How can we make cuddle therapy mainstream?

xandriarain

I had an unpleasant encounter with a woman today who assumed I was a 'hooker' and that there was no skill involved in my work other than cuddling (this was very infuriating because I have done so much work to educate the public and destigmatize cuddle therapy). The woman I spoke to was a career psychologist because despite all the efforts I have put in this year to put myself out there and improve professionally, my revenue has slightly declined from last year. I think the problem is that cuddle therapy, while it is slowly becoming more well-known, is still not mainstream or widely accepted. People don't understand the service, so traditional marketing does not work. All of this is to say I am fed up, and I want to do something BIG that people can't ignore so that EVERYONE knows what cuddle therapy is. So please give me your ideas.

KamikaziNinja86

Honestly, she probably felt threatened. If people start doing more cuddle therapy it then takes money out of her pocket. Some people just go to a therapist to talk about stuff and if they can get that PLUS human connection then it's going to be a no brainer.

xandriarain

@KamikaziNinja86 she is a career psychologist/ career consultant; I am in no way her competition.

JillianCuddles

There will always be people that are against what they don’t fully understand and are uncomfortable with. There are people who think psychology is harmful and that therapists spread falsehood. But I’m sure the woman you spoke with would have something negative to say about those people as well.
Just remember you are part of the few that are more open minded to do the work that takes more warmth and connection than a pen and paper can give.

Ophelia1617

I feel you in this! Just to let you know, I’m a social worker and former therapist and there’s a lot of animosity within the field of mental health due to multiple degree and licensing tracks and yes the competition is there. I started professional cuddling because honestly I hate filing insurance and natural neurotransmitter release through touch therapy is healthier in my opinion than medication. We are not prostitutes. We are providers. 💜

CuddleWho

For better or worse, I think pro cuddling will probably never be mainstream. People think it's weird because it really is weird. Paying for cuddles (which, to be clear, I do often) is just strange.

What I'm about to say may be perceived as insulting, for which I'm sorry, but it really is how I feel. Pro cuddling is not therapy. It's just cuddling. It can have beneficial effects, but I don't think it's appropriate for you or anyone else to call it therapy.

As for the woman assuming you are a sex worker - that is really too bad, I can see how that is hurtful. But the fact is that sex workers masquerading as cuddlers are rampant. The longer I've been involved in cuddling, the more I am convinced that sex work among cuddlers is not just an occasional issue, it's truly pervasive. So, unfortunately, the assumption from people outside the community that pro cuddlers are prostitutes actually isn't far from the truth in many cases.

I do respect that you take your work seriously, care about your clients, and try to maintain a high standard of professionalism.

Minestrone101

One thing people don't talk about is how arrogant some therapists are. Society reveres them now and as professionals that guide the personal and professional lives of many clients as a living, they sometimes are raised on a podium.

Ive had peers, mentors,and friends that have become therapists (not to mention having seen more than one therapist), and I can say I'm not always impressed by their character or knowledge. Not that I'm knocking therapy in general, bc I've benefited greatly from the process as well.

I think social media and podcasts are ways to introduce and discuss the topic in a way that pple can receptive (and a way to broadcast your signal and maybe earn a second revenue source).

Besides the pandemic, I feel pple need this activity and service more than ever : technology is reducing in-person interactions and people's connection to their body and to the interaction w their with others, millennial and particularly gen z are said to experience anxiety and depression due to heavy social media consumption, etc.

Everyone can benefit from cuddling imo.

And sorry you had to feel judged by someone!

PeopleLikeUs

It would be interesting to get stats on how many people need and seek cuddles, take or leave cuddles, only cuddle partners, or don't want or need cuddles at all. If the world was like us I think cuddles would have broke mainstream long ago. A sex-worker friend of mine told me she could never cuddle a stranger (figure that one out) because it was way too personal. My best friend who's an amazing AA sponsor feels the same way about it. There is something about personality types, upbringing, culture, and basic responses to touch that can make someone want or reject cuddling.

As for being accused of sex work... by a therapist? There is a strict segment of society that is extremely old school with their relationship expectations, sort of a backlash to the less traditional styles popping up everywhere. Maybe she's into a more traditional, prudish scene that views what we do as unstructured and boundary-less, which is anything but true for us, but still a thing. There is a movement in some psychological circles toward traditional older-style relationships. What we're doing is nuts to some people.

friendlyhugging

I'm not a professional obviously, but it has crossed my mind that there is no coordinated marketing, only the individual efforts of professionals who have a talent for marketing. If resources were pooled somehow, a more continuous marketing campaign could increase public awareness of cuddle therapy.

coregulate

I have been wondering the same thing. Hardly anyone knows this even exists. I talk about it a lot but thats about the extent of my advertising.

I work with a client with childhood abuse trauma (he gave me the green light to talk about this). He has been in traditional talk therapy for a decade but he says before doing cuddle sessions he literally didn't know what it felt like to love another person.. Since doing cuddle sessions regularly for more than a year I see him as this whole different person who laughs and feels love for lots of people.

A decade of therapy did not get him to that point.

The embodied practice of feeling safe and being nurtured in a cuddle is surely not allowed to be called therapy but the healing can be very powerful.

CuddleBarista1

Maybe professional cuddlers can go to multiple youtube channels such as vice, try guys, truly, buzzfeed, etc. And do collab videos with them to show what it is like being a professional cuddler. It takes awhile for some things to be normalized.

Ophelia1617

I agree with the statement that cuddling should not be considered therapy. It’s very common for therapists to have their license suspended for benign reasons like lack of CEU completion during license renewal. However, the most common reason for license being revoked are reports of inappropriate relationships between therapist and client. The point I’m trying to make is the same thing she was criticizing cuddling for can happen in the therapy community as well. Both professions have to deal with stigma, and the early days of mental health therapy had to deal with accusations of being charlatans. So there are a lot of similarities because there was a time when seeking mental health services was considered taboo. Cuddling is a new concept and as pioneers in a new market we will be criticized. It just comes with the territory. I wish you luck. I do feel this will eventually become more mainstream because unfortunately our mainstream society is becoming more digital and platonic human face-to-face interaction is becoming less and less as our society advances. More people are going to start seeking this out over time. We are just entering in at a time where the trend is at the beginning stage. This is going to be met with backlash and criticism.

justjennn

@xandriarain please know that I am here in it with you. I am feeling all of the same things. I regularly get asked how what I do is different from sex work. I often have to go into quite depths to explain to people before I can break down their cognitive dissonance. I am going through something in my personal life that has me in touch with many people in the Sheriff's Dept, as well as victims advocates. When I had extensive amounts of time to talk with them about what I do for work, they were shocked that our sex education curriculum does not include talking about boundaries and consent as much as it talks about anal sex with five year olds. I ALSO recently had lunch with an incoming senator and representative from the House who asked loads of questions about cuddle therapy. I talk about it everywhere I go. I wear my "may I cuddle you?" shirt everywhere I go. It's SO much work to get the stigma removed and it's work that is vitally necessary. I will keep doing this work with you, Xandria, every day that I am able. Call or text me and we can share our woes about what it is to do this work. I'm here for you and with you.

CuddlingCricket

@xandriarain I would continue to use TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts to educate people about cuddle therapy. Maybe add a catchy caption to your videos to hook in a larger audience. 🤗

TxTom

I agree with @CuddleWho and @Ophelia1617 in that cuddling is not therapy. From my layman's understanding, therapy is meant to help someone get over, or get through, some kind of experience.

Cuddling doesn't help me to get over craving human touch or affection. Speaking only for myself, cuddling is quite addictive. The more I cuddle, the more I want to cuddle.

@xandriarain Bringing platonic cuddling into the mainstream will just take time.

Minestrone101

I think folks are getting caught up on the linguistics; aromatherapy won't heal your childhood trauma either nor do the essential oils have a license after years of training. It's just a name assigned to an activity.

OP was talking about the concern about being considered a prostitute despite her publicizing the act of cuddling. I don't think she stated that she's a healer or doctor.

CuddleWho

aromatherapy won't heal your childhood trauma either nor do the essential oils have a license after years of training. It's just a name assigned to an activity.

Indeed, and aromatherapy is pseudoscientific nonsense promoted by con artists. You’re not making the case that you think you are.

The dictionary definition of therapy, which I think matches with what it means in popular conception, is “treatment intended to heal a disorder.” Pro cuddling is not treatment for a disorder. It’s cuddling. There are people who want physical affection, and for whatever reason find paying for it to be an expedient way to get it. That’s it. It’s not therapy. It’s not a medical treatment. Words mean things.

Minestrone101

Aromatherapy, retail therapy, and massage therapy... the descriptive and prescriptive usage of words doesn't change the original content of OP's post.

“treatment intended to heal a disorder.” Pro cuddling is not treatment for a disorder.

Yep. Just off topic. The big picture is the public perception and awareness of platonic cuddling, not whether it is a legitimate medical practice.

Maybe people can start correcting her grammar too.

friendlyhugging

@cuddlewho It intends to heal anxiety or depression

CuddleWho

“Retail therapy” is a joke phrase. It’s meant to be ironic. It’s baffling that you’re somehow using that as justification for seriously calling something else therapy.

Massage therapists have pretty intensive training about anatomy, how to relieve pain, heal injuries, etc. It might be warranted to question the legitimacy of massage as a healing modality, but it is at least a legitimate and plausible attempt.

Can I open a bookstore and say it will repair your car? Can I open a gym and say it’s dentistry? Can I open a grocery store and say I’m conducting surgery? No. Words mean something, and it’s especially important to be honest when you’re trying to make money off of what you’re providing.

A bookstore is not a mechanic. A gym is not dentistry. Cuddling is not therapy. Cuddlers provide physical affection. They do not treat disease. If they say otherwise, they are misleading you to try to make money off of you, just like “aromatherapists” are misleading you to try to make money off of you.

PeopleLikeUs

@xandriarain - Your psychologist friend's use of the term "hooker" and lecture about how your cuddle therapy involves no skill is shaming. Most mental health professionals are growing into using the term "sex work" because it is actually work and it does involve skill.

@CuddleWho - The Cambridge Dictionary definition of therapy is:
[a treatment that helps someone feel better, grow stronger, etc., especially after an illness:
occupational therapy
speech therapy
group therapy
joining a club can be a therapy for loneliness.]

If art is therapy and music is therapy (Both of those have gone mainstream post-1980's) then for sure cuddling and massage are therapies for people who are touch deprived. "Sex therapy" and professionally prescribed sex surrogates have been around for a long time.

cde123

Not this again. Cuddling can certainly be helpful in treating a variety of named disorders, including some listed in the DSM-5. For example an anxious person might need exposure therapy, or somebody who's been dealing with a narcissist may need somebody neutral to listen.

No, cuddling is not licensed therapy. It is not going to diagnose you with anything. The intent is not to solve psychological problems you may be encountering, except for touch starvation. But if during a cuddle session through conversation you begin to recognize and name patterns in how you act or react, and learn something about yourself, it's just achieved a therapeutic outcome.

PeopleLikeUs

There's also such a thing as placebo therapy.

https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/placebo-therapy

snuggly_sloth

Don't downplay @Cuddlewho's point about a definition of "cuddle therapy" or dismiss it as purely pedantic, because this is actually very important to answering the thread's question.

@xandriarain raised an issue with a professional having a different idea of what "cuddle therapy" involved, and asked how we can spread awareness of it.
@PeopleLikeUs suggests it counts as a therapy based on a general dictionary definition of a therapy

To explain how the definition is important and how Cuddle Therapy could become mainstream, we can look at how it is currently different from practices such as massage therapy. Not how it is practiced in action, but how it is situated as a profession.

Professional Standards:
Massage Therapy for example has professional practice bodies, who define the bounds of what actions count as "Swedish Massage" or "Indian Massage", who accredit training courses that teach people how to apply one of those practices, and who then award certification that someone is qualified to apply their knowledge as a therapy and is unlikely to do harm through incompetence.
By having that standard, there is then something to study and compare against in order to establish the medical efficacy of this practice as a candidate therapy/treatment for specific ailments.

Definition usefulness in research, e.g. acupuncture:

Now, comparing massage to a dextrose pill is not very helpful when determining its effectiveness as an intervention, because different non-medical interventions can have larger placebo or nocebo effects. For instance, an isotonic salt-water injection can have much stronger positive or negative effects on many diseases than a sugar pill, because people perceive an injected medicine very differently to taking a pill, even though both are doing nothing to directly help or hinder the patient's ailment! That is why it is very helpful to have as clear a definition of the practice as possible.
For example, Acupuncture has a clearly defined map of places on human anatomy where its practitioners place needles in order to be within the definition of its practice. Having that clear boundary has allowed some well-controlled studies to take place amongst many junk ones, by comparing accredited practitioners with a control group of "sham" therapists who intentionally place needles in positions away from that map's permitted locations while minimising harm.
See "Acupuncture: Does it alleviate pain and are there serious risks? A review of reviews" by Ernst, Lee and Choi, 2011, for an overview of this.
For a specific example, one review of "excellent" quality that they quoted, by Manheimer et al., "Acupuncture for peripheral joint osteoarthritis" 2010, concluded that "Sham-controlled trials show statistically significant benefit".

Cuddle Therapy has no such professional body as far as I have seen. With a quick search for a CT standards body, there are no results, but searching for a CT training course, a couple of candidates turned up - one called Cuddle Academy, a single-page website that presently looks like a scam to cash-in with unaccredited training and has a disclaimer that information on the site may not be up to date, and another called "Cuddle Practitioners International", which appears to tack itself onto the International Institute for Complementary Therapists and the "CMA" (which by searching seems to be California Medical Association) for accreditation of its diploma.
Neither of these provide a clear definition for the practice or establish who within the field supports them. Cuddle Comfort provides some guidelines on how to practice, but as far as I'm aware as of yet we lack a clear published definition with some precedent as to why that definition is accepted, and by whom.
There have also been few different networks and meetup groups organising things such as 'cuddle puddles', often organised by professionals with other certifications such as in Massage Therapy, Psychology, etc., and these groups have been feeling around at what could become a definition, beginning with "keep it platonic" for example.

Why is that such a huge problem?
Suppose we get a very eloquent, experienced and charismatic pro cuddler to go on a national news channel interview or Joe Rogan's podcast, and present the benefits of this practice to millions of people. They do a great job of describing how they hold a cuddle session, how it affects their clients' state of mind, and all the positive feedback that they have received from clients. Then they make the claim that @cde123 just did - "Cuddling can certainly be helpful in treating a variety of named disorders".
The host then asks, okay, which disorders? Who studied this, when and where? How are you so certain?
That's where the lack of definition comes to haunt you. With a quick literature search, it appears that there has not been a single academic study on Cuddle Therapy! The only article that shows up with it in the title there was an anecdotal report of a single intervention with a sick infant, which does not provide a clear definition of CT.
That's not to say that benefits of physical touch have not been established, as there is copious research showing how vital physical touch is to early human development, for instance how premature babies in incubators have better developmental outcomes with more physical contact, and babies left to sleep alone in cots are more likely to suddenly die, but research on the benefits of a professional cuddle therapy to adults? Nothing visible.
This lack of scientific support could provide a point on which to ridicule the practice.

Suppose the interviewer then has a sex worker call in to the show, who says that they provide cuddling as a service, and that in their view when it turns sexual it still counts as "cuddle therapy", and that we are viewing it all wrong.
Without an accepted standard for what counts as "Cuddle Therapy", how can we argue that their point of view is wrong or that there should be separate definitions for practices that are platonic or sexual, that ours is legitimate, and that ours deserves attention?
This difference has similarities to the difference in definition between "Acupuncture" and "sham control therapy" described in the side-point above. Where acupuncturists have their map of places to put needles, we have our map of where it is acceptable to touch someone within Cuddle Therapy, and a sex worker whose practice does not stay within that map could function as a useful point of comparison for study.
That is not a suggestion, in case anyone is wondering, just a thought experiment.

What will it take to solve this / make it mainstream then?
In order to have research on the effectiveness of Cuddle Therapy, we need an accepted definition of it. In order to have an accepted definition, we need people to accept that definition on record. What is the standard way to do this? Hold a conference on it:

When you want to establish an experimental field of practice as one that has a concrete foundation to work from, you typically invite all the people you can find who claim to have lots of experience practicing in your field, and over a day or even a few days, have them share their points of view, argue over differences and hash out a definition to start from.
That definition might not be perfect, or might need to be amended in a future conference. You might also end up with more than one competing definition, in which case you give them an extra word in their names to differentiate them in the same way we do with "Indian Massage" and "Swedish Massage" as related but separate practices, and accept those definitions as such. Then at the end you get as many people as didn't walk out over the course of the conference to sign an agreement as to how they define this/these professional practice(s), and you publish that agreement.

snuggly_sloth

...Continued, due to post length limit:

If you need to come back next year and heal differences with a party who walked out of the conference the first time, that's ok, as long as you have somewhere to start.
If everything goes amazingly well and we all agree on one foundational definition, you might even find someone in attendance who stands out as a great candidate to be President of a new body to steward the training and study of this professional practice, or even a whole board of great candidates! Then you can send them as representatives to be interviewed and improve public perceptions of Cuddle Therapy.

So then the question becomes, who will take the initiative to organise such a conference?

entwine

Very well written @snuggly_sloth

It is important to get the phrasing right. Until then, I agree that you can't shut someone down for thinking they are wrong.

coordinated marketing

This is a good one. I'm sure like most things, it takes the small few to spark a movement/change. Holding a conference/getting on a big podcast.

But have to accept that some people won't ever get it. Just like some think psychology is silly...or chiropractic is silly. Won't ever convince everyone. Like others had said, there are even sex workers who don't cuddle. And even married couples that don't.

Shouldn't stop you from trying though. Good luck.

PeopleLikeUs

If someone takes self-help action and it's therapeutic, they got therapy.

therapy
4.) any act, hobby, task, program, etc., that relieves tension. - Dictionary.com

Andy1996

I disagree with that therapist. I find that cuddling can actually be very beneficial especially when it comes to opening up to someone about some thing. I certainly wish I can experience cuddle therapy. Because I definitely can see how beneficial it can be. Often, I do find that if I am cuddling with someone I do tend to open up to them a lot more, because of the fact that I am experiencing physical touch.

KozyKim

I read your post and I know this sounds like a silly idea but the very first thing that came to my mind was a flash mob cuddle party. You know people used to do the flash mobs we should just get out in public and cuddle where everybody can see us

KozyKim

That’s honestly why I never felt very comfortable in therapy sessions it seems so cold they were far away, i’m sure most people don’t want their therapist to sit next to them. But I find it easier to talk about my life when someone’s close by and someone that I know or have gotten to know. When I actually had some kind of healing it was usually when someone was hugging me or when someone was near me holding me or taking their time with me.

KozyKim

No disrespect to anybody’s profile, but what if we did bring a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist on the site to check it out. She would probably stick with her claim because a lot of profiles are very provocative showing a lot of cleavage. A lot of shots are taking with someone just showing their butt. I thought that our butts were off-limits because of the no touching of the bathing suit area rule. So I sometimes wonder that same thing to maybe not with your profile but with some others. And my latest cuddler said that a professional offered him extras for an extra price and I’m sure you’ve heard that before. He of course banned her. I guess it’s the nature of the intimacy and cuddling. But I would like to see a Site where they get rid of more of those kind of pictures or at least talk to the people about getting a better picture. I seen where people have clothes on but you can’t tell. So they’re not breaking the rules but it just looks really compromising and it doesn’t look professional.