When it comes to somatic empathy, touch is special
There is a vast difference in the way your minded body responds when you touch someone accidentally or intentionally. In the caress of a lover, the holding of a child's hand or the examination palpating of a patient, there is an intention either to: 1. understand or 2. communicate our feelings.
Intention matters
The intention to touch someone increases blood flow to our hand as well as to regions in our brain which deal with anticipation, expectation and imagination of what the tactile sensation will be like. This heightens information gleaned. Intentional touch involves a deliberateness which is not found with our other senses, in that it is an action searching for meaning and this creates a strong feedback loop between doing and feeling—the fundamental component of our largely unconscious sensorimotor intelligence. Although this is an ancient intelligence, even today, we feel something before we think about it—although only by milliseconds. I feel cold before thinking it is cold outside. I feel thirsty before realising I need to drink.
1. Intending to comprehend sets in motion a wealth of processes that form simulations of what is going on for the person you are touching. This embodied perception is a natural part of how we understand our world. Sensations in our body are a precursor for intuitive hunches. The sense of unease I feel comes a few milliseconds before my awareness that someone makes me feel uncomfortable.
1. Mindful touch is a superhighway of subconscious communication. Receivers of touch can discern whether they are being touched accidentally or deliberately and can correctly "guess" the emotion of the person touching them. Studies show that holding hands with someone who cares about you reduces your pain. Researchers think that this comes from brain coupling linking the way the two brains process pain. Another possible mechanism is the natural electrical potential across our skin because it is a fantastic indicator of emotional and physiological state information. For this reason, skin conductance can unconsciously inform the toucher about a person’s intention.
Peri personal space
Our skin can respond to touch even before there is physical contact. Each sensory receptor in the skin has its own area of responsivity in which a signal can be triggered. If a "touch" receptor on my arm fires when my skin is touched within a few millimetres of the receptor, this receptor is said to have a ‘receptive field’ of a few millimetres. Interestingly, many touch receptors also fire as an object approaches the skin, so their receptive fields are said to extend out away from the skin. The area immediately around the body therefore includes the receptive fields of many of our sensory receptors and is known as our peri-personal space. It plays an important role in social interaction because if someone moves into this space or any kind of threat occurs in this space, relevant neurons in the brain activate.
Changes to the size and area of receptive fields take place all the time, during our daily tasks, when playing sport and interacting with others. Our attention and intention influence which senses are activated and at what distance from the body. This ability to extend or contract our receptive fields is what we describe as being "open" or "closed" to sensing something/someone. It can be deliberately used to extend our receptive field towards and into our bodywork clients.
Self vs other
Although we might assume that our brain knows which is our body and which is someone else’s, the situation is not that straightforward. Touch is our main source of information about where we end and someone else begins. When I move my arm, I feel it move. This link between moving and feeling is interpreted as ownership—the arm which I feel moving must be mine. In other words, our felt sense generates our sense of self.
If I move someone else’s arm, normally, I don’t feel it move and so my brain does not consider the arm to be part of ‘me’. However, this feedback system is easily fooled (or is highly flexible). This is useful when we have replacement limbs or when using tools as extensions of our own body.
In some situations, such as mindful bodywork, the practitioner can unconsciously take on ownership of the client’s body. By taking up the slack in the fascial fabric of our clients’ body forming a fascial ‘continuum’ with our own, we can feel the response in our own body when we alter theirs. For example, when I rotate my client’s shoulder and twist their fascia, I can feel a response in my own fascia. Combined with somatic empathy this can generate a strong sense of self and other being as one.
For competent bodyworkers, touch is mindful, deliberate, and infused with an empathetic curiosity about our client, placing us in a realm of heightened potential for somatic empathy. This experience can be much more sophisticated than simply reading a client’s emotion. They might recognise complex conditions with images, sounds, tastes, memories, and predictions as if their own. This is not extra-sensory perception but activation of our ancient experiential-intuitive way of comprehending the world.
