When you touch me

This post is inspired by a fellow bloggers post which moved me so deeply this morning.

https://thejourneytowardhealing.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/attachment-here-we-go-again/

I remember the first time my first therapist reached a warm hand across from her chair to hold my hand when I was in deep distress.  An ocean of tears burst forth and it was terribly frightening, longed for but frightening.  One of my favourite songs, Touch is by Seal and it brings me to tears every single time.  It reminds me of how much it means and gives to us to be touched with love.  Especially if we never were in childhood or had abusive touch in terms of sexual abuse or beatings or even just slaps with the wooden spoon or a hairbrush(Mum once hit me with a flying hairbrush and then slapped me hard on my bare leg with the bristles of a brush), added to all the other injuries such as burns and cuts it made me associate touch with hurt as I am sure so many of us do.

Being touched in this way, being treated with love, respect, empathy and kindness opens up a deep, deep wound in so many of us who were abandoned or hurt in early relationships.  Our fear is awakened and then we can start to blame ourselves for feeling this vulnerable, but we should not.  We should wrap both loving arms around ourselves metaphorically and just let the part of us that holds all these feelings of tenderness, longing, fear, pain and vulnerability express until the river we dammed up inside of us for so long is no longer such a raging torrent of hurt and pain but runs clear and clean and open and free in the way life and love designed it to.