
Touch has been taboo in therapy for a long time. But when it comes to addressing the experiences of connection and support that many of us are missing, nurturing touch is just what we need. Think about it:
Do you get enough touch? What happens when you get enough touch? When you don’t get enough touch?
When you are touched, is it just how you like it? Or does it leave you longing for more or a different quality of touch?
Do you ever consciously touch your own body?
Touch can help us feel our aliveness and establish a stronger sense of Self. Touch can help us feel closer and more connected to others.
NeuroAffective Touch is a therapy modality that uses touch to help you build an in-the-body connection to the physical sensations of trust and comfort. It bridges the gap between psychotherapy and bodywork. Through direct communication and support to the body,
NeuroAffective Touch reconnects us to our wholeness and ability to feel safe and present in our bodies.
In this blog, I’ll dive into some uses of touch and reasons for using touch in a psychotherapy session.
Uses of Touch
Containment / Care / Comfort:
While traditional bodywork focuses on physical repair, NeuroAffective Touch focuses more on helping you build capacity to contain what’s happening in your body - emotions, sensations, impulses, thoughts, and more.
When we are overwhelmed with stress, it is a common desire to get rid of the stress - and certainly, we are only made to handle so much stress. However, for bodies that have undergone a lot of stress and trauma, the body's capacity to cope with stress shrinks. This is a protective mechanism intended to communicate the potential of danger and subsequent defensive reactions more quickly, but it can be challenging when such reactions are used all the time, even in situations where they are not needed.
Receiving touch can be extremely stabilizing. It is soothing to receive supportive touch, and it can also help us sense into the edges of our body; really truly feeling the body’s boundary can help the brain to discern what’s actually happening in the present moment instead of the energy getting muddled and taking over, so to speak.
Listening / Supporting Self-Awareness:
For those with trauma, it is common to disconnect from the body as a protective mechanism so as to not get overwhelmed. Using touch, we can track what’s happening throughout your body. We can notice what you feel, sense, and perceive.
You can even try for yourself right now. Perhaps bringing a hand to your face, your arm, or your foot. Noticing what it’s like for your hand to touch, and what it’s like for the part of your body being touched. Do you sense temperature? Pressure? Does it feel pleasant or unpleasant? Do you want more or less of it?
Stimulating / Amplifying OR Inhibiting:
Similarly, touch might be used to stimulate or inhibit sensation in the body.
If there are areas that are particularly numb, we can experiment with adding pressure, or movement. In NeuroAffective Touch, we also use warm pillows to stimulate comfort. The goal is not to stimulate anything that feels unsafe. Though there may be times when you are ready to experiment with uncomfortable sensations, we can always start with stimulating something that feels comforting or pleasant.
On the other hand, if there are areas that experience overwhelm with sensation, we can experiment with how holding that area or applying heat, for instance, might reduce some of the sensation.
Directing / Experimenting:
There may be times when it’s appropriate to experiment with facilitating movement. Your body may hint at movements it wants to make. We can explore how certain movements feel and what it’s like to follow your impulses.
We can also use movement (even subtle movement like pulsing) as an anchor or something to reorient to when you feel overwhelmed or uncomfortable.
Connecting / Resonance:
As your therapist, touch can help me get in touch with what’s happening in your body on a deeper level. I am trained to track breathing rhythms, heart pulse, organ vibrations, and the flow of fluid in your body.
Connecting in this way also allows me to share a bit of my own physiological experience with you. As a somatic therapist, my most powerful tool is my own present and regulated nervous system. Through touch, my body can communicate safety to your body.
Is This For Real? The Neural Basis of Touch
“Skin, nervous system, and brain are so closely related that one could describe the skin as the outer surface of the brain and the brain as teh deepest layer of the skin” - Deane Juhan

Infant Development
The skin is the largest organ of the body and has over 300 million sensory receptors. We are always touching something. Touch is the first of our five senses to become functional, coming online six weeks after conception.
In utero, we are constantly in the experience of being touched. We are cozy, firmly embraced by the uterus. The in-utero experience is optimized to be a safe and restful place for babies. As our parent moves and breathes, we are constantly being rocked into sleep or rest.
After only knowing the soft, warm, white noise of the womb, birth is a rude awakening!
You may be familiar with the concept of the fourth trimester, a theory developed by Dr. Harvey Karp, where it is believed that babies are born about 12 weeks too early, likely to accommodate the limits of the birth canal, and that they can benefit from an additional 12 weeks in the womb for brain development.
This model suggests that doing things like swaddling and swinging (and some other S’s) can minic the in-utero experience which will help the baby’s development and keep them comfortable as they transition to living outside of the womb.
We can live without most of our senses (sight, smell, hearing), but we will die without our skin and touch.
One study by Harry Harlow gave baby monkeys access to two surrogate non-living mothers - one being a soft terrycloth warmed by a lightbulb that provided no food, and the other being a wire mother with a bottle attached to it. The researchers found that the baby monkeys preferred the warm terrycloth “mother” and were frightened by the wire “mother.”
Additionally, the babies that fed from the wire “mother” actually were unable to digest the milk and developed patterns of clasping to their own bodies, seeking tactical input. These baby monkeys experienced reproductive difficulties as they matured and also didn’t develop typical grooming patterns.
Research on touch-deprived babies from Romanian orphanages in the 80s and 90 found hat these children had significant delays in cognitive function, motor development, and language, deficits in social-emotional behaviors, and higher prevalence of psychiatric disorders. Fortunately, they also found that the children who were placed into foster care showed improvements in many of these categories; while they still lagged behind children who had never been institutionalized, they did fare better than those who continued to live without touch and support.
Survival
The skin is the body’s first and primary surveillance system. It provides immunological protection and it is constantly sensing light, chemicals, moisture, and more, making decisions about what to accept as nourishment and what to seal out.
The skin also psychologically contributes to the line between what is me and not me. It is a boundary that helps us sense into who we are and how we operate in relation to others.
Beyond Skin
But it is not just our skin that experiences touch. Sensory signals are also processed in our joints, muscles, tendons, and organs, which feel for temperature, pain, hunger, thirst, movement, our position in space, and more.
Feelings
Exhart Tolle says that emotion is where our mind and body meet. We know we are feeling a certain emotion based on our internal experience. Many times when we are asked to identify an emotion we locate the experience in our internal body - a heavy heart, a lump in our throat, butterflies in the stomach, and so on.
Proprioception
Proprioception is the sense of our posture and movements of our body in space. Proprioception is also how we sense effort, force, and weight, including our relationship with gravity. It helps us to plan and guide movements as we interact with our environment.
Beyond using our sense of sight, for example, proprioception enables us to find our nose with our index finger even if our eyes are closed, or to know whether our feet are on soft grass or hard cement, or to balance on one leg.
Struggling with proprioception can look like balance issues, clumsiness, dizziness, and issues with spatial awareness
Relationships

Being touched is not just nice; it’s a developmental and socio-emotional need.
The sensations that come from being touched and supported contribute to the physiological and emotional learnings that underlie our experience in other relationships. When babies get enough of this need met, the experience “integrates;” it becomes a living memory, a felt sense that we have access to as we move about the world.
Throughout our lives, affective touch (gentle, pleasant, or meaningful touch) facilitates social bonding and releases oxytocin, the hormone linked to social connection.
Which leads me back to some of the questions I asked at the beginning of this blog:
Do you get enough touch? What happens when you get enough touch? When you don’t get enough touch?
When you are touched, is it just how you like it? Or does it leave you longing for more or a different quality of touch?
Do you ever consciously touch your own body?
NeuroAffective Touch and Somatic Psychotherapy
Studies show that touch can be healing for individuals with trauma, chronic pain, and more. NeuroAffective Touch can help you:
experience that you actually exist!
develop the ability to regulate and soothe yourself enjoy being in your body
learn to trust relationships
identify and communicate your needs
reduce chronic self-judgment, shame, and guilt
cope with and reduce chronic tension and pain
Experimenting with touch in psychotherapy might be unfamiliar, it might even feel uncomfortable to think about. Working with me, there is never any expectation that we use touch in your sessions. Even just talking about or thinking about touch can be fruitful.
If you’re interested in exploring touch, your relationship with touch, or your comfort receiving touch and care in your relationships, somatic therapy and NeuroAffective Touch can help. I offer free 20-minute consultations. We can talk about your concerns and goals. From there, we can schedule your first few sessions and you can see how you like the approach.
Resources Used
Harlow, H. F. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist, 13(12), 673–685
Harlow, H. F., & Zimmermann, R. R. (1958). The development of affectional responses in infant monkeys. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102, 501–509
Meijer LL, Ruis C, van der Smagt MJ, Scherder EJA, Dijkerman HC. Neural basis of affective touch and pain: A novel model suggests possible targets for pain amelioration. J
Neuropsychol. 2022 Mar;16(1):38-53. doi: 10.1111/jnp.12250. Epub 2021 May 12. PMID: 33979481; PMCID: PMC9290016.
Nelson, C. A., Fox, N. A., and Zeanah, C. H. (2014). Romania's abandoned children: Deprivation, brain development, and the struggle for recovery. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: Harvard University Press.
Photos by Luna Hughson, Pixabay, Anna Shvets, and Mental Health America (MHA)
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