We could easily restrict ourselves only to words. Why do we do this? After all, most of the ways we touch are unnecessary for conveying the basic message.
If you take a moment to observe people in the public square, you will be astonished at how often they touch - couples holding hands, a friendly back slap between friends, a couple sitting side by side on a park bench leaning into one another, a friend who touches another’s upper arm while listening intently. If I didn’t snuggle him, he requested it.Īfter awhile, I decided to see if there was a use for this type of energy in therapy. It appeared that my son gained peace by letting me touch him tenderly as he lay in bed at the end of the day. Each time I got the same response I had witnessed in the yard. Several times over the next couple of weeks, just before sleep, I would snuggle him close, caress his hair or rub his back and talk to him about when he was a baby and what it was like bringing him home from the hospital. This incident fascinated me so much that, in the tradition of theorists such as Jean Piaget, I used my child as a miniresearch subject, adding this type of snuggling to my son’s bedtime ritual. Almost mesmerized, he stayed in my arms until I was too tired to hold him any longer. I talked to him about when he was little and how I used to snuggle him in our rocking chair in the middle of the night. He stared straight into my eyes as one might expect an infant to do. I expected him to immediately resist my grasp, but when I looked into his face and talked to him like a baby, he became surprisingly still. We were wrestling in the grass, and I intended to tease him by holding him like a baby, thus challenging his independence. He was 8 years old at the time and already displaying the burgeoning need for the independence of adolescence. Instead, it happened in the front yard with my son.
Joining hands counseling mn professional#
I didn’t learn this lesson in graduate school, from a book or journal article, or from any professional training. I learned a lesson about the power of touch totally by accident.
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