[stanmore][relax]

Tag: touch deprivation

There were people I lost so fast I didn't even know I was grieving. And then there were the versions of me that went with them — the one who thought he had more time, the one who believed the story we were all telling each other about how fine we were. Nobody held a service for those. You don't get a casserole when a part of yourself stops being survivable. For years I treated intolerable feeling the way I treated most things that scared me: I made it useful, or I made it small, or I found something that would take the edge off long enough to function. Which worked. Until the body started keeping its own records… There was a version of me that could not be in the room with his own feelings. Not metaphorically — I mean I would leave. Dissociate out through the top of my head, or drink toward the edge of something, or find a body to press against until the feeling got crowded out. I didn't know that was a skill I'd built. I thought I was just coping. The first time a breath actually landed — slow, deliberate, down into the belly during something that felt intolerable — I didn't feel better. I felt more. Which was the thing I'd been avoiding. But I also didn't die. And that was new information. Breath doesn't fix intolerable emotion. It doesn't dissolve it or reframe it or make it mean something cleaner. What it does is slower and stranger than that — it keeps you in the room with yourself long enough for the state to move, which states do, when you stop fighting the arrival… For a long time I was very good at not feeling things. I had systems — substances, sex, the right face for the right room, a version of myself that could walk into almost any situation and perform competence. And underneath all of it, something I could not name and definitely could not afford to let anyone see. The cost wasn't obvious at first. It looked like capability. It looked like I was handling it… For a long time, home felt like the moment just before someone decided I was too much. I chased that feeling for years — in rooms, in men, in substances that took the edge off the waiting. I didn't know I was homesick for something I'd never actually had. The template was laid down so early: love as something you earn, proximity as something you manage, belonging as a negotiation you could lose at any moment. And the body memorised all of it. Not as a wound exactly — more like a posture. A readiness. A held breath that became so constant I forgot it was held… Some sessions relax you. This one asks you to arrive. 🕯️ For a long time I didn't know the difference between wanting something and needing to escape. They felt identical — the same pull in the chest, the same forward lean into whatever was next. Compulsion moves like that. It gets you out of the body by making you think you're finally in it. The distinction I keep coming back to, the one that took years and a lot of damage to find, is whether the wanting leaves me more here or less… There's a kind of contact that happens before anything touches skin. I've had sessions where the most significant moment was just — being looked at. Not assessed. Not tracked for signs of distress. Just met, in the eyes, while hands were already working. My system did something it rarely does mid-session: it stopped rehearsing. The touch was skilled, it knew what it was doing, but the look was what gave me permission to actually be there for it. I've thought about this a lot since I started working bodies myself. How much of what we call 'safe touch' is actually being received by someone who's present enough to see you while they're doing it. Hands can be technically impeccable and still feel like no one's home. And a look — unhurried, not searching for anything — can do more for a dysregulated nervous system than pressure or heat or the most careful structural work. I don't fully understand why. Something about being witnessed while being touched closes a loop the body's been waiting on. Like the contact only becomes real when someone else confirms you're there... You didn't learn to want — you learned to spike. Desire got tangled early with the jolt of something forbidden, the heat that meant you were finally, briefly, out of your own head. So now when arousal rises, it arrives with its old travel companions: urgency, a little shame, the subtle hum of wrongness that was wired in before you had a word for any of it. That shame was never yours. It was handed down, pressed into you so young it started to feel like character. And because you mistook it for who you are, discipline became punishment — another way to confirm the story rather than interrupt it… Pleasure doesn't live where you've been looking for it.