TOUCH: THE GIFT OF TOUCH

The Gift of Touch: How Physical Contact Improves Communication, Pleasure and Health, Helen Colton, 1983!!!  An excellent and very important book!  Edwin’s summary:   Touch is the most important, and yet the most neglected of our senses. We can survive without sight; blind people do. We can survive without hearing; deaf people do; ...But we cannot survive with any degree of comfort and mental health when we are not able to feel, to touch. Every-one of us is born with intense skin hunger. Touch is the most social of our senses. We can do everything by ourselves, see, hear, smell, taste, but not touching which requires another human being, most of the time. In a higher sense, touch gives us all kin-ship. There is something Godlike about the power every one of us possesses in our hands and fingers to bring pleasure and give meaning to another human being. Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself”, “I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from.”Regardless of our age, we all have the desire at some time to feel babied or nurtured by another, taken into his or her arms. For these few moments, we can stop being our own doers and providers. We enjoy a respite from the intense pressures of living. We enter into a higher level of consciousness- are lifted above the ordinary plane of living.                                                                                                                                                                          Language tells us how important touch is: 1, It was a touching experience. 2. Your words have touched me deeply. 3. “There is a touch of spring in the air”, the poet said. 4. She is lovely, she is a soft touch.5. “Don’t be so touchy”, he said to his wife. 6. Recipes tell us: “A touch of Oregon or basil.” 7. “I will touch it up with paint”, he said to his friend. 8. “I am suffering from a touch of rheumatism.” A ship touches port when it makes a brief stop. Do you agree?: One of the most recurring sentences in the USA, or perhaps anywhere on this planet, is: “Let us keep in touch”, when we leave a friend, etc. How much less alienated we would be, if, instead of just mouthing this phrase, we did actually touch. I exactly did this with a woman I met at a workshop. We touched thumb to thumb, a declaration that we were kindred souls in this human race together. We enjoyed our touch signal and, as we parted, we both started laughing joyfully. Life felt good. 

Edwin: When I was interacting with my students, age 16 to 60, depending on the country and the emotional maturity of my students, I often used to say during class: “Petra, I can see that you are tired”, please take the hand of a boy and get his energy.” Speaking of the healing power of the human touch, Spencer M. Free says:

“It is the human touch in this world that counts. The touch of your hand and mine, which means far more to the fainting heart than shelter and bread and wine;

And bread lasts only a day, but the touch of the hand and the sound of the voice, sing on in the soul away.”

Every one of us is born with intense skin hunger. When the human potential movement started in the USA on the West Coast in the 1960s, the famous Esalen Institute, for example, encouraged touching and hugging, but the rest of the USA ridiculed California’s “touchy – feelies.” And yet we can learn from them a lot, even now!

Isn’t it interesting? There are hundreds of books on family life in the USA, and many of them are used in schools, and they do not have a single mention of touch. Many books on communication skills never mention the word “touch”. What does this say about our society, the Western world? And Asians and Oriental people, do they touch? No, they don’t really.

I, Edwin, have looked up the word “touch” in an English and German Etymological Dictionary: Touch: Old French, to strike, VL(Vulgar Latin) toccare, to knock, rap; to produce a sound, Old Provence, tocar, to ring the bell; Spanish, tocar,t o touch, handle, to knock, srike, to ring bells. German: beruehren, ruhren: Indogermanic root: ker, to move, sensitive, strong, courageous, touch, emotional, touchy, compassionate.

Can you imagine that the word “touch” does not appear ( 1983!!) in the indexes of several

sex encyclopaedias. And Helen Colton justifiably asks:” How can we teach young people the basic requirements of good family life and marital relationships when we ignore our most vital sense?

Bill Johns, an American therapist, dealing with teenage-runaways, believes that “ninety per cent of the girls who run away are partly motivated by guilt and shame over their longing to be touched and held by their fathers.

There are 1.300 nerve endings per square inch in our fingertips. Isn’t this incredible?

Our palms and fingertips are extremely sensitive, then come the lips and our tongue.

About a third of our five million receptors are in our hands, then follow the lips and tongue.

When I counsel couples I ask if they feel loved by each other. I am not surprised when a wife says:” No, I don’t really feel loved by my husband.” Frequently her husband is astonished and exclaims: “ But I often tell you that I love you.” Yes, but his wife does not feel his words, because he has no touched her!!!!

Massage means touching, doesn’t it? Our desire for touch is also a reaction to the brutalized, harsh, depersonalized conditions of modern life that make so many of us angry, depressed or even the opposite- violent.

Please read: Leboyer, Birth Without Violence- there you will find a lot about touching.

Marilyn Monroe: Helen Colton was a free-lance reporter for The New York Times, and “I was interviewing Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn sat at her dressing table, toying with a powder puff in her hand.      I asked: ”Did you ever feel loved by any of the foster families with whom you lived?” “Once”, she replied, when I was about seven or eight. The woman I was living with was putting on makeup, and I was watching her. She was in a happy mood, so she reached over and patted my cheeks with her rouge puff. For that moment I felt loved by her.” Re-enacting the experience, Marilyn dabbed the powder puff on her cheeks. The memory brought tears to her eyes and she was silent, thinking back to that rare moment of childhood joy. It brought tears of compassion to my eyes to see the famed sex goddess weep as she recalled how meaningful that playful touch, so casually bestowed, had been to a little girl starved for love and affection.”

An American couple who had lived in France for two years was asked upon returning:” What was the single greatest difference you experienced in French life?” They answered: “The physical affection French families give each other.” Puritan heritage is still very powerful in the USA, because we were taught to equate touching with sexuality... Happy families can affect the world.  Laodzu, the “father” of Daoism, 2500 years ago, wrote:

 “If there is right in the soul, there will be beauty in the person; if there is beauty in

the person, there will be harmony in the home; if there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation; if there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.”