Note: The original author has since deleted this article from Medium.
My friend Elizabeth shared this to her page and I wanted to retain it for future reference.
One of the components I think that comes with good healing, and I mean that as in massage therapy which I do, or in touch therapy, or even an energy work is the ability to be in a space and experience safe consensual touch.
Touch is intimate, and our culture sexualizes intimacy almost immediately in the popular genre. Either that or it is violent. So when we create spaces that bypass violence and sex, and instead introduce safe consensual touch there is a different level of healing that can occur.
As a massage therapist this is one of the issues we can encounter. This mentality that does not have any room for nuance because the experience of touch has been blunted in many cases in popular culture and/or in peoples lives because of culture or lack of dynamic safe loving relationships.
We can find fear, energy that can feel sexual, or tender places in the body where clients giggle, shiver, or has doubt. I believe that one of our unspoken but very valid jobs is to be able to go into places and dissolve the expectation that sexualize is the encounter, to create the space were real trauma release and healing can occur.
My friend Sarah once said to me that the greatest gift of massage was safe consensual touch and she said that to me while I was learning in school, and that has carried with me so much into all of the spaces I teach or heal. When I say I create safe space I mean at least in part, this. Because we live in a culture in which people are starved for touch…
Excerpt: Physical touch” people feel starved of daily connection”
“Google “friends love language” or “how to show friends you care using their love language” and you get a myriad of ideas for the other four: gifts — easy, words of affirmation — why not?, quality time — of course!, and acts of service — sure!
But when it comes to “touch,” there’s only one suggestion, which comes up again and again: give a hug “hello,” and another when you say “bye!” (Maybe an extra thrown in if they’re feeling particularly low.)
But that’s it.
And while that may seem like enough, the reality is that these rushed, empty gestures aren’t meaningful, and leave others feeling limp-hearted.”
Scott