The Medicine of Touch

Babies who are in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) do better when held skin-to-skin. That’s partly because touch can communicate a sense of comfort, safety, and connection. It is the first sense to develop and the last to fade. It stimulates the brain and nervous system and learning helps us understand our world. Long before we have the words to explain what we feel, we often understand care by being held, touched or even just near someone.

I invite you to take a moment to remember. When you were growing up, did touch bring a feeling of warmth and reassurance? Or was it confusing, or even painful? What is your relationship with touch, today?

When I worked with teenagers as a psychiatric aide in locked facilities during the 1980s and 1990s, I saw the attitudes around touch change. In the earlier years, appropriate and caring touch was part of the emotional support we offered the youth. It was available to express nurturing and encourage healing.  If a patient was feeling deeply and asked for a hug, that moment of safe human connection was given as reassurance that someone cared. Someone was there and they weren’t alone. Over time, however, as the fear of allegations of sexual abuse grew across child-serving institutions, touch became something to avoid rather than something generously offered. The result was further pain. Children who were already hurting would be turned away from one of the most basic forms of comfort.

That policy reflects a larger paradigm shift. Parents began touching their children less in the home. Laws arose regulating touch for teachers and students. Now, we have generations of people who seem more touch-starved, more guarded, and less certain about themselves or how to offer care and comfort. Loneliness has risen dramatically and relationships with others is often virtual.

In spite of this, research has long affirmed what many of us know intuitively: touch heals. Touch nurtures.

Dr. Tiffany Field, a professor at the University of Miami School of Medicine, and a leading researcher on touch, has written “Children need touch for survival. Their growth and development thrive on touch.” Her work also highlights how safe, supportive touch can help regulate stress, improve self-esteem, and support overall well-being.

This invites a gentle but important question: how do we restore healthy, respectful connection in a world that often feels disconnected and even frightening?

One way is to treat yourself to a massage. Massage isn’t for everyone. But the benefits are extensive and include improvements in body and mind. Even a gentle relaxing massage can relieve pain, lengthen the muscles and activate the parasympathetic nervous system – rest and digest. Because of how it effects the nervous system, it is a powerful stress reliever. It improves circulation and immune function. And when done by a trauma-informed massage therapist, it can help to reconnect to inner wholeness.

Touch and/or massage is not the whole story of healing, and it must always be safe, welcomed, and appropriate. But when it is offered with care, it can remind the body that it is not alone. It can urge the central nervous system to a state of comfort and relaxation and communicate a message of safety.  Sometimes that’s all it takes for healing to begin – the quiet reassurance of human touch that says, “I’m here for you.”