Touch as Trauma, Touch as Healing

As a class, we explored the concept of positive healing touch quite a bit, how hugs and kisses can make people feel better and bring comfort, with it even being considered essential to proper development. While we did discuss how some people do not like to be touched all that much, or see physical touch as something that needs to be built up to when creating relationships with people, one thing I think we could’ve explored more is the idea of touch-related trauma. Often people who have been assaulted in some way, such as having been attacked or sexually violated, will find themselves having very complex relationships to physical touch and their own body existing as a physical thing. When you are assaulted, very often you will experience a sensation of dirtiness, a need to sit in the shower, and scrub in an attempt to rid your body of whatever trauma had occurred. Often after this very often an overall disconnect to the body will occur, with the victim losing the relationship they previously had with their body in some way and either will attempt to regain the control and agency they had, or succumb to a lot of the negative thoughts that fill one's mind after an assault. People gain uncomfortable relationships with touch after a traumatic incident, often with unwanted touch becoming a trigger, and with a lot previously fine forms of touch becoming unwanted. People find themselves uncomfortable in their body and uncomfortable with others perceiving their corporeal form, especially in sexual situations. It can take years of active working and healing in order to regain a sense of being grounded in one's body and a comfortable feeling in control of it. I think a lot of people ignore the struggles that can come with touch, proffering to look at it as solely a positive experience, and that perspective can undermine a lot of the different experiences people have where they feel disconnected to their body and thus uncomfortable when people try to engage with it.





This disconnect is definitely not just limited to those who have experienced some sort of physical violation or violence directed at personally, it is really common among minority groups. In any minority group, your body is not fully your own. You are seen as whatever caricature society has for your identity, be it laborer, criminal, sex object, etc. When people interact with you and function with the expectation that you are nothing more than a harmful stereotype, you begin to view yourself in that way. In sociology, we have the concept of the looking glass self, that your understanding of who you are and what you are capable of is based on how others interact with you and respond to your existence. If you are hated, put down, and insulted you begin to believe it, you begin to internalize it, and you begin to hate yourself for who you are. This self hatred can lead to a very painful disconnect between one’s mind and their body, they may begin to behave differently in order to accommodate their view of themselves and this new character they are expected to embody. They can lose their connection with intimacy and touch because they are used to altering who they are and forget how to put their guard down and be genuine because you grow up believing that who you truly are is not worthy of love, but instead worthy of hatred and stigma. Intimacy requires vulnerability, but for many minorities, vulnerability means not surviving in a society that deems you disposable. For people of color, this can manifest due to a value of strength within one’s culture. POC are expected to be durable and resilient, study after study has shown that women of color are likely to be ignored when in pain because people expected them to be over dramatic or to have higher pain tolerance since they are seen as less fragile and worthy of care versus the treatment of white women. We cannot even turn to our community for support a lot of the time, because our own community is so used to mistreatment that it is a value to be strong and survive and push on no matter what, even when the pain caused by the world is crippling. Needing to be strong, people turn away from their pain, but as discussed Sacred Pain, to turn off our feelings of pain is to numb ourselves to our realities and our bodies' own needs. We cannot experience full intimacy without acknowledging our pain. How are we to touch one another, hold each other close, when the need to be held is seen as a weakness? Queer people also find themselves in a similar boat with intimacy and touch because the stigma they receive is both alienating and targeted directly at either who they want to be intimate with, or with how they perceive their own bodies. Gay people often have a hard time shaking off the years of internalized homophobia and active slander of their love and the physical urges and desires they have. When given the opportunities to be intimate gay people often have a hard time feeling comfortable with being touched because they have been led to believe that their identity and thus their entire existence is not worthy of love and that whatever love it does receive is unholy. This is incredibly damaging and results in gay people not articulating or acting on their feelings, and that kind of unwilling restraint can be traumatic. For trans people, they also face the societal stigma of their identity, but it comes also often with dysphoria, which is an active disconnection to and discomfort with one’s body because it is not representative of the identity they have in their hearts. They can have issues with intimacy and touch for a multitude of reasons, including feeling uncomfortable with engaging in vulnerable and intimate moments because they can cause the person to be hyper aware of their body and whatever discomfort they may have, they may have partners interrupt intimate moments to comment on their identity and presentation, and often just feel unlovable or fetishized and thus avoid intimate moments to not have to deal with that stress.





The good thing about all these unfortunate relationships with touch and intimacy is that often, with care and therapy, people can recreate their relationship with touch and reach a point where they find themselves able to be truly open and vulnerable with others, without fear of stigma or harm. Often, to be touched after you’ve been afraid for so long is magical. To experience enough trust towards other people that you allow them to put their hands on your entire existence, even if it is just a little hug, can be revolutionary after pulling away and staying low and safe for so long.