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.
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