Being Touchy-Feely Is Not Just For Creeps

I might as well have titled this post ‘How A Fucking Massage Therapist Didn’t Know About The Importance Of Touch’. A fucking massage therapist, not a fucking massage therapist. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Now why would I consider giving this post a title like that? Because even as an ex-massage therapist, I didn’t fully understand how important touch was until Covid hit and I ended up being isolated. So that either makes me stupid, or we just don’t realize how important something is until we don’t have access to it any more. My ridiculously large ego self-compassionate side tells me it’s the latter.

Let’s start by having a look at some horrendous research which taught us a lot about the importance of touch. In the sixties, a researcher called Harlow (which sounds a lot like harrow… coincidence? I think not!) took infant monkeys away from their moms, and raised them in his lab. He gave them two ‘surrogate mothers’: one was made from metal wire, and the other one from wood which was covered in soft cloth, with a lamp behind it for warmth.

The infants were divided into two groups. In the first, the wire mother had a milk bottle and the cloth mother didn’t; in the second the cloth mother had a milk bottle while the wire mother didn’t.

In both groups, the baby monkeys spent a lot more time with the cloth surrogate than they did with the wire surrogate. Meaning, even when the wire mother provided the food, the infants immediately returned to the cloth mother after feeding. So it wasn’t the food that bonded the monkeys to their ‘moms’, it was the physical contact and comfort.

On top of that, when the researchers put these monkeys in an unfamiliar (stressful) environment with the cloth mother, they at first clutched to her but then relaxed, and even started exploring after a while. If only the wire mother was there with them, they panicked, cried and were incapable of soothing themselves, which again showed the importance of contact comfort.

So that was obviously a fucking horrendous experiment. I can’t help but imagine what those poor baby monkeys went through. On a good day it makes me angry, on a bad day, it makes me cry. But I guess at least we learnt that touch is important?

Another example of the importance of touch is the research that was done with children from severely understaffed Romanian orphanages in the nineties who experienced a chronic lack of touch. Because of their lack of contact comfort, these children were found to be delayed in all areas of development (!).

So, all this severely depressing information leads to what I actually wanted to talk about: touch starvation or ‘skin hunger’. This condition is the result of not getting enough physical touch, which can lead to depression, anxiety, stress, sleep problems and more; a pu pu platter of crappy symptoms quoi.

I experienced all of these towards the end of the Crazy Clusterfuck Called Covid. Most of my friends had left Malta, I was working from home, and I was single at the time. Now I know what you’re thinking, a lot of people were feeling anxious, stressed etc. back then.

Sure.

But this was different. I cried EVERY week, and it also felt like something was wrong with my skin. As if it was ‘itchy’ and trying to lift itself off of my body and onto another person (I know, gross).

I had this feeling that it might have something to do with the no-touch-situation and so, since my massage therapist was in the same boat as me, we ended up forming a little touchy-feely bubble. After being touch starved for months, getting that first massage felt incredible. It felt like I had been under water for months and I could finally breathe again.

During that time, I may or may not have spent way too much money on massages but hell, I was selling my soul in my corporate job anyway so might as well spend the money on something to keep myself somewhat sane right? Or like, san-er. Someone please tell me that logic is sound.

Now, please don’t turn into Captain Creep, touching people and telling them “It’s ok! Being touched is a human need, I am helping you out!” It is a human need, but, you gorgeous big-eyed Bambi: not everyone wants to be touched by you.

As a touchy-feely person with a non-touchy-feely dad, which resulted in me attracting non-touchy-feely partners in the past while obviously complaining about said non-touchy-feeliness, I had to learn that the (very) hard way.

Adam was clearly feeling a little touch-deprived here