Touch of Survival: How We Can Prepare to Be Together, Again and Forever
Let’s begin by stating the obvious so that we can have it in mind as we try to think through some solutions (obviousness only makes this problem worse). We all see it, everyone in positions of relevant influence or power sees it, and still nothing is changing….
The obvious but abysmally-addressed reality: Our mental healthcare system — and our societal status quo as a whole — is not working for anyone. We have a global loneliness crisis, a global suicide crisis, and countless other disasters and catastrophes of individual, communal, and planetary implication. Every living thing is suffering more than they should be. Yes, suffering is an essential element of existence from most ways of looking at it and I spend ample time discussing and reflecting on the ways that our pain and turmoil offer some of our richest, most affecting opportunities for growth and connection. But that’s with regards to the inevitable and/or less preventable kinds of suffering. I don’t feel so keen to take such a warm embrace of the particularly cruel kinds of suffering that are so obviously (and, often, relatively easily) preventable, if only there were the will.
We have to do better. NOW.
As I said in a previous piece, I will continue to treat, write about, and research these things we call depression, anxiety, and trauma but I will simultaneously continue to study, write about, and research the best ways to begin eliminating the prevalence of these things altogether. There are no quick-fixes or “silver bullets” in the journeys of personal growth, social justice, or ecological repair. As with our ailing planet, we will have to accept the damage done at the level of each human psyche/body and find ways to infuse our new approach with active hope and persistent joy so that we can leave behind words (and their related attitudes) like “fight” and “attack” as we shift towards language that reflects a new view of ourselves, each other, and the ecosystems we exist within.
But it can’t all be accomplished through talking. We can’t talk our way out of depression or anxiety or trauma or climate crises or racism or misogyny or any other challenge that, literally not existentially, threatens our lives. Talk helps, sometimes quite a lot, that’s a given. But, like anything, it has its limitations. Learning to discern the moment when we’ve tilted towards that uniquely Western brand of language bias so that we can pause, breathe, get quiet, and consider other options will be a lifesaving lesson for us all.
As I make my way through this training with MAPS to learn about the resurgence of offering MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, the inevitable conversation about if or how to use touch in such a setting has come up. My observations so far are that a striking number of my fellow trainees (mostly mental health professionals) are genuinely uncomfortable simply discussing touch, much less using it in a therapeutic context. As I listened to person after person think out loud about their worries, concerns, and suggested alternatives to granting the request from an MDMA patient for a hand to hold, or the stroke of an arm, or a hug I started thinking about where this discomfort might, at least in part, be coming from.
I spend a lot of time reflecting on the idea that there’s an order to most things. Even disorder or chaos or spontaneity are subject to a certain form of order. I don’t mean order as in a set of rules or a formula or series of steps to follow. I think about there being an order to things the way I think about creativity. There’s no plan, per se, but there’s a collection of elements and it matters to give yourself time to breathe, to zoom out, to zoom in, to think, to consider, and to draw from this collection of elements based on what you’ve decided the moment calls for. This period of deliberation can be seconds or hours or years. It all depends on context. But there is an order.
As the training continued, it started to become apparent that some of the fear I was hearing was pointing to the need so many of us have to learn how to refocus some of our attention on ourselves when we see that we’ve started to worry for someone else. An inadvertent, probably largely subconscious deflection kicks in when we’re flooded with pathos or concern. We start perseverating on what can be done to protect or help the other even as we leave ourselves behind. Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, yes and no.
If you’re going to provide touch to someone deep in the ocean of a plant-medicine experience (or, to a much lesser degree, anyone in life) you are excessively responsible for tending to the requisite order of such a thing. Your body becomes an instrument, a tool with which you set a tone and a rhythm. If your body’s been well-tended to (when I say “body” I am including mind) and you are practiced in the skills of slowing down or speeding up, depending on present-moment context, then you can probably offer touch in ways that will be soothing, even healing. If you have put yourself into the lifelong journey of personal growth, of seeing and managing your biases and conceptions, of unlearning the problematic messaging you took in along the way that made anywhere from a small dent to a dramatic imprint in your filter of perception, and if you have surrendered yourself to the liberating, painstaking process of going through — and not around — your own trauma and the map of highs and lows across your life, then you are probably able to grant a request for touch from someone in a remarkably vulnerable and malleable state in a way that will be soothing, even healing.
I started to realize, listening to my peers, that this ethnocentric, strangely ironic language bias we have in this culture is pervasive and yet we hardly notice it most of the time. In one discussion group someone suggested that instead of granting the request for touch we could offer words of soothing. Hearing this made me feel very sad, both for the hypothetical patient and therapist. Touch, to make another greatly obvious recognition, can be unimaginably harmful and bad. But it isn’t always the touch as much as the intent and the energy it’s infused with. A hug, depending on whose arms you’re wrapped up in, can be ineffably joyful or ineffably frightening. Should we avoid touching someone who’s been harmed by touch? Every part of me shouts out NO! How can any of us learn to trust touch after being hurt if we never have a safe and thoughtful place to practice? I don’t want to live in a world where we have to reserve all healing contact for those in our tiny inner circles, remaining rigidly separate from everyone else.
Our skills of discernment, our practices of self-care and self-awareness, our ongoing learning about the interplay of human bodies when they’re in proximity to one other will help us live more freely. Perpetrators of weaponized touch won’t rob us of the literally life-giving force of being close to each other. We will acknowledge the risks in our ventures and do our best to go about this quest for feeling less pain with our eyes wide open and our breathing all in sync.
The same uneasiness that knocked so many of these folks in my training on their heels when the talk of touch came up is present all around our world. There’s an uneasiness in speaking more honestly or asking for things we need or showing our full selves to anyone, anywhere. The curated way we’ve started to live — or feel pressured to — is unnatural in that it denies our nature. We are beings of contradiction, hypocrisy, paradox, and complexity.
What do we do to begin calling attention to this insidious dis-ease that permeates so much of how we deal with ourselves and each other? As always, I don’t have any answers but I’d like to think through some ideas so we can try to work it out together …
When was the last time you got a really good hug? Take a moment right now to pause reading this and close your eyes to think about that hug, how it felt, who offered it, what it did to your body and to your mind…
Okay, welcome back. So, having spent a moment reveling in the memory of the delight of a really good hug, how do you feel now? Did you pick up on some of the same effects in the present that you were recalling from the past? Maybe a warmth around your heart or a catch in your throat like the moment before your eyes fill with happy tears. Or maybe you noticed thoughts start swirling around your mind about the person who you gave the good hug, how you feel about them, what they mean to you, what prompted the hug, or a burst of the gratitude you were filled with in getting it. Whether your memories were mostly in your body or mostly in your mind, you likely began to relive some elements of the moment you were recalling…the past gradually slipping into the present as if you could time-travel without leaving your couch.
Depending on your frame of reference, you may be thinking by now about how we talk a lot about this time-travel phenomenon in the mind/body when we’re recalling memory specifically of experiences that were painful, scary, or overwhelming. You may already be familiar with the so-called ‘science of trauma,’ the tricky wisdom of evolution embedded in your nervous system allowing you to feel and/or think all the things from some past moment in the present, just as if it were happening all over again, even when to do so makes you feel intense fear, rage, panic. That’s the thing about us humans with these big, complicated brains: most of our greatest assets are also our greatest liabilities.
I’ve spent countless hours in trainings, books, and therapy sessions learning about and applying this fascinating discovery that our brain is making constant predictions, sometimes in ways that are helpful, ingenious, and simply time-saving and sometimes in ways that are confused, problematic, time-wasting. When we’re provoked by some stimuli — a thought or sound or smell or mention — that our nervous system finds to be similar to some other stimuli from the past it starts a series of responses to prepare for what it thinks the situation is going to call for. If you’re in danger you need adrenaline to fight or to flee. If you’re overwhelmed but not in the path of imminent harm you need rest, as if to press pause on your weary consciousness. These extreme states are brilliant survival mechanisms that our bodies developed over unthinkably long, slow stretches of time as the ways we lived, where we lived, and what we understood about being alive changed dramatically, in ways beyond words. This means that, brilliant and wise as these automatic responses are — whether to strong emotion or strong physiological sensation — they are very often obsolete or incongruent to the current context.
Some primal part of our organism seems to have difficulty differentiating between past and present when we’re feeling too much at once. All the conversations in all these classrooms and books notably only address how these responses are triggered by negative memory. I have almost never heard anyone discuss the other, obvious half of the conversation which is about how our bodies begin to relive the past in the present when we’re feeling a lot of pleasure, or joy, or safety, or peace. I don’t know all the reasons for this omission. I suspect it’s partly due to our obsession, as modern humans, with talking about what’s hard. Honorable as this is, essential as the growth implied will continue to be to all of us, there’s a time and a place.
What if we’ve gotten so enamored of our own emerging vulnerability that we’ve begun to leave out, or even undervalue, the things we’ve experienced that were good, that made us feel ease or hope or confidence? Are we afraid that if we amplify these lovely parts of our individual and collective existence that we somehow disrespect all the pain? Or are we worried that to talk about how good it feels to feel good would be to avoid the fact that we can’t (shouldn’t) feel good all the time? I think most of us have the capacity for so much more nuance and dissonance than this. I think it’s always been a small, puritanical collection of systems and propped up sensibilities that have written the story this way. Undeniably, the story has become a part of the culture, the way things are. But it’s not the way things have to be.
Let’s go back to your last really good hug…did you know that getting or giving a hug releases the neurotransmitter oxytocin into your blood which is a chemical associated with so many beautiful parts of being a human including childbirth, sex, and the warm-fuzzy feelings of love, trust, and connection? But what’s even cooler than all that is how our bodies release oxytocin at very similar levels for getting a good hug as in the recalling of getting a good hug. Positive memories in general cause the production of increased oxytocin which helps us regulate our emotions and makes us feel more empathy, more a sense of being part of something beyond our own individuality. You’ve probably heard me talk about interconnectedness before and how powerful and critical it is to our continued ability to live and thrive on this planet. We clearly can’t go on in this isolated, disjointed way where we only occasionally get close — physically, emotionally, spiritually — and mostly just drift past one another in increasingly virtual realms.
We’re too far away from each other in every way. And being distanced like this from each other seems to lead to feeling distanced from ourselves. I wrote recently about depression as being a sort of distancing from one’s “true self.” How painful and terrifying it is to feel this way. I won’t tell you that I believe getting and giving more hugs is the antidote to our endemic mental health struggles. But I am here to say those things can only help. And they are literally and symbolically the start of doing better. We can measure hugs given and received, we can feel them, and we can talk about the benefits, many of which have been studied. It’s only partly the function of our cognitive mind that we crave various forms touch when we’re feeling especially low or high. It’s also very much biological, possibly entirely so…
Perhaps our brains are simply having the “thought” of wanting touch as a form of interpretation of the felt sense of it, deep in our bones. Maybe our blood speaks to us in ways we have yet to fully comprehend. And yet, we hear what it has to say. Maybe when we’re having all these thoughts and emotions we’re actually communicating the translations of the messages that our cells are sending all the time. There is no human survival — and arguably no sustainable human health — without closeness, physical and otherwise. If your body speaks to you in wordless ways then it is probably speaking to mine too. We talk about co-regulation and how much we impact each other’s nervous systems, in ways that heal and ways that harm. We know these bodies are deeply connected to one another but it seems we’ve sold short the depths and design of their bond. Like trees in their mad glorious families of forested wizardry that are their shared homes where everyone depends on everyone else, we are rooted in a soil of our own, however invisible to our human eyes. Living only here on the surface as we do, it’s easy to not realize or to forget what’s happening underneath. Somehow, we have to start to remember and to remind each other.
Next time someone gives you a really good hug see if you can envision that your bodies are extending like beams of sunlight down through the soles of your feet and into the core of the earth where a billion beams of every other soul are dancing like leaves on a windy day, brushing against each other, some intertwined, some suspended at an excitingly close distance, all together, unquestioning, at ease, at home.
No place is too small a place to begin. You can start by offering or requesting more hugs from your partner, your friend, your acquaintance whom you sense is a little more attuned to our interconnectedness than the average person and so would probably be quite delighted by the idea. You can begin to use your online life to organize your people in real life. You can dream up ways to bring together your friends, colleagues, community members to talk or dance or sing or draw or strategize. You can have quiet conversations with the people around you that sound like humans being human: sitting with more questions than answers, fears irrational, hopes disproportionate, faith tested, rage righteous, delight ever-present.
You can stop expecting unreasonable things from yourself and start becoming curious every day about what you’ll see, feel, learn, and gather. You can plant seeds to grow food to share with those who are hungry. You can write poetry to share with everyone or no one at all but yourself. You can take long baths and listen to your heartbeat get very slow and steady. You can find the people who know the things you don’t know and commit to a long relationship of working together to build the things you all want to see.
You can know so much that’s needed to for so long is finally crumbling around you but that not all dismantling is good; you can seek to maintain and nurture the parts of yourself, your home, your community, your relationships that are just fine, that are working well, that are perfectly not in need of disruption. You can read the books that stoke your imagination, the ones you loved as a kid, the ones you’ve only just heard of. You can meditate on your dreams, your flaws, your visions and find ways to weave them all into your future.
You can know — and live — that you are imperfect and in need of other imperfect humans who also want to live wide-awake and humbled by the impermanence and the raw, excruciating astonishment of knowing we will die a different kind of death if we keep living without each other, if we don’t learn to really be together. You can start anywhere. Anything your intuition suggests is a place to begin. Take one step out of your aloneness into the light and shadows of this shared place where we’re not each other’s competition or judge-and-jury, where we coexist in love and disagreement and fallibility and the profound ordinariness and survivability of the kinds of ups-and-downs that come from a culture that’s forgotten, finally, how to be certain of anything at all.