The Indigenous Mexican village where I began my work was a small crossroads of the expatriate world, a gathering place for the wounded who sought refuge from the past and bargained for forgiveness from the future. Vietnam veterans searching for human connection south of the border limped and ached along on disability funds. Some traveled in a stupor of alcohol and painkillers by day, and others dived for lobsters and octopus in the quiet of the night.
I worked with a varied group of people, Indigenous villagers, expatriates, and tourists; their bodies were movable installations of pain and stress, where many had stored their memories of trauma for safekeeping. Early in my work, I discovered that people were talking about important, painful, long-forgotten events in response to my touching the areas that hurt, that their bodies longed to tell the stories that their minds preferred to keep quiet.
When I first began my practice, I treated people who came because their bodies hurt with intractable pain. As they relaxed at the table, they talked to me about their lives, and it became apparent that there was a relationship between the source of their bodily pain and the content of their words. As I grew in my capacity to listen, people began to trust me and opened more deeply to their memories, images, and stored pain. Commonly, areas of acute pain were overlays of chronic, ancient pain buried in layers; the first layer was childhood abuse or beatings, followed by accidents associated with high-risk lifestyles, war, or adult rape or violence. These memorable sensations with history were state-dependent and often waiting to emerge; as with Pandora’s box, the contents, once revealed, could not again be shut away.
Somatic Touch Therapy
The field of touch therapy and its integration with psychotherapy for trauma treatment has broad applications. The body is the locus of traumatic experiences. The embodiment of pain presents a tangible, tactile text, a moving memory that requires a witness who will listen and respond. People with PTSD present with stiff necks, spastic perineal muscles, chronic back pain, and temporomandibular joint pain. They seek help for migraines, stomach pain, hyperventilation, sexual dysfunction, chronic fatigue, depression, multiple sclerosis, and more.
There are numerous systems of touch therapies, indeed as many as psychotherapies. People of all ages are candidates for touch during all stages of their recovery. Different touch therapy techniques facilitate specific responses at different stages, and there are a variety of isomorphic methods for everyone.
Whatever the theory and method, they all rely on being congruent with a client’s belief system and a “good fit” with an empathic, caring practitioner.
The Taboo of Touch in Psychology
The early 20th-century relegation of magnetic healing and hypnosis to quackery intersects with the taboo on touch and the conflation of touch with sex. While there have been significant gains in mind-body medicine there remains a great deal of fear of touch, especially when used with traumatized and suicidal patients. The taboo on touch and the taboo of the body signify social dissociation from life in the body, which is evident in all strata of society.
Our sensibilities about touch are inextricably linked to our consciousness about the body as a source of knowledge and power.
Even as therapeutic massage and forms of manual medicine and healing become increasingly integrated into mainstream therapies and are covered for some by health insurance, the healing touch remains a stepchild method, adoptable mostly by the wealthy.
The full flowering of touch as a therapeutic modality in Western culture cannot occur until a clear delineation of when to touch and when not to touch is observed in all aspects of social, familial, and therapeutic interaction. This requires an effective dismantling of patriarchal structures that continue to protect perpetrators of assault and abuse. Nevertheless, this should not stop us from the task of integrating healthy therapeutic forms of touch for healing at all stages of life.
Touch Therapy Techniques
As a body-oriented psychotherapist, I blend techniques from the counseling and bodywork traditions; of massage therapy — deep tissue, abdominal, visceral, lymphatic, and polarity therapy. Like many clinicians, I work eclectically, attuning the method to the client’s needs.
Touch therapy practitioners include massage therapists, energy medicine practitioners, healers, curanderas, physical therapists, osteopaths, chiropractors, and naturopathic physicians who treat children and adults with PTSD and complex trauma using touch and manual therapies.
Veterans and their families, survivors of sexual and physical abuse and torture, and victims of disasters all benefit from somatic methods. People with diagnoses of dissociative identity disorder, borderline personality, prenatal and perinatal trauma, and those who are suicidal and self-harming can receive touch therapies at all stages of healing.
Some of the benefits of skillfully applied touch therapies are:
- Facilitate somatic empathy, a psychobiological attunement prerequisite for attachment and bonding.
- Desensitize and transduce state-dependent memory.
- Facilitate consciousness states associated with alpha, beta, theta, and delta brainwaves.
- Induce trance and simultaneously provide the grounding rod to gain control over dissociative processes.
- Reduce anxiety and deepen sleep.
- Stimulate circulatory, lymphatic, and immune responses.
- Activate neurohormonal responses, including the release of beta-endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin.
- Regulate cortisol levels and stimulate the endocannabinoid system.
- Change body image and improve body concept.
Learn more about Touch therapy for trauma recovery in my book Rhythms of Recovery
She served as a Fulbright scholar on traditional medicine, a Clinical Fellow at Harvard Medical School, and a National Institutes of Health-funded research scientist in mind/body medicine.
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