Skin hunger

Quarantine Nights by Tarn Ellis

COVID didn’t just exacerbate a pre-existing mental health crisis.

It massively exacerbated a pre-existing touch deficit.

Our liberal individualist society has put a great premium on the privatization of personal space. Don’t touch me. Hands off.

Our society gives us a lot of space and freedom to be ourselves, free from the encroachments of others. But it also creates loneliness and a touch deficit.

We’ve created a society where, in Britain, there are 8 million people living on their own.

Where the only contact a person might have during the day is a commercial transaction when a cashier hands their change back to them. Even that is mainly automated now.

This from a Guardian article in 2018 called ‘Are we living through a crisis of touch?’

In countless ways social touch is being nudged from our lives. In the UK, doctors were warned last month to avoid comforting patients with hugs lest they provoke legal action, and a government report found that foster carers were frightened to hug children in their care for the same reason. In the US the Girl Scouts caused a furore last December when it admonished parents for telling their daughters to hug relatives because “she doesn’t owe anyone a hug”. Teachers hesitate to touch pupils. And in the UK, in a loneliness epidemic, half a million older people go at least five days a week without seeing or touching a soul.

Psychologists have a term for touch deficit — they call it ‘skin hunger’.

This from Vice magazine in 2016:

Scientists began investigating skin hunger shortly after the Second World War. In controversial experiments run by American psychologist Harry Harlow, infant rhesus macaques were separated from their birth mothers and given the option of two inanimate surrogates: one made out of wire and wood, and another covered in cloth. The baby monkeys overwhelmingly favored the embrace of the cloth surrogate, even when the wire mother was the only surrogate that held a bottle of milk. From this, Harlow deduced infant macaques needed more than nourishment from their mothers to stay alive. He termed it “contact comfort.”

A monkey in one of Harlow’s experiments

Comfortably numb

I had post-traumatic stress and social anxiety when I was in my late teens and early 20s.

I was ashamed of being messed up, and this made me afraid of intimacy. I kept my distance from others, because I didn’t want to be rejected for being damaged.

Yet of course I desperately craved intimacy.

On the Tube to work, in my first job, I remember once feeling someone’s leg against mine. And it was like I couldn’t feel it. I felt physically numb, alienated from my own body.

I broke up with my long-suffering girlfriend when I was 22, and a few days later, I went for a massage for the first time. It was on my lunch-break — I knelt in one of those massage chairs, as if praying, while the therapist massaged my incredibly knotted back.

What is a massage company? It’s the privatization of our basic mammalian need for intimacy and touch.

All through my 20s, I was too strung out to have a relationship, but when I felt really sad and disconnected I would go for a massage and that made me feel human for a while.

From Vice magazine:

“People who are touch hungry usually present as being depressed individuals,” explains Dr Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute.. “They’re withdrawn; their voice intonation contour is flat.” She adds that people suffering from clinical depression may also often suffer from touch hunger — and this can be seen in an area of the brain called the vagus. “When you massage these people, their depression levels go down and their vagal activity goes up.”

The monthly massages felt like a temporary fix, a compensation. Booze was like that too — a quick fix which temporarily reduced my inhibitions but prevented me from properly healing. Compensatory mechanisms easily arrest our development.

After a few years, I outgrew that phase of my life, and started to be able to have intimate relationships again.

But it showed me how desperately humans need to be touched, and how badly our atomised society serves that need.

When I had an extended period of dissociation three years ago, after going on an ayahuasca retreat, the thing that calmed me down most was touch. Getting hugs from my friends, or sitting by the fire stroking my brother’s dog.

It helped me come back to my senses, slow down my whizzing consciousness and ground it in this material reality. (I wrote about this in my account of that time, Holiday from the Self, and also in my chapter in a new book on spiritual emergencies, Breaking Open.)

When we are hugged, or even when we give hugs, we activate a very old mammalian mind-body circuit called the parasympathetic nervous system. We switch from the fight-or-flight mode of stress and vigilance, and into the tend-and-befriend response. Our blood pressure falls and breathing slows, adrenalin levels drop in our bloodstream, endorphines and oxytocin are released, our stomach starts to digest and our immune system receives a boost. According to Stephen Porges’ ‘polyvagal theory’, it affects our vagal nerve tone, which helps us to regulate our emotions.

We relax. The defensive walls of our ego soften. We allow ourselves to blur into the other. To melt into the hug. We put down the weight of our lonely self, for a moment, and rest in the tribe, the primate troop.

The hug is the ancient, primal mechanism for emotional regulation, trauma recovery and social bonding. And yet in modern therapy, there is no touch — one therapist wouldn’t even shake my hand when I first met them. Some therapists won’t make eye contact and insist on you sitting facing away from them.

Doctors and GPs might resist touching patients, for fear of litigation. Yet, again, touch is one of the most basic, ancient ways to trigger a healing response.

No wonder people flock to alternative healers offering massage, acupuncture, Reiki, Alexander Technique or whatever. Whatever you think of the evidence or lack of evidence for such methods, they offer one thing that traditional medicine doesn’t. Touch.

You know there’s such a thing as professional huggers? People pay a person to hug them for an hour.

Or they go to clubs to grind on a stranger they don’t even speak to.

Or they go to authentic relating events, to hug with strangers.

Or to sex parties to be tied up and feel held.

Laura Huxley, Aldous’ wife, even tried to launch something called Project Caressing, in which booths would be set up every few blocks in cities, where the elderly could go to hold babies.

It sounds nutty, and it failed to get off the ground, but it’s not so far from recent highly successful projects where toddlers go to old people’s homes to play.

Lesley Carter, clinical lead at charity Age UK, says:

I have seen it so often, when a child touches the hand of somebody who is perhaps very withdrawn, and not really speaking, and all of a sudden that person is alive.

Physical distancing

Now, in the lockdown, we are more out of touch than ever.

We try to connect with Zoom, but it feels weird to our bodies, because our bodies tell us, they’re not here, I can’t feel them, I can’t smell them.

Last week I dreamt I was at a festival, and I was riding with some friends on top of a slow mechanical caterpillar. And we were all lying in a pile, lazily at ease, like a many limbed organism. I woke up, missing that touch.

The world record for spooning, organized at Wilderness festival by Togetherness

The first two weeks of lockdown I was living on my own, in the basement of a lovely couple’s house. Because they’re in their 70s, I kept my distance, and pretty much avoided everyone for a week or so.

I was surprised how quickly my mood plummeted.

I know some of you are doing lockdown on your own, and are handling it fine. Some of my relatives are as well.

But for some reason I couldn’t handle it.

I started to feel it in my body — the old traumatized sense of unreality and numbness.

Our sense of reality is somehow connected to our sense of touch and sense of being a body in the world. Psychologists call this ‘proprioception’. And self-isolation was distorting this sense of reality, making everything feel virtual.

I couldn’t even bear to zoom my brother, because I knew I would see his home, his wife, his two children and dog….all that touch….and it would make me more sad.

I thought how awful the suffering must be in prisons, where people are kept in isolation for months and years.

An opportunity arose to move in to a friend’s house, where someone I didn’t really know was also living (my friend was away).

The situation triggered my social anxiety, my natural instinct to self-isolate, but I realized I needed to be with others.

So I moved in with the person I didn’t know very well. She opened the door and we hugged.

After two weeks, my friend came back, and I’m staying in her guest room now, in a house that also includes her two cats and a new puppy.

How I appreciate these fellow mammals. Strange to say, but I have more social and physical contact now than I did before the lockdown.

Two of the mammals in the Ark where I am spending lockdown

We can’t go back to how things were before lockdown.

We need more touch, not less. Maybe not immediately, while the virus still prowls, but the old single-dweller life is not sustainable. Not for me anyway.

The sales of sex toys may have tripled during the lockdown. Likewise the sale of Stoic books.

But sex toys and Stoicism are not enough.

We need living touch.

We are not just brains. We are skin.

If you can’t find anyone to touch and hug at the moment, you can still find living things to touch. You can feel the earth in your hands. Or walk barefoot on the grass. Feel the breeze on your arms.

If you are confined to your home and don’t have access to nature, you can still feel the sun on your face, or listen to the bird song, see the clouds passing, and find ways to get back into your body — take a long bath, or bounce up and down, or rub your face, or blindfold yourself and feel different surfaces in your flat, or taste different foods and really know them.

I know it’s bloody hard. It will pass soon. Hang in there.

We will hug again soon. We must find a way to make it happen.