The Healing Touch

Our previous video just planned to provide a little look into the feeling of touching and being touched. It meant to open up your interest, and maybe just make you imagine being touched in several ways. Now you also see – our connections with other people are deeply rooted in a physical contact. We first formulate within our mother’s womb in a continuous touch, and after that we develop further through our parents and relatives cuddling. Sometimes we feel that we would die without being touched by another person.

Do you know that it is literally so? At the beginning of the 20th century there was a research by Henry Dwight Chapin among orphanages in the USA, where he found that the infant mortality rate is extremely high for very young babies, although they got proper food and medical care. They called this phenomenon “marasmus” from a Greek word, meaning fading away. After looking for the cause reason it turned out that the main reason was the lack of staff time spent with children. When this changed, and children got at least some amount of cuddling, the rate of mortality radically dropped. (However marasmus as a condition also exists if no proper food is available for the child.)

There was another interesting, and befamed study, an examination of monkeys by Harry Harlow in the 50s. He gave the baby monkeys two artificial mothers: a soft, cloth one and a wire one. It turned out that monkey babies were spending time with and turning for safety to the soft mother even if the food came from the wire one.

We need our mother’s, father’s, lover’s, other people’s soft touch for our healthy development and for our feeling of safety. Developmental studies even underline how much physical touch and contact from our mothers are needed for the development of our mind and consciousness.  Howvwe, new extensive research confirms the profound importance of touch for well-being across all ages. A comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis of 137 studies (Packheiser et. al. 2024), encompassing nearly 13,000 individuals, revealed that touch interventions significantly promote mental and physical health.

For adults, touch is highly effective in reducing pain, feelings of depression, and anxiety. Newborns also benefit considerably, experiencing regulated cortisol levels and increased weight gain. While human-to-human touch offers superior mental health benefits compared to touch from objects or robots, the number of sessions is crucial for adults, leading to greater improvements in depression, anxiety, and pain. Interestingly, parental touch is more beneficial for newborns, though familiarity of the toucher doesn’t impact adult outcomes. Additionally, head touch appears especially advantageous, and unidirectional touch shows higher mental health benefits in adults. These findings underscore touch as a powerful and adaptable tool for enhancing health.

We feel touch through the borders of our body – our skin. Our skin, the largest of all our organs is also the most ancient one. All creatures have an outer border, and all of them use it for sensing. Even if we identify our other senses (like seeing, or hearing) easier and give them more importance, in reality the primary sensations are coming through our skin – the feeling of hot, cold, pressure, or even pain and irritation. Our skin contains several different neural endings to feel all these different senses.

We can even learn to communicate through our skins: there is the story of Helen Keller, who got deaf and blind before her second birthday. She was taught to communicate through tactile stimulation by her teacher, Anne Sullivan, who also deserved to be mentioned by name. Keller later earned a university degree, and became a famous writer and an activist.

Trauma can also be healed partly through touching. Those specialists working with traumatised people – veteran soldiers, abused women, adults with previous childhood abuse –, have found that talking and medicine itself will never take away the remnants of these traumas, while working with the body through touch – will (Van der Kolk, 2014, Levine, 1997, Mate, 2019).

Even without turning to history and science we do know how important it is to be hugged and touched, and we all seek these sensations in our connections. There are ancient forms of getting it even without a mother or lover around: through dance, massage, or close friendships. So let’s use them.

In case you have got the hang of it, and ask the question – but where, and how to do somatic practices in a more organized way, we have good news for you – there are several approaches and practices, and you can select the one, which fits you best. In some of them there is more touch, in others there is more movement – and also in others there is more connection to others. In our last, upcoming article we are going to introduce some of these practices to you.

Sources:

• European Institute of Perinatal Mental Health: They could not live without the love, blog article, source: https://eipmh.com/they-could-not-live-without-the-love/
• Henry Dwight Chapin, “Family vs. Institution,” Survey 55 (January 15, 1926):485-488.
• Wikipedia: Harry Harlow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow
• Wikipedia: Helen Keller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller
• Packheiser, J., Hartmann, H., Fredriksen, K., Gazzola, V., Keysers, C., & Michon, F. (2024). A systematic review and multivariate meta-analysis of the physical and mental health benefits of touch interventions. Nature Human Behaviour
• Van der Kolk, Bessel A.: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2014
• Levine, Peter A., and Ann Frederick.Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997.
• Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. London: Vermilion, Random House UK, 2019.