sensorimotor art therapy 2014, 3 May 19:1) The undirected waving of infants’ hands, find fulfilment the moment they touch a care-givers skin. The motor impulse has “arrived”. It has been responded to. This continues as the toddler’s exploration when picking up a building block or a handful of grass. As grown-ups we communicate with the world and others through touch, depending on how safe the original learning experience in our formative years has been.
Virtually all trauma involves touch, because, also violence is primarily communicated through touch, and our boundaries are invaded through inappropriate touching. Sexual experiences are overwhelmingly ruled by the sense of touch – and so are medical procedures, as well as all other events that happened to our bodies.
Being out-of-touch during the COVID epidemic has caused a significant increase in mental disorders. The lack of connection in self-isolation has triggered emotional dysregulation, depression, domestic violence and escalated addictions. More children than ever before are presenting with severe eating disorders and self-harming injuries in emergency wards.
Our nervous system reacts with high anxiety when we lose the sensorimotor feedback we receive from touch. Holding someone’s hand, receiving a hug from a friend or sitting close to someone we trust makes us feel safe and helps us to calm down. Just like a crying infant will not react when you lean into the crib saying “you are safe”, we need to be touched and held to downregulate states of anxiety and upset. During the COVID epidemic, such close contact has been deemed to be a threat. While sanitising hands, avoiding touching surfaces and no longer greeting someone through touch has kept us safe from infection, it has simultaneously deprived us from the core, non-verbal mode of down-regulating our nervous system in order to manage stress responses.
The lack of direct contact with classmates, work colleagues and friends, lack of privacy at home, familial conflict and frustration, combined with boredom during lengthy periods of lockdown and the persistent threat of infection have all aggravated mental disorders. (Faya 2020)
We need to reconnect with ourselves and once we can emerge from lockdown, with others. When my family visited after nine months of self-isolation, I burst into tears every time I got a hug. During the isolation period staying in touch via Zoom helped, but did not reach my more embodied needs for contact. I hugged my horses daily and my cats got unprecedented amounts of affection, but it was obviously not enough. Only now, looking back over the past year, do I realise how viscerally uptight I had been, despite coping well on the surface.
In this context touch-informed therapeutic approaches have become more important than ever. Not surprisingly body-focussed approaches have attracted a lot of interest in recent months. Therapies need to support embodiment such as being based on bilateral, rhythmic movement like Guided Drawing, or involve haptic perception through touching clay or finger paints. We need to get out of our heads. Telehealth sessions and talking therapies are likely to increase cognitive overload and offer little relief for visceral states of anxiety. Weighted blankets and weighted soft toys have helped many children to calm down. Walking is grounding. Dancing and exercising can channel blocked libido into exhilarating body sensations. Touching food while baking and cooking has been a stress release for some. Gardening is an outlet for others.
Eugene Gendlin discovered that those clients who could be aware of how certain experiences resonated in their body, when they talked about them in therapy, had far more successful outcomes than those who were cut off from their Felt Sense. (Gendlin 1981) We need the body-focus for insights to touch us, otherwise we treat ourselves and our clients in the same way as the parent, who looks into the pram and tells the screaming infant “you are safe.” The cognitive input alone will have zero impact on the infant, unless the child is able to viscerally feel the safety through touch and connection.
Guided Drawing and Clay Field therapy both involve an intense tactile experience. Touching clay, chalky crayons or finger paints brings us in touch with ourselves. It is this non-verbal connection that can link us to a primordial mode of communication, to a preverbal stage in our life. This is the truly beneficial quality of this media in a therapeutic context. Its touch-qualities will allow a therapist to facilitate a bottom-up approach to down regulate the nervous system. Being in touch helps us to calm down, feel less anxious and stressed in a primarily non-verbal way.
Such non-verbal therapies require training; it takes skill to understand haptic communication through this touch-lens of perception. The changes clients experience in their body need time to be integrated, which even for children becomes an almost meditative, introspective experience during a session; seemingly nothing happens, yet lasting shifts occur. It is a calming, often wordless gut-feeling to be safe and loved. When we feel deeply touched and held, we usually have no need to talk, while such being in touch makes us feel viscerally alive and fulfilled.
Works Cited
Elbrecht, Cornelia. 2013. Trauma Healing at the Clay Field, a sensorimotor art therapy approach. London/Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley.
Elbrecht, Cornelia, and Antcliff Liz. 2014, 3 May 19:1. “Being touched through touch. Trauma treatment through haptic perception at the Clay Field: a sensorimotor art therapy.” International Journal of Art Therapy; formerly Inscape 19 - 30.
Faya, Montserrat Graell M. Goretti Morón‐Nozaleda Ricardo Camarneiro Ángel Villaseñor Silvia Yáñez Rudiger Muñoz Beatriz Martínez‐Núñez Carolina Miguélez‐Fernández María Muñoz Mar. 2020. “Children and adolescents with eating disorders during COVID‐19 confinement: Difficulties and future challenges.” European Eating Disorders Review, 29 July: https://doi.org/10.1002/erv.2763.
Gendlin, E. T. 1981. Focusing. Toronto: Bantam Books.
Perry, Bruce in, Cathy Malchiodi, and Bruce Perry. 2020. “Rhythm and Regulation; Innovative Approaches to Brain and Body During a Time of Immobilization.” www.besselvanderkolk.com. 30 May. MP3.
Weir, Kirsten. 2014. “The lasting impact of neglect; Psychologists are studying how early deprivation harms children - and how best to help those who have suffered from neglect.” American Psychological Association www.apa.org, Vol 45, No 6 June.
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