In Touch with Ourselves by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
We have a body and we
are a body. Having a body allows
us to feel in our body, and being a body allows us to reach out to others and
ourselves. Touch is central to being in the world and in touch with ourselves.
The skin
is the meeting-point between self and the world, but
it is also that which contains all those feelings of self as similar to and yet
different from others. It is critical for feeling supported and safe, and yet
able to reach other to others, to touch in skin and soul. Touch is, though, more than the process of interaction
between touch receptors in the skin and that which is touched; it is also an
interplay of body exploring space and places, it is proprioceptive.
Interestingly, at least for what I intend to explore in this article, the
origins of the word “proprioception”, from the Latin proprius, refers to “own”, and “receptive”. Thus, we can think of touch as starting
from the point of receiving touch from ourselves.
My
purpose for exploring this subject is to reconnect the sensation of touch – our
sensation of touch – with the integrity of what we as therapists encounter
every day, those who are detached from that primary perception, the primacy of
touch.
It is
interesting that when I revisit the literature of much somatic psychotherapy
and compare it with the phenomenological literature (the literature of lived
experience) I notice one fundamental difference – and this really interests me.
In contrast with the phenomenology of embodiment literature, somatic
psychotherapy literature only considers touch in one way: touching and being
touched by someone else, or a projection of someone else in our own hand. It
does not adequately notice that when we touch as a toucher, we also receive
touch. The somatic literature often
too quickly interprets touch as something done to another person, or in the
absence of another, as something imagined to come from someone else. There are
reasons and consequences for this idea. Before I explore those, just bear with
me a moment. Consider this:
If I hold my left hand
with my right hand, I will have the feeling that my right hand is the subject
that holds. When I feel the left hand as held, I notice that left is the
subject being held. In touching
and being touched, I am the subject of the experience. I can experience being the subject (the
holder) and also the subject as one who is held.
Compare this to my
left hand touching the leather of a chair. I can feel, as subject, my hand
touching the object and I can feel the object touching my hand, as subject.
When I touch my own body, though, I am only subject. My body isn’t object,
there is no other. We can
certainly imagine the object as being another subject, but it is not our own
subjective self. We can project onto the act of touching us an “other” entity,
but this projection is something created by our minds; it is not, and cannot
be, our subjective touching experience.
Some of us are really good at creating “others” in our own minds and
that’s fine. The only problem comes when all experiences of self touching self
are interpreted as someone else touching us. Phantom touchers are then created and we see ourselves as we
imagine others to see us. We lose
our sense of ourselves, quite literally.
The art then, and the therapy, is to reconnect our sensory perception of
touch to an awareness that being touched and touching ourselves is our
subjective experience. It is to draw into ourselves, the primacy of perceiving
ourselves as subject, and not object.
The consequence of
seeing ourselves as objects is that we are not only confused about who and what
we are as individuals, but subject to the whims and fashions and styles of
other people.
My observation earlier
on that there are reasons for much therapeutic literature avoiding the reciprocal
truth that touching oneself is a subjective act and feeling the touch of
oneself is also a subjective act. Obviously, and I guess most of us would think
straight away that touching oneself is a sexual act. I used the touching of the
hand very deliberately to point out that most touching oneself really isn’t
sexual at all. It is the assumption that self touching is automatically sexual
that points to the origin of the avoidance in the literature: religious
prohibitions on the self. The
pleasure centres of the body are avoided, and sometimes mutilated, in many
places in the world. We, in the West, mutilate our own perception by ignoring
it. The therapeutic literature, including much somatic psychotherapy, avoid it
by a leap to the pathologization, real or not, of the subjective sense of
touching oneself, as though the world isn’t already pathologically disinclined
to notice the ordinariness of being a subjective self. How good it is then to simply reclaim
the most basic of senses, the sensation of touch as something received by the
self and given by the self.
Restoring touch as the
primal sense is becoming, I believe, increasingly necessary as more and more
young people only know themselves through the lens of others, and only knowing
themselves thus, to mutilate their own bodies through starvation, cutting, out
of control sex practices, and so on. Only knowing yourself as an object of
another is to be detached from elemental feelings of being actually here, right
now, in the world, feeling able to make choices, being able to identify what
this subject needs right now, as opposed to fulfilling entirely the desires of
the other.
Feel the hand touching
the hand and feeling the hand being touched and knowing yourself is the
beginning of being real in the world and the beginning of non-projected being
for self and others.
