Healing Through Touch

Most of us know that touch can make you or break you. There is an old study conducted in World War II times where baby rhesus monkeys were given two monkey mamas: one that was mostly wire that would feed the monkeys and one that was made of a soft fabric. The scientists thought the monkeys would spend more time with the monkey mama made of wire because that monkey mama had the milk. What they found instead was that the baby monkeys spent all the time they possibly could with the soft monkey mama. Touch is so essential for our comfort and for our life there is actually something called touch deprivation, or skin hunger, which can effect us poorly. 

I want to dedicate this episode to my father because his birthday is on Monday. 

My father and I are estranged. 

It’s a long painful story, but let's just say that there are valid reasons for this. It makes sense that I would dedicate this episode to him because of the way I grew up. I know that as an infant I was held, because I've seen pictures of my mother holding me as a baby. She also nursed me. It's kind of hard to nurse a baby if you're not holding a baby, right? 

But that's really the only reason I know. 

I have but one memory of my mom holding me as a child. My mother is not a huggy person. She's not physically affectionate, and my father sort of came in and tried to fill that void. He was the one who was more physically affectionate even though he's really tall and is all elbows and knees. As you can imagine, a hug from him wasn't very cuddly. He would hug you occasionally but it was always awkward and felt like he was just doing it because he was the only one who would. 

My father had other ways of using touch to bond with us kids. He had this game we all played called Dog Pile where he would get on the floor, and then us kids would pile on top of him. Like a dog pile. Hold on really tight, arms around his waist or wrapped around his neck so that when he tried to throw us off by rolling back and forth violently, he would have his work cut out for him. Dog Pile wasn't a feel good game. It was basically hold on as tight as you can so you don't get thrown off violently and hope nobody rolls over on top of you. It was rough housing, but it was really the only kind of regular physical affection I got from my parents growing up. 

So to paint the kind of household I grew up in, you wouldn't try to hug my mother because she was like a porcupine. If you got too close, she was going to hurt you. Maybe not on purpose, but she had those quills. She was sort of prickly. She has a prickly personality, and if you were really upset and you were crying about something, she wouldn't give you a hug. She would say, “Angela, go to your room until you calm down.” 

To be clear, I don't think it's necessarily bad to send a child to their room if the room is actually a place where they decompress. If it's the child's favorite place where they have their favorite books and they have their favorite sheets and it's painted their favorite color. They've got their nice little tent and the music that they love in there, maybe stuffed animals. And it's made clear the room is not a punishment, but a place to calm down. In this case, I think it makes sense to send a child to their room. I have done this with my own kids, in fact.

But in my house growing up, that's not how it was. 

In my house, when you were sent to your room it was akin to being banished because “how dare you have these feelings that make me uncomfortable.” My mother was like, “I don't want to deal with your messy emotions. Go up to your room until you’ve pulled it together, and when you're willing to be happy, you can come down.” She didn't actually say those words, but it's what she meant. 

So my room was not a comforting place. It was Siberia.

I would just go to my room and cry and cry and get it all out, and then I would come down and pretend to be happy. My mother wouldn't give you a hug when you were upset or crying or distraught because it was so against her nature. She wouldn't really give you a hug when you were happy either because why give a hug if you're happy? What's the point, right? It was lose lose. 

I grew up in this house where I can honestly say the floors were clean: floors are swept, carpets vacuumed, shelves were dusted, and there were pictures hung on the walls. It was like a museum; you didn't want to break anything or you would get yelled at or sent to your room. Well, unless it was your sibling. It was was okay if I broke my brother by tickling him too hard. 

It was okay if two of my brothers picked up my sister by her ankles and dangled her in the middle of the living room floor and called her mean names, that was fine. 

We were allowed to rough-house. The siblings were allowed to break each other. Bully each other, go ahead, but don't break any of the stuff in the house. The stuff was important.  

This was the environment I grew up in. 

All of us children were touched deprived. 

Looking back, it's clear that all of us dealt with it in a different way. My older brother would take these long hot baths that he would actually fall asleep in because he never wanted to get out. My younger brother got his needs met in a different way. You know how I said my mother was like a porcupine? Well, he would wait until she had folded laundry and she was putting it in a laundry basket and she was walking across the floor before he would come up to her and put his arm around her and stop her while she was walking, giving her this big hug. I’ve gotta hand it to him. It was pretty strategic. She couldn't swat him away. She couldn't say or do much because she was in the middle of laundry. This way he was able to get the physical affection he needed of just getting closer to her. 

She did complain, but he did it anyway. Since she was in the middle of doing stuff, she couldn’t stop him. He was the only one who was able to get away with that, and to this day, I think he was the least touch touch deprived among us.

My younger sister hoarded stuffed animals as a child. She slept with them. She carried them around everywhere she went as a substitute for human touch, and then when she got to be a teenager and was forced to give up the stuffed animals by my parents, she went boy crazy. She had to in order to get her touch needs met and managed to fill those needs through dating. She craved affection. She knew she needed it and she went after it like her life depended on it. That was my sister. I was the opposite. 

When I was in high school, I didn't want to touch anyone, ever. I was touch averse, which is also not normal.

We had these dances that we would go to: church dances. The lights would be down and the music would be up. We would all stand around in these little crowds of mostly girls or mostly guys and we would dance in a circle. Then slow dances would come on and we would wait for someone to ask us to dance... or we would go ask someone.It was a bunch of teenagers being awkward, but I was more awkward than most with my hand-me-down clothes and my bad perm and my pimples and all that. I was so afraid of touching boys in any way it made matters worse. 

I wanted to dance. 

I didn't want to be a wallflower, but the way people danced back in the 90s, when I was this age, was that the boy would put his arms around the girl’s waist and the girl would put her arms around his neck. I couldn't do that. It was too scary and it felt too awkward.  

I didn't want to be close to a strange guy that I didn't know that well, either. 

So when I went to dance with someone they would start to put their hands around my waist and then I would rest my hands on their hips, which forced them to back up a step. It also looked really weird, but it was the only way I was comfortable dancing. If I put my hands around this guy's neck then that would push the front of my body up against the front of his body and that was just terrifying. I couldn't deal with it. 

There was this one day that I asked this boy to dance who was in my church. I didn't know him very well, but he was one of the cool kids: tall, blond, very sociable with lots of friends. I asked him to dance and he said yes, but after the music started, he refused to dance in this weird way where his hands were on my hips and my hands were resting on his hips. He found it mortifying. He was a cool kid and didn't want to dance with some awkward girl that couldn't even dance like everybody else. So he told me he wasn't going to dance with me unless I did it like everyone else, and he put his hands around my waist. 

He was like, “We're not dancing unless you put your hands around my neck.” 

So I put my hands around his neck and the front of our bodies touched. I took a step back because I felt trapped. I was pushed up against this person I didn't feel comfortable with, but he was like, “Oh no no. We’re dancing like this. You’re just gonna have to deal with it.” 

It was probably the most terrible dance I've ever had. He wouldn't let me put space between us. His front and my front were smashed up together during this whole song because he was too cool to dance in an awkward way with an awkward girl. 

I felt trapped. I still remember it. I'm sure to anyone watching, nothing looked off. But for me it was kind of traumatic because he wouldn't let me back away. He wouldn't let me put space between us at all. I was extremely touch averse. 

After I went into college, I was able to solve the issue of feeling trapped when I danced by taking ballroom dancing classes. When you ballroom dance they tell you where to put your hands and where to put your feet. There needs to be a certain amount of space between the dancers too. Otherwise you can't do turns and twists and other kinds of fun moves. Once I learned how to ballroom dance and how to swing and do all those other kinds of fun partner dances, I was never in a situation again where I had to put both of my arms around some guy's neck. It solved the dance problem, but it didn't change that when I was dating, I was scared of the guys I was going on dates with. 

I didn't want to touch them.

If they touched me, it just felt weird. Holding hands I could warm up to, but I didn't kiss anyone until after I graduated from college. Nor did I recognize how unusual that was or that this was a sign I was touch deprived. 

I liked boys and wanted to date, but had no clue how. People would say, “Why don't you just flirt a little with that guy? Touch him on the shoulder. Tell him how strong he is.” But that was a horrifying thought. Touching a man on the shoulder? I didn’t want to touch anybody! 

I dealt with my touch deprivation by becoming afraid of touch, and I married a man who was not affectionate. He didn't give me a pet name. We called each other by our first names, and while we did do a few things before we got married: we held hands, that kind of thing, a little kissing. We didn't kiss much.

I didn't know if we were physically compatible when we got married.

And we weren't.

We had a king sized bed. He would take at least five pillows and build a wall between us so that we didn't have to touch. That's the kind of man that I married. And yes, there was sex, but it was the only time we were ever physically close. 

Even then there wasn't affection.

It was not comfortable. There was nothing soothing about it. There was, in fact, nothing to commend it. No intimacy. Which, again, is not normal. It was a lot like having a one-night stand over and over and over again. Imagine doing that for 14 years. 

That was my marriage. 

I didn't know that I was touch deprived. I only knew that when the kids came along they would need to be hugged, and I remember putting forth an extra effort to hug my children and to hold my children, to be there for my children when they cried. On some level I knew that they would need what I hadn't received. I knew… but I didn't put two and two together that I personally was touched deprived. 

I didn't learn that until after I had gotten divorced and met my current boyfriend. He is very affectionate. He likes to touch and he likes to touch in a way where we're sitting on a couch and we're both typing on computers, writing. And our feet are touching. Or I'm cooking and he comes up behind me and puts his arms around my waist.

He has pet names for me, which is really sweet. 

He'll come up behind me and he'll hold me there for a while. There's nothing uncomfortable about it at this point, but when we first started dating it felt foreign. I didn't realize I was touch deprived until he started to move in closer, and I had to train myself not to run away. We dated for over three months before we kissed, which is not normal, but I was terrified. He knew that I was terrified, but he cared about me. We were friends first, so he didn't push and it was a gradual thing where we physically got closer. If he ever saw I was uncomfortable, he would back off. So he was the opposite of that kid in high school who forced me to get closer when I wasn’t ready. He was tuned into my feelings and he could see when I wasn't comfortable and would back off. 

I wanted to be close to him. 

So it was really just a matter of time and patience before we got there. 

What I’ve found is there is a certain kind of touch that is very healing. I didn't have it growing up and I didn't have it in my marriage either. This sounds sort of like a scientific explanation but I couldn't think of a better way to explain: it's this soft slow stroking that's maybe 3 - 5 inches a second. If you roll back your sleeve and touch your arm 3 - 5 inches a second and you do it very gently, that's the kind of touching I was missing. It’s very affectionate. It's very soft. It says “I care about you. I want you to be happy. I want you to be relaxed.” And it releases these happy chemicals because you feel safe when someone is touching you this way.

When someone is touching you softly and is stroking you this way, it helps you bond and form a secure attachment. I didn't have that until after I’d been married and started dating my current boyfriend. I didn't know I was missing it. I have a stronger bond with my boyfriend, Nick, than I had with my parents. 

I know Nick loves me and that when we leave each others presence, he's going to come back. I don't need to worry about losing his affection. I don't need to worry about him getting angry at me and throwing a tantrum and treating me like the enemy. I don't need to worry about him trying to make me feel guilty for existing. These were all things that happened in my marriage and that happened with my parents. For the first time in my most intimate relationship, I am good enough as I am. 

Nick touches me in an affectionate way and I feel safe. I know he’s never going to do anything to hurt me and even though it's kind of messed up to compare him to my father I will say this: You want to feel securely attached to your parents and I never did. 

I was always afraid of them on some level. 

Even my father, who I was able to talk to for many years until I realized that I couldn't talk to him because everything I told him in confidence would just go straight back to my mother... 

Even my father.

I was never sure when he was going to turn on me and get threatening, or use guilt trips to make me feel like crap. Or when his love was just going to be yanked out from under me at any moment. If I made mistakes, he wasn't going to love me anymore. 

He would never say he didn’t love me, of course. He always said the words, but his actions would say otherwise. Actions are louder than words and they mean a hell of a lot more. So with my parents I wasn't allowed to form a secure attachment to them. But with my boyfriend I do have a secure attachment and I have to give him credit. 

He didn't push me. 

He has always been gentle with me. He has always been careful, and now, when I'm together with him, I want to be affectionate. I want his arms around me. I want to have my arms around him. I want to snuggle, to sit next to him and put my legs over his. I want to touch his feet when I fall asleep beside him. Yes, there’s sex. But sex isn't the only place where I can get my touch needs met, and that has made all the difference.

Healing Through Reflection

Today's topic is healing through reflection. 

This can be a bit of a slippery slope because anytime you reflect on something in your history, particularly something painful that has caused trauma, such as group bullying or being scapegoated or mobbed out of a job, there's the danger of excess rumination. 

What's wrong with rumination you ask? 

A certain amount of it is normal, so nothing really at the beginning. 

I think when you first get out of a bad situation if you're not ruminating you're probably a robot, because we all ruminate to an extent. But the danger in continuing to think about things that aren't pleasant is that it does affect you after awhile. It makes you less productive, less able to focus, more depressed, and a lot of us find that we're falling into that trap while trying to recover from a really bad situation. I'm going to share with you something that really helped me get over that hurdle.

Your brain is kind of like water. 

Water in and of itself can’t absorb everything. You can put things in water, but they have to be really small in order to be absorbed. Sugar can be absorbed in water and salt can be absorbed. You're going to have a hard time absorbing things like carrots or celery, or potatoes or mushrooms, or broccoli. Your brain, after you've been through a really traumatic event is inundated with salt. The salt is all those really terrible memories that you can't stop thinking about in a loop over and over again: insulting things that people said to you, the way you were treated, the way you were made to feel inferior. This is all salt, and the more you think about it, the more those thoughts cycle and accelerate until you have so much salt in the water of your brain it's the equivalent of taking a cup from the ocean. 

I wouldn't drink it because then it will dehydrate you, taste awful, and doesn't really provide you with any nutrients. So how do we heal when our brain is so saturated with salt?

It is toxic to us. It's unhealthy, and we can't not think about this. 

If you're one of those people who tells someone who has just gotten out of an abusive relationship that they need to just put it behind them and get over it, I want to slap you. That's not how it works. You cannot snap your fingers and just stop thinking about it. If you're one of those people who's like, “Oh yeah, your life is hard. Start making gratitude lists. You just need to be grateful.”  I want to slap you for the same reason. It's not how minds work, or how we work as human beings. You can't just move on and pretend nothing happened when you've been through trauma. Your body holds onto it. Your body remembers, and let's say that you do succeed at not ever thinking about it or remembering it during the day: You better believe that when you are asleep, you will have nightmares. You will have nightmares and you will remember. 

Let’s talk about those nightmares for a moment, because I think those are important if you're one of those people actually having nightmares because the trauma was so severe. First of all, you should definitely make sure you have a competent therapist. There is one thing that sometimes helps, and that is waking up right after you have a nightmare, writing it out, and then changing the ending. Write it out. Change the ending. 

Write it out. 

Change the ending.

Keep doing that every time it happens for at least a month. This works for some people, not everyone, but for a lot of people this really helps their brain retrain. Because at some point those nightmares are going to start ending the way you’ve written them. 

This made a gradual easing out of those kinds of traumatic nightmares for me. I have religious trauma. I went to my therapist and told him about this recurring nightmare I sometimes had where bad things would happen to my children because I wasn't Mormon anymore and there was nothing there to protect them, there was no God or religion because I was a terrible parent. It was a recurring theme. 

So for me, I would go into my therapist and tell him these nightmares and he would have me change the ending. I didn't write them down, I just changed them verbally in front of him. I got in the habit of doing that, and even though I still sometimes have those recurring nightmares, it's not as often now. If you cannot write the nightmares down, it may help to verbally change it or alter it while talking to someone. This can relieve that particular problem for some people, not for everyone, but that was a tangent so moving on...

Your brain is like water. The molecules have little pockets in them and they can take in small particles but they can't take in large particles. The really bad memories naturally fall into those small pockets of the water molecules because dwelling on them is like adding salt. It just naturally is integrated into our brain and this effects us after a while. So what's the solution for that? Doing gratitude lists, as mentioned before, and thinking about all the happy things in our lives is sort of the equivalent of taking potatoes or carrots and cutting them up and putting them in the water. The nutrients from those vegetables are not going to end up in the water in your brain because they are too big. They don't have the same power as those terrible salty traumatic memories. So what's the solution?

The solution is finding a way to expand the pockets in the water molecules so that they will take in a little bit more of what's good and not just salt. When you boil water and it heats up, the water is able to take in more of the nutrients from vegetables like sweet potatoes and broccoli. Turning salt water to vegetable broth is what we want. Reflection is the equivalent of heat, or the amount of time we spend dwelling on good memories. Instead of trying to not think about the terrible time that you just went through, go ahead and go back. 

Go to that terrible time, and then you're going to do something which I think a lot of therapists call re-framing.

Back when I was being mobbed out of my job there were a lot of people who were against me, who tried to make me feel like I was incompetent, a corner cutter, and a terrible worker. It was hard not to believe those things. However, the one thing I had to my advantage was I had this really wonderful and empathetic boyfriend, Nick, who wanted me to be happy and who believed in me. 

Whenever I go back to that time now I think about specific memories I have of Nick. I have this one memory of lying down, looking up at the ceiling as he runs his fingers from the base of my neck down to the top of my cleavage and then back up really lightly, like butterfly wings. When I dwell on this, I remember how relaxing that was, how comforting the stroking motion was; and I will close my eyes. I will breathe slowly. I will remember his fingers. I will remember the emotion that I felt, the peace, and the fact that I was relaxed. 

I dwell on the memory. 

I hold it in my mind until it becomes more than an intellectual exercise but also an exercise in feeling, in grounding myself in the physical sensations of that moment. 

The longer I can do that, the more effective it is.

Here's another moment I have a memory of from that dark time. I was sitting in Nick’s apartment on his bed. It's getting dark and the lights aren't on, so it's sort of getting dark around us and I feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder. It's very warm, a little bit heavier, and then I feel my hair being swept to the side and his breath on my neck. He is nuzzling my neck. I can feel the warmth of that sensation and how my breathing sort of hitches and then relaxes, and I can feel how my stress level goes down. The longer I can remain in that memory, and not just the intellectual exercise, but the moment of relaxation, the more effective it is. 

Another memory I go to is where he knows everything that is going on, but he doesn't think any less of me. He doesn't believe what people are saying about me. He only believes me, and he knows I'm in dire straits. So he’s sitting next to me on the couch in my house, and I have the computer open.  I'm looking at job openings and applying. He's coaching me, actively coaching me, “You can do this. You're smart. You're going to apply for this job and that job. You apply for every job.”  And this is more than an intellectual exercise, because I'm remembering that he’s keeping his voice happy and optimistic, infusing it with confidence, because I don't have any at this point. He is telling me that I'm fantastic, that I’m qualified, that I can do this to the point that I'm able to take some of that confidence in myself. I have it in my head and I'm remembering how his confidence effected me personally, how it infused into me like I was a sponge.

Another moment, memory number four, is in the Silver Diner where I met him one weekend. I remember the big note cards that were bright colors like purple and yellow and blue and green that he'd written possible interview questions on, and how I sat across from him in the Silver Diner with my pen scratching against those note cards. I came up with answers. I wrote them all out, and he read what I had written and helped me make my answers stronger, pointing out what I could add to my answers to make me a better interviewer. 

He was there with me. 

I remember the sound of the footsteps of the waiters and waitresses as they walked past,  the smells coming out of the kitchen of chocolate cake with chocolate drizzle, the smell of the eggs, the draft that came in when people opened the door and the bell ranging. I remember the way Nick looked at me, how intently he looked at me, and how much faith he had in me. It was then I began to feel that faith in myself. 

When we were done eating, I still wasn't done preparing. I have this memory where he held my hand and we walked to his car. I sat in the front seat, him in the driver's seat and me in the passenger seat, the sun coming through the windshield. His hand was on my knee, very comforting; and I practiced answering just one or two questions over and over and over again, messing up, getting words wrong, getting answers wrong. “Okay, sweetie,” he told me. “This is normal. Keep going.” His faith in me coming out through the firmness and the gentleness and the warmth of his voice, the warmth in his hand placed on my knee solidly. The warm sun came through the windshield and hit my face, and the way his eyes, with his long lashes (big brown eyes) looked down on me. There was so much confidence and faith and belief, like we were in this together. It was unlike all of the fear I had inside.

I didn't learn until after I had found my new job and everything ended up okay how terrified and  scared for me he was, but he hid it. He hid it really well, because he knew that's what I needed. He recognized that I was the one in the hard position, so his own fear for me was less important than him being my rock in that moment. 

When I go back to that time now, the time when I was being mobbed, there’s a certain amount of remembering the terrible things that were said and done. That's going to be in there, and I don't try and stop those thoughts, but I try to spend just as much time on the good memories. At the beginning that was hard, but it gets easier. Picking a memory of the person who was there for me during that time provides comfort and security. I pick a memory and then try to live in that memory for as long as I can.

When I first started doing this, I couldn't do it for more than 2 minutes. It's really difficult, but the more you practice the better you get at it. So I would practice each day living a little bit more in those memories that were happy memories and supportive memories that came in the midst of a very terrible time. 

This is where the heat added to the water comes in. 

When you first put heat under a pot of water, the molecules are not moving very much because it's just a little bit of heat; and that's really the same as when you start this exercise.

As you start dwelling on good memories in the midst of your terrible traumatic time it's like adding just a little bit of heat. Your brain can't take very much in besides salt. It's only 2 minutes at a time that you can do it, but as you keep practicing, progressively adding more time and heat to the water, the molecules begin to move faster and they begin to take in more nutrients from the good things: potatoes and carrots broccoli. Two minutes of remembering may turn into 4, and then 4 minutes eventually will turn into 8.

I really believe you're changing your brain by dwelling on those beautiful moments in the midst of trauma, because your mind increases its capacity to take in the nutrients from the supportive wonderful memories the more you focus on them. I don't know what the scientific explanation is for that but I swear it works. I swear it works, because now when I look back on that time, I feel a lot of gratitude. 

Yes, the pain is still there. 

I can't get rid of that. It will always be there, but I feel just as much gratitude. 

I started immersing myself more in music during that time because it was mostly when I was playing my viola or violin that I felt happy and confident and like I was good at something. So I  also focus on memories of that. 

I would encourage you, if you are trying to recover from any sort of terrible experience that was abusive and that lasted a long time, not to block off that time from your mind. That's not going to heal you at all. Don't block it off and pretend it didn't happen. Don't just focus on the good things afterwards, because the trauma is going to come back. It always comes back. 

I would urge you, when you reflect on it: Go back, find the person who was there for you.

Find the hobby that made you feel like you were strong. 

Find the tender moment with your child. 

Find the time when you were jogging and felt capable. 

Find the memories that allowed you to get through that tough experience, and then recognize that there are resources for you.