Newsletter Archives

About Linda Graham

 

 

 

In his book Coming To Our Senses, Jon Kabat-Zinn notes that the word “touch” has the distinction of having the longest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, even longer than the entry for love. (Jon credits Ashley Montague, in his book on touching, for this discovery.)

Attachment researchers have documented “beyond irrefutability” how foundational touch between baby and parents is to develop a secure attachment bond and support full development of the baby’s growing brain.  Without enough loving touch, babies die of “failure to thrive.”  Without enough touch, our brains don’t develop the structures and circuits we need to “feel” love, even though love is offered.

For reasons we explore below, even as adults we tend to live now in a touch-starved culture.  Even as we gather with family and friends in the approaching holidays, often these holiday gatherings re-activate old attachment traumas around touch or lack of touch or harmful touch.  We may not have, or know how to have, enough of the healthy touch that is “a vital element, if not the element, in bringing people into presence, awareness and interconnection with life.” (Eve Siegel, see more quotes below in Poetry and Quotes to Inspire.)

May these reflections on the healing power of touch and tools to recover a healthy sense and amount of touch in our lives be useful to you and yours this season.

            – Cherry Jones

In the first year of your child’s life, your body, much more than your mind or your words, is your primary communication tool.  You receive almost all the incoming information you need from your baby through your body and its sensations (as opposed to the communication we tend to focus on as adults – the exchange of ideas).  And all the outgoing information you deliver to your baby goes through your body as well.  You connect with your baby through your facial expressions, your warmth, your touch, your tone of voice, and your tension or relaxation in each moment.  In fact, everything your baby knows about you and is learning from you during this time of ultimate brain plasticity, when neural pathways are being laid down for life, is happening through the communication between your body and you baby’s body.  Your body is likely the primary source of nutrition, and even if you are bottle feeding, your body during feeding times nourishes the baby with important skin-to-skin contact.
– Cassie Vietan, Mindful Motherhood

To touch is to give life.
– Michelangelo

Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.
– William James

In the person whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.
– George Eliot

Some of the dictionary’s uses of touch identified by Jon Kabat-Zinn:  we can be out of touch, lose touch, be touched (as in the head) and feel touched (as when our hearts are moved).  We can not touch our food, put the touch on someone for money, feel a touch of envy or sadness, add a touch of paprika, have a touch of the flu, let the candlelight provide just the right touch, but told not to touch anything, touch off an uproar, touch upon something in conversation, touch up the scratches on our car, add finishing touches to the flower arrangements, and touch base with someone.

We cannot touch something without being touched by it in the very same instant.  We cannot be touched without touching.  Walking barefoot, our feet kiss the earth with every step, and the earth kisses right back and we feel it.

For all that, we tend to be specialists at being out of touch a great deal of the time, and out of touch with just how out of touch we can be.  It is easy to eat without tasting, miss the fragrance of the moist earth after a rain, even touch others without knowing the feelings we are transmitting.  How many times have you unwittingly and improbably walked into the door you were opening, or inadvertently banged your hand or elbow on something, or dropped something you didn’t know you were carrying because in that moment, you weren’t actually all there, and so were momentarily out of touch even with the spatial and temporal orientation of the body, which normally we have covered without too much specific attention.  And is it not the case that we are sometimes equally and grossly out of touch with what we call the “outside” world, with our effects on other people, with what they care about and may be going through and feeling, even when it is written on their faces or apparent in their body language, if only we were available to ourselves to take notice.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to our Senses

The Lightest Touch

Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then, like a hand in the dark,
it arrests the whole body,
steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows
a great line,
you can feel Lazarus,
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

– David Whyte
Everything is Waiting for You

Richie Davidson and Jim Coan did study the effect of touch on reducing stress and creating well-being at the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin.  Women volunteers were told they would be given a slight but unpleasant electrical shock on their ankles while their brain responses of anxiety and pain were monitored in an fMRI scanner.

Each woman in the control group was alone during the procedure and registered anxiety before and pain during the shock.  In a second group, each woman held the hand of a “stranger” (the lab technician) during the procedure, which resulted in the reactions of anxiety and pain being reduced somewhat.  But in the third group, each woman held her husbands’ hand during the procedure, the pleasurable security of holding the hand of someone who loved them (and the oxytocin thus released) down-regulated their stress and overrode both anxiety and pain. The women instead experienced peacefulness throughout the procedure.  Touch turned off the threat switch in the brain.

*           *           *           *           *           *           *

Chris shared this story about touch in our Wednesday evening meditation group.  Prisoners trained dogs to be paired with soldiers returning from Iraq, to help the soldiers afflicted with post-traumatic stress from combat to re-enter American society and re-adjust to non-combat lives.  A win-win for the prisoners, the soldiers, and the dogs. In one story, a car backfiring triggered an ex-soldier into a PTSD flashback of an IED explosion.  He sat frozen, unable to move or speak.  His wife did what she had been trained to do, holding him and speaking to him in a soothing voice, to help him calm down and re-connect.  But it was when the dog from this program climbed on his lap and began to lick his face that the man was able to respond, re-engage with himself and his wife in the present moment.  (I wish I had more details of what program, where, who’s doing the research, but the story rings true; we know a loving touch from a loving pet can bring us out of a trance, back to awareness and peace of mind in the present moment.)

*           *           *           *           *

Another story from a different meditation group.  A mother and young child were watching their neighbor across the street sit on his front porch day after day, slumped and somewhat inert in grief over the recent death of his wife of many years.  Finally the little boy went over to the neighbor, climbed up on his lap, and sat with him quietly.  From across the street the mother watched the man begin to softly sob.  After about ten minutes he stopped, gave the boy a gentle hug, and stood up to tend to some things in the yard.  When the little boy returned to his mother, she asked him what he had said to the man.  “I didn’t say anything.  I just sat with him.  I helped him cry.”

*           *           *           *           *           *

Many years ago my own father had a stroke big enough to land him in the hospital for a few days, and a skilled nursing facility after that.  While there at the SNF, my dad became suicidal.  The staff called me at 5:30am to come pick him up.  In his confused mental state, even at the age of 80, he had managed to climb out onto a second story deck overlooking the courtyard and was threatening to jump.

When I arrived at the nursing facility, I managed to get my dad into my car to take him home.  But I was completely bewildered about what to do in the next few days.  Before I could get in the car myself, I burst into tears.  I collapsed right there on the curb of the parking lot, and just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.  All the grief and fear and confusion and anguish just welling up and spilling over.  The nurse who had discharged my dad saw me out the window; she came out of the building and gently took my hand as she sat with me on the curb.  For the next 30 minutes, she never said a word really; she just held my hand with one hand; her other hand gently stroking my back.  (Now I know how significant her touching me there, at the back of the heart, was.)

The nurse stayed present with me as I cried out wave after wave of grief, fear, confusion, anguish.  Eventually the waves of tears subsided.  I looked up into her eyes and saw simply someone seeing me, seeing my pain, someone caring for me, caring for my pain, caring for all the pain of all the family members who had ever gone through what I was going through, all the pain of the human condition. No matter what the next moment brought, in that moment I knew my struggle was completely seen, understood, accepted.  The nurse’s unspoken empathy and gentle touch allowed me to normalize my experience and re-group.

*          *          *          *          *

Another story from Dacher Keltner, about the power of touch to mitigate aggression.

“I estimate that I’ve played approximately 4,500 games of pickup basketball, twice a week for twenty-five years. Ten bodies, each weighing on average 200 pounds, crash into each other for hours at a time, with a force that sprains ankles, breaks noses, blackens eyes, and wears down the knee cartilage until it’s bone on bone in the middle of life.

“In those 4,500 games, where loud voices and thrown elbows reign, I have never once seen a fight break out.  Sure, there are dramatic confrontations, and many a shove under the boards.  But I’ve never seen a punch thrown or anything remotely resembling unadulterated aggression.  That level of violence (0) proves pickup basketball to be more peaceful than randomly sampled interactions between marital partners, siblings, family members at Thanksgiving, crowds celebrating their football team’s triumph, people parking to go to the theater.  At the end of the game, there is most typically laughter, respect and a faith in the human project.  The rest of the day is more peaceful.

“Why?  Because the violent physicality of basketball is transformed by touch.  Teammates bump fists when the game begins.  During the game opponents lean into each other, hand check to the hips, push forearms to the back and chest.  Defenders bear-hug to stop a drive down the lane.  Opponents slap rumps at a good play.  There are high fives at the games’ end.  The visible physics of basketball is incommensurably violent – bodies colliding at near-full speed.  The language of touch in the pickup game neutralizes the aggressive intent of the actions; there’s a humming vibration that shifts the physiology toward higher, loftier values.”
 

Warmly,