Philip Chard's Out of My Mind column is sponsored by AllWriters' Workplace & Workshop, which offers online classes in all genres and abilities of creative writing, as well as coaching and editing services. You can read past columns here.
Psychologists have long recognized the importance of caring skin-to-skin contact, and there are numerous therapeutic methods that employ tactile ministrations as a pathway to emotional healing. Caring touch can release endogenous oxytocin in the brain; the so-called “love hormone.” Research shows positive physical contact is central to human communication, bonding, and mental health. It is also a primary means for exhibiting compassion, which is much needed in these trying times.
Sadly, during a pandemic, for many, loving touch proves in short supply, if not altogether absent. Using digital media, we can see and hear each other, even in absentia, and smelling and tasting can be readily engaged. But the touch of another caring human being may become, quite literally, out of reach, making it the most starved of the senses.
When one leaves the enveloping embrace of a mother’s womb, one becomes subject to the touches of the outside world. For the unfortunate, touch may prove a source of pain, both somatic and emotional. Physical and sexual abuse, tactile deprivation and painful medical injuries or procedures leave their marks, causing some to cocoon within their own skin in an effort to remain safe. I’ve worked with clients traumatized in this manner, and some recoil from human contact, knowing it largely as a source of suffering. But, for most, touch provides far more good than ill, leaving us longing for more.
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Emotional Malnutrition
Those in households with loving people or pets can draw on this resource, so to speak, to satiate what some call “skin hunger.” However, for those living alone, separated from loved ones, or quarantined during our pandemic, the absence of caring touch creates its own version of emotional malnutrition.
“My grandkids are my big huggers,” one widow told me. “And now I can only wave to them from afar or on video chat. It’s like a hunger, and I can’t do anything to satisfy it.”
“Just before the pandemic, I found a new love interest,” a middle-aged gentleman told me. “We’ve both been unattached for a long time and feel a strong connection. The hugs and holding hands have been wonderful for both of us. But now, we’re confined to texts and FaceTime.”
“My mom is in a nursing home, but they’re locked down, so I can’t see her. At every visit, I would hold her hand, massage her shoulders, and leave her with a kiss. But, no more,” an anguished daughter told me.
Presently, these folks, and others in similar circumstances, don’t know when their touch famine will cease. Maybe weeks. Perhaps months. That’s a long time to go without feeling loving physical contact with another human being. It exacerbates the loneliness many already feel due to social distancing. Even phone calls, texts, emails and video chat, while helpful to assuage those lonely feelings, do nothing to blunt the impact of skin hunger for those in need.
So, who are most affected by touch deprivation? Obviously, those who live alone or find themselves quarantined. And then there are the unfortunate souls hospitalized and in isolation with COVID-19. While many nurses and other healthcare providers do what they can to provide caring touch (through PPE) to these seriously ill people, it’s rarely enough. Most tragically, during one’s final moments in this life, most of us desire the comforting presence and physical contact of loved ones. I recall, along with my sisters, sitting at my mother’s bedside while she passed, as each of us placed our hands on her, stroked her hair and kissed her goodbye. In most cases, this plague makes that impossible.
Poet John Keats said, “Touch has a memory.” And for some in our new abnormal, at least for now, those memories are all they have.
For more, visit philipchard.com.
Philip Chard's Out of My Mind column is sponsored by AllWriters' Workplace & Workshop, which offers online classes in all genres and abilities of creative writing, as well as coaching and editing services. You can read past columns here.
