How Bodywork Helped Me Find Healing From Trauma

Though I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I somehow knew that both relief and release were no longer optional. They were necessities.

When I walked into the room, undressed, and laid down on the table, I expected the session to go as usual.

I’d chat with my acupuncturist about where I hurt—in my body and my mind—and she’d talk me through some of it while applying essential oils to particular points on my body. She’d then open her packets of needles and begin inserting them at points that aligned with where I was experiencing pain. As someone who lives with chronic pain and PTSD, I’d done this a million times before. But that day was different.

My acupuncturist rubbed my face with an essential oil blend because I’d shared with her the intensity of sinus pressure in my head and ears. She rubbed my chest with the same oil because I’d complained of weird knots appearing and then disappearing on my body. She then began inserting needles. At first, it was fine. Normal, even, if there is such a thing for being at the liberty of another person inserting needles into your body.

But then, she inserted a needle in a point on my chest, near the place where one of the knots had just disappeared. That’s when the volcano erupted. Emotions I didn’t know I had burst from me like an explosion of wails.

I cried—no, sobbed—in a way I hadn’t in a very long time. I’m sure, in hindsight, the look on my face was comical. I was overwhelmed with sorrow and grief, but was totally confused as to why it surged from my body in such a way. My face was probably a mixture of emotional release and “What the hell?!” After the session, I felt as though I’d run a marathon.

I also felt a peace and calm that I’d never experienced in my forty-four years of life. I’d walked into the room wanting a momentary respite, and left with the sensation that the trauma that had been trapped in my body was making its way out. It was mostly a feeling, as I hadn’t quite worked out what was happening in the moment.

I suppose I should have known that what happened that day was possible. I am the quintessential spa person. I love all kinds of bodywork services, and if my budget was unlimited, I’d have several different practitioners on-call daily.

One of my favorite types of bodywork is the Korean body scrub. It’s certainly not for the modest. Nevertheless, I will strip down to my Garden of Eden onesie, jump on a table, and let someone scrub my body down to the white meat in a minute. I love it. My mother? Not interested. Not even a little bit. And that’s fine. I do it enough for the both of us. In fact, over the last few years, I’ve completely immersed myself in holistic methods of dealing with stress, anxiety, and physical ailments.

However, it wasn’t until this surreal experience with my acupuncturist that I realized my affinity for bodywork was rooted in more than just a need for relaxation. Through therapy and deep trauma work, specifically modalities like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), I figured out that the non-sexual intimate touch I received from my massage therapists, acupuncturist, etc. had become a way for me to heal more deeply. A way to feel safe and human in my body.

The non-sexual intimate touch I received from my massage therapists, acupuncturist, etc. had become a way for me to . . . feel safe and human in my body.

I wondered if I was typical. Particularly since the COVID-19 virus has now outright eliminated—hopefully only temporarily—my present ability to experience that kind of intimate touch, I am even more curious about my need for it. Are there others like me who crave non-sexual intimate touch? Why? My curiosity led me to ask the Black women around me—including those who work in bodywork and healing professions—about their own experiences.

Annette Deigh, a licensed social worker and mental health therapist in the metro Philadelphia area, was one of the first to respond. “Perhaps non-sexual intimate touch is so significant to me because I am a black woman AND a survivor of sexual assault,” Deigh told me in a message. “I cannot think of non-sexual intimate touch without thinking about how the opposite has impacted me.”

She went on to say, “At times, sexual intimate touch can still be triggering for me, even years removed from my assaults and after extensive treatment and work put into my self-care regimen. So to have positive non-sexual intimate touch in the form of mind-body work, and even from the soothing hands of my loctician, is very healing for me…”

As a survivor of sexual trauma too, I get this. And I received variations of this response over and over again.

About receiving non-sexual intimate touch, Amanda Green of Philadelphia wrote, “[it] makes me feel cared for and restores my energy. It reminds me that the aches and pains I feel are real, that my body needs to release the tension. There’s been an expectation on Black women’s bodies to give or to be used for healing and not to receive healing for ourselves. We’re humans who need healing touch, too.”

This resonates with me. There were too many times prior to that day in my acupuncturist’s office when I’d become nearly comfortable with spreading myself thin. I’d found myself speaking about the importance of self-care to others, encouraging friends and colleagues to go to therapy and “get free,” investing in my dreams, business, and family and yet finding no release for myself; no place to feel human; no place for the pain to go.

In these conversations, a theme emerged: Non-sexual touch—touch that humanizes and grounds us—is a near-necessity for many Black women. It helps to heal from traumatic experiences and counters the diminishment we experience in everyday life.

Roberta K. Timothy, an assistant lecturer of global health, ethics, and human rights at York University suggests that the level of racism Black people experience causes a significant amount of grief and that one way to work through that grief is to “engage in intimacy (or massage) in a safe space — to reconstruct the power and healing possibilities of safe touch and prevent [us] from holding violent materials in your body, mind and soul.”

Adrienne Carwheel, a holistic health educator in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, explained in an email why touch is so powerful in general: “Touch lets us know we are connected to those we love. Sometimes in families, touch is withheld or initiated inappropriately. Massage, acupuncture, other bodywork allows our bodies to release what we hold on to. Our bodies are so intricately made that we are wired for connection and survival. Touch taps into that, allowing the body to speak, letting go of that which doesn’t serve us.”

However, for Black women specifically, we seem to be particularly drawn to modalities that call for non-sexual intimate touch. Carwheel continued, “As black women, we [often choose to not] allow touch to be tainted. It simply is a means of healing.”

Abeje Bandele, an esthetician based in Lexington, Kentucky, said via message, “Receiving a service helps [me and other] black women feel beautiful, important, and like the many sacrifices we make are worthwhile. We can suffer from racism, abuse, and not feeling like we’re good enough, so we need that positive reinforcement to be able to go through life.”

There is an even more expansive reason for this. I would submit that Black women carry traumas, including our everyday encounters with misogyny, over-sexualization, and racial microaggressions, and one of the ways we seek healing or a reprieve from these experiences is through non-sexual intimate touch.

As a college professor, I often face white colleagues that run the spectrum from “mildly biased” to “down right racist.” I’ve had whole bodies of scholarship on race and gender dismissed by these individuals in conversations and meetings because the scholars behind the theories I was presenting were Black.

Prior to teaching full-time and running an independent publishing and content creation company, I worked as a managing editor at a small publishing house. I clearly remember days when the levels of ignorance were off the charts—like the time a co-worker asked me how I was doing; when I responded with “hanging in there,” he responded with, “well, at least it’s not from a noose.”

Yes. That happened.

These kinds of interactions sent me running to a massage therapist as I tried to figure out how to not internalize the barrage of microaggressions. Not too long after the “noose” comment, I budgeted for monthly bodywork services. Though I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I somehow knew that both relief and release were no longer optional. They were necessities.

It’s not conscious. It’s not even necessarily something we set out to do with any real intention unless that’s the work we’re unpacking. But the active need that many Black women have to be touched—and sometimes even the resistance to it, as in the case of my mother—seems to point directly to a kind of compensation for or reconciliation of historical and present-day trauma.

Bessel van der Kolk, a scholar on PTSD and author of The Body Keeps the Score, wrote that, “Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies.” It’s entirely possible, then, that non-sexual intimate touch is a way for Black women who have experienced great amounts of trauma to return to our bodies in the face of overwhelming and oftentimes devastating circumstances and environments.

There’s been plenty of discourse lately around the very real need for men to experience platonic touch. The New York Times even ran an article on it. Several prominent male-identified celebrities have been in our newsfeeds solely because of their public displays of affection and vulnerability. But there hasn’t been much on the impact of non-sexual touch on women. There has especially not been much discussion about the particular intersection that Black women find themselves in when it comes to desiring intimate, non-sexual touch.

This is likely because platonic touch is assumed to be common among women. It’s assumed that women are comfortable with being touched—an assumption rife with an unsaid devaluation of women’s agency over and understanding of our bodies. That narrative must change.

We cannot ignore the impact that historical trauma and pervasive misogynoir has had on Black women, driving us to bodywork practitioners in droves. In fact, since the early 2000s, Black women have increasingly begun using massage therapy as a way to manage pain and stress. The truth is, daily, Black women can find themselves countering the many skewed media narratives designed to box us into stereotypes and categories that are incomplete at best.

These images vacillate between the docile, Mammy figure to the angry career climber to the oversexed man-eater. Even our little Black girls are subject to adultification—where they are perceived to be older and more mature than they are; shrinking their childhood, criminalizing their behavior, and making them vulnerable to predators.

All of this hearkens back to the ugliest parts of human history—white supremacy, more generally, and the transatlantic slave trade and colonization, in particular. Gentle touches were rare for the enslaved African woman. Or those touches were loaded with bodily concessions. Felt pleasure was not, could not, be a priority and sometimes had deadly consequences. As a result, both the dearth and yearning for intimate, non-sexual touch was likely passed down generationally.

Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, PhD conceptualized and defined historical trauma in the 1980s as “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding across generations including one’s own lifespan.” What this means is that the weight of the physical and psychic wounds of our ancestors, the residue of trauma, can live on in the bodies of their descendants and is compounded by present-day struggles.

So it’s no wonder that many Black women desire to feel worthy beyond these classifications and certainly beyond our sexual capacities. We’re frequently working to negate these images while simultaneously creating spaces where we can receive the healing touch that we need. And even before there was a Black middle class—with a modicum of discretionary income for the privilege of professional massages, bodywork services, and spa dates with the girls—there was the hairdresser.

Our bodies are so intricately made that we are wired for connection and survival. Touch taps into that.

Lori Tharps, co-author of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America and host of the My American Meltingpot podcast, expounds on this subject more in an email to me. “Black women are so often perceived to be strong, tough and resilient, that they are often the last ones to receive a gentle touch. [We] are overlooked when it comes to compassionate care of any type, whether that’s in the medical profession or even in [our] own homes where [we] are too often the ones responsible for keeping the household together. Therefore, Black women are in desperate need of intimate and loving care, touch and connections because we do shoulder the burden of so much of society.”

Tharps went on to share that hairstyling has always been significant for Black women as a means of connection and intimacy. She believes there is a clear relationship between the need for intimate, non-sexual touch and what could be perceived by outsiders as a preoccupation with hair.

“Historically, Black women have always experienced feelings of love and intimacy through hair grooming practices,” Tharps wrote. “Dating back to pre-colonial Africa, styling someone’s hair was a way to show kinship, friendship, and care. In the United States, many Black women can recall a time sitting with an elder who showed love through hairstyling practices, whether that was a fancy style for a big event or just a simple braid done before bedtime.”

I remember sitting “criss-cross applesauce” between the knees of my mother as she ran her thin, rat-tailed comb down the center of my head, smeared healthy helpings of Blue Magic grease in the part, and cornrowed her love onto my scalp. There was a feeling of love, protection, and security that was completely lost to me outside of that space.

Consequently, when a boyfriend in college helped me take out my Janet Jackson Poetic Justice braids, as well as scratched and greased my scalp, you could not have told me that we weren’t going to get married. We didn’t, but that’s another story for another essay. The point, I think, is that I deeply equated this non-sexual act of intimacy with love and felt cared for in a way I hadn’t prior to then.

So yes, when the shelter-in-place, social distancing mandates are lifted and the threat of infection is no more, I will gladly once again let someone walk across my back with their bare feet. Or savor my hair braider moving her index finger along my scalp with shea butter or eco-styling gel depending on the style. Or hug my friend a little longer when sadness chooses to linger around the edges of our souls.

Knowing why I do it only makes it more resonant. Knowing only makes me more intentional about ensuring that non-sexual intimate touch is a priority for my own healing journey.