The Language of Touch – Touch as a Powerful Non-Verbal Communication Tool

Touch holds immense power as a non-verbal communication tool – that is why we can talk about the language of touch. Everything we go through leaves a mark on us, or, rather, a story. Touch can help us feel and connect to our silent, unexpressed stories that may have caused trauma. If we allow the power of therapeutic touch to take us towards re-living and re-experiencing the traumatic events we are holding on to, we also allow ourselves to process, let go, heal, recover and grow.

The language of touch between the therapist and the client

The therapist usually starts the session sitting behind the client’s head. She puts her hands on the treatment table close to each side of the client’s head, with palms open and facing up, waiting until she feels the client.

That two-way feeling of one another between the client and the therapist during the session is essential to the process of grounding and somatic resonance. Somatic resonance is a mutual process involving both the therapist and the client, whose bodies impact each other, reverberating at the same vibrational and energetic frequency. This phenomenon includes mirroring, empathy, intuition, and kinaesthetic sensing.

The attuned communication based on touch between the therapist and the client can best be seen in the situations when the client’s eyes are covered. Even without talking or eye contact, two of the most important forms of communication, the therapist and the client are still communicating through touch. In other words, the client’s body sends the messages of relief from trauma and the therapist receives them.

The relieving power of the language of touch

To protect the organism from threat during traumatic events, the autonomic nervous system switches into either a high tone sympathetic (fight or flight, i.e. a sense of fight/defend/flee) or high tone parasympathetic (freeze, i.e. a sense of shut down/hide/freeze) activation. If the nervous system fails to return to ventral vagal ‘rest and digest’ state, the neurophysiology may remain in a state of high tone activation as if the body is in the state of danger. The therapist’s trauma-informed and relational touch sessions bring back the clients towards the place of internal safety.

The therapist will often apply gentle pressure and traction in the chest and upper back area to promote somatisation and coming out of the freeze.

People that suffer from trauma often experience considerable shoulder tension. Trauma-informed sessions that apply the language of touch approach help relieve the shoulder tension through active response touch that promotes gentle discharge and empowered release. In that way, the shoulders noticeably relax, while the twitches that happen in that area travel and push into the therapist’s hand.

The touch therapist will also offer a helping hand that trauma sufferers can hold and clench as hard as they want. Without fear of hurting the therapist, the clients can let the hurtful traumatic experiences find their way out of the body and the mind.

Conclusion

Relational trauma brings about a very deep experience of not being able to communicate the trauma. What cannot be said through words, can often be communicated through touch, which can serve as a relational exchange of the traumatic experience.