the magic of touchwork
Touch is as vital to our existence as food. It’s the first sense we develop, our first and most primal communication, and the only sense we can’t survive without.
As we heal from developmental trauma or complex trauma (especially when it’s preverbal), sometimes words aren’t enough. Co-regulating touch helps our bodies receive safety in relationship on a deeper level.
Through presence and attunement, touchwork also helps the receiver and me understand the ways both physical and emotional pain are held and released in your physiology. We can reach beyond words to work with trapped and disrupted energy in the body and support the return to safety and connection.
Receiving touchwork has given me a greater depth of insight, resolution, relief and empowerment than I ever thought possible.
On the first day of my first touchwork training, we sat face to face with different students and took turns holding each other’s wrists for a few minutes at a time with presence and intention.
The first person I sat across from was an elder white woman with cropped silver hair, who immediately softened me with her eyes before we began. As she took my hand, I was in awe of the way someone just holding my wrist with loving attention impacted me. It was like the empty feeling from old intergenerational attachment wounds I assumed I’d always have to manage were being knitted together again in my heart.
After the exercise was over, we reconvened as a group to debrief. I raised my hand to speak and was given the microphone. As I began to casually (or so I thought) share my insight, I began to weep, and it was hard to finish my sentences. My emotion caught me off guard but it felt congruent with the impact I had experienced.
An equally powerful part of that day, though, was during our break after the exercise. At least 20 people came up to me and said different versions of, “Me too. I know that feeling too. Thank you so much for sharing.”
Our self protective responses can feel so isolating, even if our brain knows better. Trauma disconnects us from our felt sense of unity and ever-present life force, or in Asian Medicine and Acupuncture (AAM), our qi. It wasn’t until that day that my mind and my body truly knew I wasn’t alone.
In the Tao of Trauma: A practitioner’s guide for integrating the five element theory and trauma treatment, Alaine Duncan explains that in energy medicine (like AAM, which incorporates touchwork), “the essential and balanced rhythm inside our zone of resiliency is always available to us, even when the overlying, overwhelming, and powerful dysregulation in our autonomic nervous system makes it difficult to access without help from a compassionate present, engaged, and mindful human being. It is a profound experience when we touch the sacred place inside each of us that can be neither broken nor destroyed and is the essence of our true nature.”
“Nothing one human being does to another can impact the fundamental, coherent, and dynamic tension between parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, yin and yang, that is found in nature. The rising and setting of the sun, the waxing and waning of the moon, and the movement from winter to summer and back to winter are unbreakable.”
I’m honored and thrilled integrate touchwork and AAM theory in my work and to keep deepening my understanding as student, client and therapist. My hope is to continue decolonizing my therapy approaches and our collective mindbodyspirit through this evolving practice.
Yours truly,
Katie