I want to hold your hand …
A pop psy culture article caught my attention this morning because I do believe that touch can help lay down new neural pathways which in some cases can help soften the blow of our trauma memory troves. (If you are wondering, my love of alliteration outweighs any semblance of standardized usage and I don’t mind being two standard deviations from the bell curve as I consider it all poetry over prose.)
I had to laugh softly as I read the methods section stating the subjects were all college aged couples. Confounding the data no doubt is the number of subjects who were likely no longer together a half year later! College much like virtual world dating can happen in the blink of an eye. Which I know a little bit about as I’ve studied the facial morphs animations of idle avatars for a decade now.
As it happens, I took a stroll down flashback byways last night when I was helping my husband with a lagging issue on his laptop. In-between waiting for processes to progress, I trolled his old email folders. Not for bombshells mind you, the redneck is many things but luddite isn’t one if them. I went straight for the emails that I wrote to him during our time in IMVU. I remember him telling me that relationships in avatar worlds only last 3 weeks and if they make it to that mark … They can work for Life. At the time of course, I thought he was warning me of an impending break-up because I spent 90% of my mental noise waiting for him to kick me to the 3D curb.
I came across a one long note where I was telling him how my house mate reacted to the news that I was in love with him. I had forgotten all the finer points she had made in the heat of a hot mic reply in person. How we’d never make it work, how I was playing a game show or reality tv relationship and once IRL the walls would come tumbling down. As I was reading the sordid details of her faithless leaps, I glanced up over the laptop screen and watched my partner iRacing in his curved screen bucket seat steering wheel simulator and smiled with every happy cell in my body. Both of us take the virtual world very seriously.
As I read through all the letters, I saw how many focused on reassuring him that we would be fine in the physical world of things and all that brings to the kitchen table. How I knew that in my heart is still a mystery. But since we are married and still together after meeting 10 years ago … I’d have to say the statistical improbability of our lives was aided by Grace.
I used the expression, once you are in my arms, or when I can touch you or other hand holding porch swing painted literary pictures. Each hinting at the power of touch and how important it would become to us. Make no mistake, I do not believe in the least that skin to skin versus avatar to avatar touching is any different. Indeed my most powerful moments in IMVU are “being held”. That’s probably when I learned how important that would become in our real life coping strategies.
My own body pain often steers me away from demonstrative displays, but my avatar as much as she loves to dance, lives to be held in a comforting embrace. And while I certainly can’t be touched all the time, the smell of his sweat and strength of his arms still settles my senses. It works for him too. Scratching his back or holding his hand or laying my back against his chest are all open avenues for coming back into the present moment stillness .. even during an out of body storm. My kids coined the term … Bitchy bitchy talk fest. Because we’ve been known to get lost and be at odds for hours when both of us are stuck in the rut of old story lines.
We both know that it only takes sitting together, holding hands or even a hug (like you mean it) to break the recursive loop of what a lousy life 🧬 and remember who we are. We know this of course, but that doesn’t mean we are apt to do that in the bio-chemical emotional mud puddle. In fact it’s quite telling when we AVOID touching when we are upset.
But eventually we come together, usually we’ll agree to hold one another. We may sit quiet for a long time, but then when words DO come, they inevitably lead to stories about our swiss cheese moments in our early childhoods. Where we closed something off and built that wall around our heart. That’s what got activated. It wasn’t anger as an incident of the here and now. There was something in the child’s story of not enough that came to the surface and for a split second we were unloved and the world was such a harsh place.
It’s no accident that our hard moments come back to the early pieces of our formidable phases. And I can see how the thesis of that study discovered how consoling touch can lead to adaptively regulated and actually reduced emotional pain associated with these memories. By telling our stories in the nest of each other’s arms we lay the saga down with a different chemical fingerprint than it had the last time it came to the surface.
It’s no accident one of my favorite poses is the cuddle puddle. There’s a lot of healing to be had.
