Pain may be a Plaintive Cry for Loving Attention via Touch - Dr. Robert Frost

Humans have a basic need for contact and loving attention. But our modern social forms prohibit or at least make it difficult to get the touch and attention we need. After all, if I touch her, my wife will get jealous. If I touch him, everyone will think I’m homosexual. Our society does not provide enough socially acceptable opportunities for touch!

When it comes to touch, you are generally limited to:
1) Greeting – perhaps with a handshake, a hug, and a kiss in the air beside the head.

2) Sports – for those who engage in contact sports. An athlete can jump on the one who makes a goal or pat him on the bum. Baseball players bump fists with the one who hit a home run.

3) Punishment – not the most fun type, but if you are hungry for touch, this can be better than nothing.

4) Slow dancing – with close contact. My mother told me, "Bobby, when I was young, we didn't have premarital sex like you do. But what we had was slow dancing. It was really wonderful to put my head on a strong man's chest, be held close in his arms, and sway to the music."

and 5) Sex. Include here holding hands, dancing with contact, kissing, petting – often the preliminaries to sex.

If you are touching me too long for just a greeting, we aren't playing sports, you are not punishing me, and we are not dancing... then it must be sex! Most of us don't have any other categories. No wonder so many people have so much fear of touch.

In our society, there are very few other opportunities for giving and receiving touch. This is one reason I like my professions of Alexander Technique and Applied Kinesiology. In both these methods, I teach and heal through touch.

In nature, the higher mammals (apes, etc.) give and receive 1-2 hours of various kinds of touch per day. Their extensive play, roughhousing, fighting, hugging, grooming, picking insects, etc., gives them the opportunity for lots of touch. It appears to serve the purpose of reducing aggression and thereby allowing groups of mammals to live in close proximity with less violence. One might correctly assume that it is a natural need of the higher mammals to give and receive lots of touch on a daily basis. And one could hope that humans too are at least one of the higher mammals.

Human babies, deprived of touch, grow apathetic and eventually die. After a few years of age, humans do not physically die from lack of touch. But they do become emotionally stunted, overly passive or aggressive, and develop peculiar mental attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

Young children, given the opportunity, will seek out and get the touch they need. I saw an example of this phenomenon when a mother with her 5-year-old son came to visit me. He became wilder and wilder in his behavior. I thought he was jealous of his mother visiting me. Then his mother said to him, “Oh dear, we haven’t had our cuddling session yet today. Come here”. He came and sat on her lap and played with her for several minutes. Then he played alone quietly and contentedly for the rest of the morning.

Children deprived of sufficient touch will behave more and more wildly until a parent or another adult gives them attention. This may be gentle or the adult may just hit the child. After being hit and initially crying, the child typically quiets down and acts more contented – for a while.

Wilhelm Reich suggested that the desire to hit or to be hit, to dominate or to be dominated, only arises in someone who is deprived of sufficient healthy touch. When someone hits you hard enough, you feel it for a long time. Reich says that this is a kind of perverse substitute for prolonged touch. He goes on to say that only a race deprived as a whole of adequate healthy touch could want to drop bombs on a neighboring nation – a kind of perverse touch on a massive scale.

Reich observed the lack of healthy touch in the German people and reasoned that this bode poorly for the future. He predicted in the 1930s that the Germans would find a political father figure who would offer them social violence in trade for personal deprivation (guns for butter), and lead them into another world war. The accuracy of his prediction adds evidence to the validity of his theories.

Reich contends that were we to have happy and fulfilling personal relationships with adequate touch, the desire to dominate would not cause such social chaos. It would be channeled inwardly to overcome character flaws and personal limitations, and outwardly in competitive sports and socially constructive activities.

Fascinated with the phenomena of human touch, Reich put electrodes upon the skin and measured what occurs when two people touch. He detected a motion of energy, slower than nerve energy, that moved wave-like along the surface of the skin of both partners toward the point of contact. He determined this energy to be caused by an alternate polarization and depolarization of the skin cell walls.

The energy did not actually flow anywhere but was clearly measurable. The motion was toward the point of contact between the two people. It was like the visual wave produced when sequential groups of people stand up in an arena. The people are not moving around the arena, but the wave of people standing and sitting does. He found that this energy would increase in intensity to a kind of climax and then subside. In his experiments, the complete cycle of arousal, climax, and relaxation took from 24-27 minutes.

Reich found that this movement of “bio-energy” would occur through natural fabrics like cotton but poorly through synthetics. And it occurs regardless of the sex of the partners. The partners don’t have to undress or make love. A good prolonged cuddle works quite well. We all know how good we feel after a good cuddle. We should do it long enough (at least 30 minutes) and more often. After about 30 minutes, the brain releases a massive amount of neurotransmitters plus hormones such as oxytocin and endorphins that act as neurotransmitters. These relieve pain and produce euphoria – a great sense of well-being.

In Reich’s experiments, when the touching parts were separated too soon, the cycle could not complete. Even if the partners again touched, the cycle could not begin where it left off but rather had to start over from the beginning. His subjects who remained in touch for the complete cycle displayed rosy cheeks, radiant smiles, overall relaxation, satisfaction, and joy. The subjects who repeatedly separated before the completion of the cycle grew restless, irritated, frustrated, and angry.

Isn’t this a pretty accurate picture of modern sex life? A young German woman summed it up quite well when she told me, “Die Jungs sind zu schnell” - Young men are too fast. Sex should provide an ideal opportunity for receiving this prolonged touch. But most people finish making love too soon! The average time the penis is in the vagina in Germany is 4 minutes! (England - 3 minutes, USA - 6 minutes, South Africa - 45 minutes!) This wouldn’t be so bad if there were extensive love play before and continued resting in one another’s arms afterward. But “rolling over and going to sleep” after a few minutes of sex does not provide for the health and psychological benefits produced by a minimum of about 30 minutes of contact. Women so treated become restless, irritated, frustrated, and angry.

How can we get the touch we need? What brought us loving attention and touch when we were children? If we had a loving mother who was at home, what worked was being ill! When we are ill, we got to stay home from school, stay in bed and be lazy, perhaps watch TV. Mom brought us nice things to eat and drink, put her hand on our forehead, stroked our hair, and asked us how we were feeling.

Our subconscious remembers this well. And since the subconscious has no linear time sense, then is now. So, when we are lacking in touch and loving attention what do we do? We get sick! It worked when we were children. And if that doesn’t work, we may try getting sicker. The subconscious may think that perhaps a chronic terrible illness will finally bring the attention we got when sick as a child.

This is not as far-fetched of a theory as it may sound upon the first examination. Here is an example from my work in the Baxamed medical center in Basel, Switzerland: Urs Edelmann, a 34-year-old male patient, had chronically swollen ankles for eight years. Interestingly enough, they first occurred three weeks before he was first required to serve in the military. Because of them, he did not have to go for his military service at that time. I asked him, “If you were to get well now, would you have to go for military service?” When he said that his illness excluded him from military service for life, I said, “Well then, I guess you don’t need this symptom anymore, do you?” He looked shocked but said nothing.

Over the next weeks, we did a great variety of structural corrections, allergy treatments, changed his nutritional plan, included some nutritional supplements, and reduced his intake of Voltarin® by one/half. Then psychological work came up as the priority. Muscle testing and “asking the body questions” revealed that he needed one hour of continuous contact with another human per day. It could be broken down into two times one-half hour, but the sessions of uninterrupted touch needed to be at least one-half hour long.

As his wife, Regula, had accompanied him to this session, I asked them both if they were willing to give each other this much touch daily. They answered, “We would like to very much, but there isn’t enough time if our day”. I gave them the following prescription: “Turn off your television one hour earlier”. They blushed. “Go to bed and sleep one hour earlier. Set your alarm one hour earlier. Get up, visit the bathroom and return to bed. Hold each other for one hour. You do not need to make love but extensive skin contact would be best.”

They followed my instructions. Within one month, Urs’ ankles had returned to normal and he could, for the first time in eight years, walk, run and dance without pain. He then stopped taking Voltarin® too, without any recurrence of symptoms.

Since touch did heal him, perhaps his symptom was a desperate call for touch. As he didn’t get it, the symptom became chronic. It seems like his subconscious mind was thinking, “Well, it worked before. When I got ill, I got lots of caring touch. Maybe if I remain ill, I’ll finally get what I need”.

Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis, the first breakthrough in the field of psychology, emerged from his observation of a similar phenomenon: Women diagnosed with "hysteria" – a disease paradigm thought to result from a lack of sexual intercourse or gratification – were treated by having their doctor massage their genitals long enough to induce "paroxysm" (spasmodic contractions). In fact, the electric vibrator was invented to relieve the doctors from having to spend so much time and effort massaging female genitals.

Freud discussed female hysteria with his French colleague and mentor, Coué. Coué said, “We know the Rx: ‘Penis normalis. Dosim. Repétéz’.” Freud asked himself, “If he knows this, why doesn’t he publish it?” Freud went on to develop and publish these theories himself. Psychoanalysis began with the observation that an absence of a satisfactory sex life causes hysteria. Generalizing from this we may say: Not enough touch of the right kind can make you crazy, give you pain, and make you sick!

I have an example from my life: While hiking in for two hours with my tent and gear for a 1 week-long stay at the Rainbow Festival near Leon, Spain, I strained my low back. I knew that feeling. Whenever in the past I had hurt myself like that, I could expect a few weeks of pain before my back felt good again.

I set up my tent and went to where others were gathering. I told them that I had hurt my back. A young woman came to my tent that night, climbed into my sleeping bag behind me, and held me. She gently reached around my waist and held her body against my back all night long. In the morning, she arose and left. We shared not a word. In the crowd of the festival, I never saw her again. My back pain was completely gone and did not return. Her loving touch and warmth were the perfect healing medicine.

A guest professor of dance at my university taught us a very interesting touch exercise. Mats for comfort are placed on the floor. The participants lie together on their sides like spoons, all in one line. The instructions are to lie in complete contact, get comfortable, close your eyes and not move for at least half an hour. The effect was nothing short of amazing. Bliss, happiness, and almost giddy joy just poured out of us. This exercise produces an amazing high! We certainly were feeling no pain.

The Ha-Ha Game is a California ice-breaker party game. To play it, the first person lies down. The second one lies with his or her head on the first one's stomach. The third lies with head on the second one's stomach and so on in a long chain. Then the fun begins. The first one says, "Ha". The second one says, "Ha, Ha". The third one says "Ha, Ha, Ha" and so on. As the person before you is saying the correct number of Ha-Has, your head is being shaken by the bouncing belly. This feels funny and makes you laugh. Your laughing shakes your belly and the next person's head. Like wildfire, it spreads through the group and all laugh awhile. When the laughter subsides, the next person in the chain says his or her number of Ha-Has, and the laughter rushes through the group again.

When all have had their Ha-Has, number one begins again. When all have had enough, the chuckles pervade the group the whole evening. This is a fun touch game. If you can get past your reluctance and just do it, the effect is just wonderful. The combination of touch and laughter produces euphoria and very much reduces pain.

Touch can heal many ills. For those of you who practice a type of popular kinesiology in which you muscle test categories of possible corrections, I suggest that you place sustained touch among the electrical category corrections and test for it during your energy balancing sessions.

In our society today, you have to be creative to arrange for and obtain sustained contact. There are so many social taboos against it.

I recall very poignantly how, at the age of 15, male hormones began to make demands upon me. I was very shy then. However, the urge to hug girls became so overpowering, that I had to somehow overcome my shyness. When I finally did try to hug a girl, she asked rather hysterically, “What do you want from me?” I answered frantically and honestly, “I don’t know!” It was all so embarrassing, difficult, urgent, and confusing.

It may not be easy for you to change your lifestyle, sense of propriety, and social habits enough to regularly obtain thirty minutes of uninterrupted touch. But if you are in pain and nothing else seems to help for long, do give this a really good try. As mentioned above, thirty minutes of sustained touch causes the brain to produce a massive amount of endorphins. When enough of these, your body's own "pleasure chemicals" hit the bloodstream, there is no way you can be in pain. Endorphins kill pain 40-100 times even more effectively than medicine's strongest pain-killing narcotic drug: heroin!

Many times, body symptoms are the language of the subconscious. The subconscious only has a few ways of making you aware of its communication. In our culture, few have learned how to receive and understand the communications of the subconscious. C. G. Jung taught us one way – by attending to our dreams and fantasies. For those who haven’t learned to attend to their inner communications, symptoms are the most effective way that the subconscious has of making you aware that something is wrong and needs attention. A symptom of strong pain is quite intrusive and difficult to ignore!

The subconscious mind is represented symbolically as feminine. The parallels between the activity of the subconscious mind and female humans in society today are striking. Both have been often ignored and suppressed. Most people do not even recognize that they have a subconscious mind. They have not learned to communicate with it in a reliable and functional manner. Most men do recognize that they have a wife. But like their relationship with their subconscious mind, they have not learned to communicate well with their wives.

When I worked with female patients in Switzerland, I learned that most women had husbands who treated them like household appliances. Their job was to take care of the house, cook, and attend to the children. When the women made unpleasant noises about their condition, the men did what they did with their cars or other appliances that made strange noises: They sent her in for repair. And I was the repairman for many of these unsatisfied and unheard women.

Why is the subconscious mind so mysterious and out of our conscious awareness? The subconscious mind does not think linearly like the conscious mind. In the subconscious, everything is interconnected into an organic whole. Nothing exists separately in and of itself. Also, your subconscious mind has no sense of time. For the subconscious, all time is now. So behavior from your infancy, that then brought you something you needed and still need, may be continued as if then is now.

The subconscious does not have a sense of sequential time. To the subconscious, all time is now. For most folk, when you were children and had pain, Mama came and held you. Now, when you need to be held and are not receiving the touch you need, your subconscious may react by producing pain. It worked when you were a child so it tries it again now. If you still don’t get held, your subconscious may produce a more grave condition. Like Urs in the example above, you may even continue to suffer for years, in the hope that eventually you will receive the touch you so need.

As mentioned, if you don’t get enough sustained contact, you may well develop secondary urges for more intense contact. Some choose to inflict pain on others. Others choose to have pain inflicted upon themselves. If you hit me hard enough, I will still feel it tomorrow. This is a perverse substitute for healthy sustained contact. This perverse transformation of the desire for healthy touch may well be the pattern that had led to so much senseless violence in society today.

Do yourself a favor. Break out of this pattern of lonely isolation. You may not feel lonely or isolated. You may have so effectively cut yourself off from such painful awareness that you don’t even know what you are missing.

For several years, each summer I arranged and helped teach Oriental dance courses in the grand castle of Villersexel, France. At the start of one such course, I spoke to the group about the need for touch. One woman said vehemently, "I have no need for touch. Since my husband left me several years ago, no one has touched me and I don't miss it!”

I gently said that it was understandable (and perhaps even necessary) that in the pain of her husband leaving, she cut off all awareness of any such need. I suggested that if during the course of the week of Oriental dance, she should become aware of the desire for touch, that there were supportive and loving folk present who would be glad to hold her and be held by her.

Since a man had been the cause of her cutting off from her feelings, I did not try in any way to be the one she could touch. Later in the week, she opened up and hugged several of the other women. She had a breakthrough, cried, laughed, and was very joyful. I just smiled happily to her from the other side of the room. She later thanked me for opening up the opportunity for her to have joy in touch once again.

Many women and some men complain that to get the touch they desire, they have to give sexual sharing. However, with the terrible new diseases of our times, getting touch in this way can be life-threatening! For your health and for our survival as a species, there is likely no more important task than to create and regularly partake of safe new touching rituals – ones that, unlike sex, do not involve the exchange of bodily fluids.

If only for the sake of finding a possible way to be free from pain, find someone that you can be in close touch with – real physical touch. Even if it is through sitting with someone on a small couch in front of the TV, find some way to be in uninterrupted physical contact with someone for at least 1/2 hour at a time.

Perhaps you are not ready for human contact yet. Well, do you have a large warm pet? Touch with loving people is perhaps more effective. However, even a cat or dog who sits on your lap or leans against you can do wonders for your health, happiness, and freedom from pain!

As John Lenin said, "I've tried it all and the thing that works best is being held by someone who loves me."