Cuddling and therapy.

Andy1996

Good afternoon, so I was having a virtual session with somebody a while back. And we talked about cuddling and therapy. And I mentioned to her that I wish that Therapist could do some sort of platonic cuddling during their sessions, because I feel like it would help the person which they are talking to open up to them. Not only that, but I definitely have looked into cuddling and its health benefits.
It definitely would be nice if a therapist could provide some sort of cuddling experience during their meetings. Because I have noticed that when I am cuddling with someone, I definitely tend to open up to them a lot more.

EmeraldFishy

Not a professional at either by any means here, but I think that'd be a really neat idea! I feel the same way about tending to open up a lot more with physical contact.

Andy1996

I know. I typically find that when I am having a session with someone and if I’m getting my hand scratched or simply weighing in the lap and getting my hair stroked. I definitely tend to open up a lot more. Especially if they have a soothing voice.

Babichev

It would be interesting to have a conversation about that with an actual psychotherapist. I suspect it would complicate even more the problem of transference/countertransference plus make both the client and therapist more vulnerable to accusations of impropriety.

achetocuddle

@Babichev That's what I was thinking. That has trouble written all over it.

TNNative

@Babichev and @achetocuddle … I totally agree. I am pretty sure professional therapy associations have boundaries and ethics outlining how to address this topic.

Nature_Lover_

There is a cuddler by the name of Janet Trevino who has attended therapy sessions with clients and held them while they did their talk therapy. I’m probably grossly misquoting her process so I encourage anyone interested to independently verify and research but I love that people are thinking outside the box as a whole.

RadiantHugs

I've had a couple of therapy sessions where I invited my cuddle pro; She held me as the talk therapist was doing EMDR. It greatly helped me process some of the early traumatic memories around touch which I had a hard time accessing otherwise. This, however, was only after several cuddle sessions with that pro and I had developed enough trust with the cuddle pro that she wouldn't breach the confidentiality of the sessions. There are several pros who I'll happily go to for cuddle sessions but unlikely to invite them for a co-therapy session like this - this is where the pro's training absolutely matters. I'm not trying to take away from those fine pros who don't have any training, but this is one sort of situation where having training provides a certain assurance that the pro is familiar with and understands the importance of confidentiality, which is absolutely crucial for this to work. Furthermore, it was much easier to convince my therapist to go along with the arrangement, as I could point to the pro's credentials and assure her I was bringing in someone legitimate, not a random person I found on a website.

quixotic_life

@CuddlesByDeep ~ That's a really interesting idea! @Andy1996 ~ I wonder if your therapist would be open to this and if one of the people you're comfortable with would be open too? Seems like it'd be worth it to at least ask and start a conversation around it.

Andy1996

I would definitely like to talk to a therapist about it for sure. It seems like an interesting idea.

Minestrone101

There was a massage teacher at my old university that began combining massage with an aspect of psychotherapy. I'll have to look him up some day.

CuddleDuncan

@CuddlesByDeep there is some work being done on bilateral stimulation as an aid to therapy with trauma survivors. Listening to left-right beats or watching something going left-right seems to help.

My feeling is that over the next twenty years the serious talking therapy world is going to move away from the model of two people in a nondescript room to one of two people in a nondescript room with one of them doing something else while talking that helps with the talking. I bet it will turn out there are a dozen different things, of which cuddling/touch will I think turn out to be one of the most powerful in certain circumstances.

CambridgeGuy

There is also a modern context here, that acts as a barrier to this idea. We have become so concerned about historic abuses (and rightly so) that safeguarding concerns now override our natural desire to simply hug a person (child or adult) when they need comforting. It is a loss to our modern society that we have become frightened of touch, and that it could be misinterpreted. That’s why I like this counter-cultural approach by CC, to rediscover the benefits of cuddling and hugging, but I do wish more people would become aware of this community. It’s great, but there are not enough of us

TNNative

@CuddlesByDeep ... What a great idea. I am so glad you were able to get the coordination worked out for that to happen.

ubergigglefritz

So cool. I would be so honored to be present and assist in actual therapy sessions. 🤗💜

RadiantHugs

@quixotic_life @CuddleDuncan @TNNative yes, it actually worked remarkably well. Not wanting to go into too much of this in a public forum, I'll only share one of the more trivial examples. So much of my early childhood trauma centers around being in a boarding school, where daily access to loving touch wasn't a thing. Having the cuddle pro there really helped my process. EMDR focuses on triggers which replay an unpleasant sequence of memories in your brain, and then aims to reprocess and replace them with pleasant ones so when the trigger happens again the brain can hopefully replay a more pleasant frame of events instead. It is in the reprocessing bit where having loving nurturing touch really helped for me. Now if someone says something nasty to me, instead of replaying an unpleasant set of memories of being beaten up on the playground and at the end of the day feeling helpless, my mind instead replays being held lovingly at the end of it all and feeling like I belong; it takes so much of the power from the trigger which would previously cause me to just shut down. EMDR is pretty powerful stuff, and having the cuddle pro there really helped accelerate the process.

@Andy1996 My psychologist wasn't too crazy about this idea in the beginning when I suggested it, but results speak volumes. She is fully on board now. If you think a process like this can help you, definitely bring it up with your psychologist!

@ubergigglefritz we can discuss offline about how it all worked.