I don’t have time to say everything I’d like on the subject but @xandriarain I feel for you and have had those same conversations with many people including family. It’s hard. You’re doing good work and there are others on your side trying to help break stigmas and educate people.
@justjennn Thank you for your post and I would love to connect with you sometime. I have family in Boulder CO that I just introduced to the concept of cuddle therapy and I’d be interested in maybe pointing them in the direction of your events, and am definitely also interested in connecting with another professional doing the work to better educate people about cuddling.
@KozyKim I have shared with my talk therapist who is a License Clinical Social Worker the work that I do as a “cuddle therapist” or “professional cuddler” and she is absolutely 100% supportive of it. She’s started asking her friends if they knew it existed and has asked for their honest thoughts on the matter. She has even recommended to some of her clients who struggle with various health issues to look into professional cuddling to address needs that talk therapy does not address.
There may not be specific academic research on cuddling yet, but it is something I’m in the process of figuring out how to pursue.
Below is an excellent TED titled “Why We Hold Hands” and it lightly goes into how that form of social touch does facilitate a sort of co-emotional regulation effect. The researcher in the video was a professor of mine last year. I spoke about cuddling in my class briefly, but intend to speak with him some one on one and get his insight into the best path forward in pursuit of cuddling research. Maybe one day I’ll make my own TED talk called “Why We Spoon”.
I agree with all of that @KozyKim. The lewd selfies issue deserves its own thread and probably has one, but you're right that it's relevant here as it probably gives a lot of new visitors negative ideas about this website or the concept. It has certainly made me suspect that some 'pros' are abusing CC and making life harder for legitimate ones.
@calmcontact perhaps you could add to Dr. Coan's work by giving a talk on how to Cuddle Comfortably within the confines of an MRI scanner. 😂️ Given that there is already a fair bit of literature on the kinds of brain region and hormonal activation involved in human & animal bonding, I think a far more interesting and helpful approach than the immediate effects that Coan was talking about, could be to look for more long-term and cumulative effects of cuddling or intimacy.
For instance, some people have claimed that some long-term deleterious effects of sleep deprivation, which they call a "sleep debt", may be reversible but take longer to heal. Whether that includes cumulative damage from oxidative stress, I don't know. (Looks at dark-ringed eye sockets in the mirror...) Given the knowledge on how early-life experiences of child abuse, neglect or orphaning can drastically affect adult personality, making them prone to addiction in later life for example, I wonder whether between those extremes it is possible to measure something analogous as a "cuddle debt" in those of us who have spent periods of months or years in our lives without a hug or a cuddle or holding someone's hand. Could there be some detectable long-term damage to the body specific to a lack of touch, and how is that affected by a single or repeated cuddle therapy intervention, both proximally and over the long term? I wonder whether there could be a rebound or withdrawal noticeable after the positive affects in some people, if someone with an addictive personality could form something like a drug dependency with the same dopaminergic system, and could you illustrate how someone is affected at different timescales of seconds, minutes, hours, days... after a cuddle.
Of course that could never be studied from a purely Positivist approach, as we can all intuit how a single intimate interaction could be recalled fondly or longingly (or otherwise, if it went wrong) by someone long after it occurred, and affect their mood whenever they think of it. I guess there would have to be some of that measuring of "subjective wellbeing", which ironically could stand to be greatly improved in its rigour.
Anyway, I'm getting a bit off-topic here. >_>