Reach out and touch somebody…

To love is to battle, to open doors. The world changes if two can look at each other and see. - Octavio Paz

There is a deep-seated hunger within us that no amount of food can satisfy. It is a hunger for the touch, the feel, the concrete reality of human contact. (Skin-Hunger) Experiments suggest that all warm-blooded animals have an innate need to be touched and that among the effects of sensory deprivation are loss of appetite, slower than normal growth, a decline in intelligence and abnormal behaviour patterns.

Every human being comes into the world needing to be touched, a need that persists until death. Being touched in tender caring ways can be healing and therapeutic.

For many, there is confusion between a caring and a comforting touch and one designed to produce sexual arousal. In many homes children are fortunate to have their skin-hunger satisfied; in many others touching, sadly, takes only the form of a spanking. (It is a school of thought that some children deliberately misbehave just to establish even this painful skin contact)

Some of the best ‘skin hunger’ therapies are the simplest:

HUGGING – a real hug is a full body hug that collapses the A-frame hug and chest-bump hug. The people coming together take time to really look at each other. Practice it with your partner and children. When family members come to know a genuine hug, they will never settle for less.

BACK RUBS – backs can be scratched and kneaded with fingers, or rubbed with the heel, the flat, or even the knuckles of the hand. The point is to press away and erase tension and tiredness as well as nourish the skin hunger in all of us.

BACK-OF-THE-NECK-CARING – its purpose to release tension through smoothing and rubbing. Just imagine what strokes and movements you would employ to take it away. The techniques are quickly and naturally learned.

ARM RUB – this involves the gentle pressing of the arm from the wrist up to the shoulder. Sometimes the arm is massaged vigorously; sometimes the touch is reduced to the lightness of a tickle.
Notice how starved the unattended arm feels. The contrast between the two in feeling is so dramatic that it rams home the point of how untouched people must feel most of the time – dead, uncared for, bland.

Set aside time to practice these exercises – one formal session of 20 to 30 minutes a week is adequate.

But there is no need to stick to rigid formula. There are other times when skin touching is important – after a long trip, for example, when tension and fatigue need to be eased away by caring hands. And when someone is hurt, either physically or emotionally, the touch attention is vastly supportive and comforting.

Touching delivers human affirmation in a direct and caring way; it establishes in the young the building material for better communication in all human relationships; it makes people secure enough to know how to ask for what they need and generous enough to give others what they need in return; it makes better children, more loving and successful ‘parents’, care-givers and partners.

Touching and being touched make better people ~ SB