Are You Suffering from Skin Hunger?
Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Debra DeAngelo, author of The Elements of Horse Spirit, Pagan Curious, and the new Sacred Massage.
Are you starving? Not for food—for touch.
We need sustenance (food) to survive physically, but we also need kinesthetic sustenance—loving physical contact—to survive psychologically. Without it, we yearn for “something” to satisfy that perpetual, aching emptiness, and we try various methods. A vodka martini. Another pair of shoes. A piece of cake; maybe the whole thing. These things may satisfy for the moment, but before long, we’re awash again in that familiar gnawing need for “something.” It’s touch.
Touch has been vilified in recent years, and unwanted touch deservedly so. In becoming a touch-leery society, we’ve put all touch outside our comfort zone and, in my opinion, to our own detriment. Let’s get comfortable with touch again—touch that soothes, calms, and reassures. The kind that satiates our “hunger pangs.”
Those of us blessed with loving parents, grandparents, or partners have surely experienced how a soft, warm hand on our forearm or shoulder is immediately soothing. We can feel love and compassion radiating through that contact. Think about someone who loves you dearly, with whom you feel safe, and imagine them placing a gentle hand on your shoulder right now, softly lingering. Ahhhhh. That’s the touch we crave, right from birth. If we were fortunate, amongst our first experiences is being safely cradled in our mother’s (or caretaker’s) arms. After the intense trauma of being born, our mother’s touch calms the anxiety, the upset, and the squalling. We can exhale, look around, and see what this life thing is all about.
That innate yearning for touch—”Skin Hunger”—is literally key to our survival. Deprived of touch, infants will ultimately stop eating, wither, and die. This sad reality was observed during a study of babies in a Romanian orphanage, whose basic needs were met, except for one: touch. They weren’t held and cuddled, and were left to cry. Ultimately, without those cries being met with physical comfort, the infants stopped eating, drinking, and even crying… and slipped away1.
We’re evolutionarily hard-wired to crave touch. It’s in our DNA. Just as we must have food and water, we must also have touch to survive. Eons ago, we huddled together to cope with fear and cold, and cuddled to bond. Nowadays, we can’t just walk up to some random stranger and cuddle when our skin gets hungry. Hopefully, that need is met in our close relationships. However, if not, there’s another way to get fed: massage. Unfortunately, regular massage can be very expensive and therefore out of reach. That’s why I wrote Sacred Massage: The Magic and Ritual of Soothing Touch. Anyone can learn to provide soothing touch to a friend or loved one; anyone can learn to feed that aching skin hunger. Anyone can give, and receive, life-sustaining touch. You can feed each other. I’ll show you how.
1 Changaris, Michael. Touch: The Neurobiology of Health, Healing, and Human Connection. Mendocino, California: LifeRhythm and Core Evaluation Publications, 2015.
Our thanks to Debra for her guest post! For more from Debra DeAngelo, read her article, “Six Ways Massage Improves Your Health.”
