Touch could properly be regarded as a form of nutrition.
We mistakenly think that touch occurs on the periphery of our self, a skin thing. But truthfully each surface stimulus travels far into the most hidden interior landscapes of our self, traversing long nerve cells right through the buried spinal core to enter and gather in the deep folds of our brain. It’s not by accident that our skin and brain each are generated from a single ectodermic substance, cascading outwards and inwards as we grow in the womb, because right at the very root and origin of us, we are built to connect the inner and outer worlds.
The necessity of nurturing touch is very clear when we are at our youngest. Without it, young children wither and even die, though they are provided with food and medicine.
Slightly older children typically find ways to build a huge, varied diet of touch into their lives. From, at the rough end of the spectrum, tumbling unexpectedly onto their parents’ shoulders, rolling on the floor with siblings, wrestling with friends, to cuddling, sitting on knees, being carried, stroked and gently soothed at the other. Children actively shape their sense of self, not just mentally, but with their hands, elbows and knees, their bellies and mouths, inside the frequency, textures and intensities of this constant, rich field of contact.
(This is why non-nurturing, violent or invasive touch can be so devastating for a child, because it does harm right in the deep heartland of a child’s emerging identity.)
As we grow up we exchange this banquet of physical contact, all that rough and tumbling rolling around for…. Well, often for very little.
For most of us, growing up coincides with a reduction in the range and quality of our tactile life. Our diet of nurturing physical contact thins out, narrows down. Ask yourself how your tactile day went today?
In fact, if we do assign a nutritional value to touch, it is clear that many, perhaps most adults, regardless of whether they are alone or in partnership, suffer from significant degrees of starvation in this arena. While some adults participate in contact sports or practices, seek out massage or physical therapies, most do not. While some adults have relationships that offer them a range of healthy touch, including but not confined to sexual, most relationships do not. Instead, we have a state of widespread tactile famine, a malnourishment that is so entrenched as normal we cannot even see that it exists.
We participate in this under-nourishing of the body in many ways. The abundance of touching we once offered to others, for example, soon becomes rationed out, reserved for appropriate moments with appropriate people. Unlike the sometimes chaotic, improvised and spontaneous interactions of children at play, almost all of these moments, a handshake, a friendly hug, a pat on a colleague’s back, are highly stereotyped too, habitual and fairly unconscious exchanges of brief physical contact. Most of these moments also require a highly muted intensity. Sex therefore, for many adults, whether regular or infrequent, loving or casual, ends up carrying the entire burden of our need for intense nurturing touch. It’s a heavy task it often fails at.
Equally, our ascension into adulthood is often accompanied by the acquisition of goods and services that reduce the tactile shock of the world on our system. Comfortable furniture, convenient transport over smooth highways, and clothes and shoes that protect us from bumps or holes in the land or temperature: all conspire to soothe and dull the senses, especially touch. We are not numb, but we have arranged the world to induce a kind of torpor compared to what we could experience.
Touch cannot be talked about in polite society. No index of well being seems to have measured it. But sometimes the absence of touch is acknowledged by proxy. Loneliness is one of its stand ins. Loneliness has many dimensions, but the absence of being held, stroked, touched is surely one of its most painful characteristics. The UK has a particular crisis here, coming 26th out of 28 European countries in a survey of who has neighbours or friends to turn to. According to the Campaign to End Loneliness, lacking social connections has the equivalent on health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
The loneliness which blights the last years of so many elderly people in our culture is based just as much on a physical deprivation as an emotional one. Two fifths of elderly people report that the television is their main company. And we know that loneliness can kill just as assuredly at this end of life as physical isolation killed at the beginning end. Solitary elderly people are almost 50% more likely to die early than those who have family, friends or community.
We could talk about poverty of touch just as validly as poverty of wealth, and although this is not confined to this area, frequently the two go together. Walk around a poor estate, and along with cramped and frayed housing, you will see many people, perhaps adults more than children, for whom reliable and consistent nurturing touch is but a memory, a yearning, perhaps an inflamed wounding, rather than a daily sustaining occurrence.
I am sure that for some people turning to aggression and physical violence is an ill judged act of substitution, motivated by a desperate need for the deep, meaningful contact that is missing. The shoving, grappling and hitting provide a perverse reminder, a tragic hint of the intense physical significance we all depend on for our sense of mattering in the world.
Individually and collectively, we need to recover a world that will nurture us, build a society that will sustain rather than erode us. Social and economic policies that prioritise real human need are priorities. But part of this task will also be to regenerate the possibilities of healthy nurturing touch in our lives and in our culture.
There are many reasons to think this is possible, because a good half of the work here is to simply pay attention to our already existing tactile experience, and to edge it forward just a little. As we pick up the mug of tea, we notice the weight and shape, the particular balance between strength and delicacy the porcelain has achieved, the contrast between the experience of the fingers and the experience of the lips. We can ignore the signs, step off the path and walk on the bumpy grass, among the trees, trail a hand across its trunk. We can once more hold our partner’s hand with some portion of the attention we brought to the miraculous first time we felt those fingers wrap around ours.
Key in the front door at the end of a stressful day, we can appreciate the ability of children to restore us. Because they plunge us back into a universe of sensation and tactile experience. They climb on us, tumble over our head or shoulder, jump on our backs, elbow us and knee us and rough us gloriously up. They break through the crust we have carefully built around our nervous system. They speak to us at a level we have forgotten about, but thirst for: the elemental dimension of physical contact.
John Tuite founded The Centre for Embodied Wisdom and Clearcircle. He now works as a leadership and life coach, and consultant. He is a qualified Leadership Embodiment teacher and a continuing student of Wendy Palmer, founder of Leadership Embodiment. He also teaches a range of embodiment skills from breath work to mindfulness and energy work/qi-kung.
Before this, John taught in London for 18 years, serving on the leadership teams in four challenging schools. He was an Advanced Skills Teacher for Westminster. Prior to this he has worked as a builder, an arborist and a councilor.
He is also a Senior Instructor of Grandmaster Han Kim Sen of Southern Shaolin Five Ancestor, a centuries old martial art born in the Buddhist temples of China, integrating all aspects of mind and body work. He has practiced within this tradition since 1974.
He lives in London with his partner and three children.
This “touch famine” can be generational. Breaking the pattern revolves around awareness. This is a wonderfully comprehensive post about an important topic. I, for one, craved touch as a child…….any touch……..as a result of having parents who never hugged their six children, never held our hands, never a kiss on the cheek. It has taken me a lifetime to realize that this longing created an illusional separation between me and others. Through awareness and forgiveness, we can move forward.
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Thank you for this thoughtful comment.
‘Through awareness and forgiveness, we can move forward.’….I especially like that.
Best, Mike.
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Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
The power of touch ….. never underestimate it!!
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Hi
I thought this article was worth sharing too, and am especially touched by its timeliness. After many years of working with Depression, anxiety and stressed clients -and more recently dementia I have formulated a way of offering Conscious touch which has proved successful in reducing suffering and also isolation, relieving depressive, anxiety and stress symptoms.Generally it acts as a healing modality which is invasive and not massage.
The Conscious Touch Foundation is launching this Friday and I would love it to be at least nationwide available so am wanting to train up CTF praticioners to take it into their professional and community environments.
If you are interested in finding out more either check out http://www.conscioustouchfoundation.com next week or pm me here.
Thank you
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As a person who lives with a chronic pain disorder that is especially painful with touch I’ve thought a lot about the importance of touch as well. We don’t realize how important something is to us until we are deprived or even permanently averse to it.
As you said, people just don’t grasp the positive chemicals kicked up in the brain and body when they are touched by another person. Maybe comfort eating and substance abuse feeds the feeling one could get had they been nurtured physically instead.
I hope those who read this will realize there are children and adults who cannot experience affection; maybe they will make changes to include more time for it in their own lives.
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Thank you for sharing from your own experience and understanding. Much appreciated.
Best, Mike.
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Reblogged this on Silver Girl.
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Reblogged this on Knitting Rays of Hope and commented:
Very interesting and worth the read….
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As a full time massage therapist I live the power of touch. Energy, all types, are moved and moulded through touch. Variations in stroke, length of massage, tempo, intent all play strong roles in touch.
Touch IS nutrition and should not be underestimated. I am lucky to engage in touch for hours upon hours every day – people ask if I get tired but no, not unless I massage a large amount of negativity or more than about 8 hours.
This is a powerful piece, thank you for bringing attention to the benefits of touch!
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Thank you for sharing from your own experience.
Best, Mike.
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Reblogged this on Letizia Accinelli and commented:
Touching article!!
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I would love to re-blog this on my website for cuddle professionals. This is an eloquent and thoughtful piece on the widespread but still not properly acknowledged touch poverty in our increasingly disconnected society. Thank you.
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Hi Kitty 🙂
I feel sure that John would be happy for you to share this piece. Please can you just lick back to John’s own site and kindness blog if that’s OK?
Thank you.
Best, Mike.
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John, thank you so much. I hope that this article spreads far and wide. In my experience, there is no more potent medicine than loving touch and bonded relation … I’m in my mid-50s, and when I think back on the moments that have left indelible imprints, they all revolve around touch. I’m going to link your blog with mine. Here is a piece that I recently wrote about the medicine of touch … http://traumorphosis.blogspot.ca/2015/02/sometimes-i-wonder.html
Bless you …
Alexa.
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Thank you, Alexa 🙂
Best, Mike.
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Reblogged this on The Forever Years and commented:
John Tuite writes about the importance for human beings, particularly in our earliest years, but also throughout life, of positive touch… so important, he says, that touch should be regarded as a form of “nutrition”. “The Forever Years” likes this ! 🙂
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Love this essay! After my husband passed away, I have been shocked how much I missed the simplest of touch. It’s an aspect of grief no one warns you about. Thank you for educating people on this matter!
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John,
Thank you from my heart for this wonderful post. I agree that touch is much more important than people realize, and it IS nutrition. I took the liberty of re-posting this on my blog, luluopolis.wordpress.com, as I wanted to share this with my readers.
Thank you so much,
Jane
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very important and thoughtful article and written from the heart. a lack of positive and nourishing touch in childhood impoverishes our hearts and minds, which in turn leads to compensating behaviour like addiction and drug abuse in adulthood, or simply not being inside our bodies and out of touch with our emotions.
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So true…
Best, Mike.
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So true. So well said.
Thank you for the article.
I had an uncle who was homosexual but chose not to go into a homosexual relationship. He lived very far from us, his only family, and he loved it when we went for a visit – pulled out all the stops!
Once he told me that he was happy in his work, loved his home, enjoyed his group of friends, but there was one thing that was very hard for him. He said he got “touch-hungry”.
We tried to make up for it by lots of hugs and scratching his back etc. He always said that it had to keep for a long time.
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