A Field Guide to Neuroaffective Touch Sessions

Why is healing developmental trauma (also known as complex trauma or cPTSD) so challenging? 

Unlike sudden trauma that shocks us with lightning speed, developmental trauma builds up over time through long-term misattunement, neglect, or abuse. This kind of trauma is relational, emotional, and repetitive.

If shock trauma is like a tsunami wave, developmental trauma is like a steadily dripping faucet that, over months or years, leaves your house flooded.

Similar to rebuilding efforts after a flood, healing developmental trauma takes time. It also requires deep attunement on the part of therapists and practitioners seeking to address it. Because developmental trauma takes place so early in life, when our cortex is not yet online and our explicit memory and language centers are not fully formed, it is often impossible to put what happened to us into words. Indeed, many individuals diagnosed with cPTSD have not received the nonverbal therapeutic experience they need to recover.

Going Deeper Than Words
A world beneath the world

This article outlines how NeuroAffective Touch offers the specific attunement and support needed to heal developmental trauma. By working simultaneously with the body and mind, NATouch lays a new foundation for the "house" that is your fundamental sense of self.

The unique genius of NATouch is that it works at the intersection of body awareness, emotional and relational healing, and building cognitive skills. Unlike traditional talk therapy, NATouch focuses on connecting you with how your body implicitly holds past experiences, emotions, and beliefs. The gentle touch and mindful guidance of NATouch therapists support exploring this world beneath the world. Helping you access and illuminate your inner landscapes facilitates your ability to reclaim your whole self and build a healthy identity.

Our bodies have a deep intelligence — just think of the millions of years humans have been evolving. Profound healing can take place when we learn to decode and listen to what our bodies have to tell us. NATouch gradually re-opens the body-mind communication channels closed off by developmental trauma so that you can translate the nonverbal, bodily language of stored emotions into conscious, meaningful understanding. 

One essential (yet often, sadly, overlooked) ingredient in this process is supportive physical contact, which signals to the nervous system that it is safe to let go of the patterns of protection and trauma responses that no longer serve us. NATouch therapists use attuned touch in tandem with verbal dialogue to help their clients safely explore and bridge the divide between the body's wisdom and the conscious mind. This form of touch is nurturing, compassionate, and intentional — rather than mechanical — and only takes place with consent.

What Happens During NATouch Sessions?
A session begins with you creating a collaborative intention. Instead of focusing on achieving future goals or excavating the past, you and your therapist begin by examining your current state.

You might be struggling with anxiety or depression, emotional numbness, addictive behavior, relational stress, burnout, chronic tension, or other conditions that are impacting your psychological well-being and bodily comfort. To open a body-mind dialogue, your therapist might invite you to pay attention to the sensations, emotions, and gestures accompanying your words. 

Phase One: Mirroring and Holding
A session generally unfolds in three phases. The first phase emphasizes building trust and establishing safety. NATouch is not massage, nor is it about "doing to" the body. Instead, it offers gentle and steady touch intended to help your body "speak" what it has been holding in. 

Your practitioner will ask for your consent before any touch occurs, taking as much time as needed to navigate your comfort with any intervention. During a session, you can remain seated, or, if you prefer, lie down entirely clothed on a massage table. With your permission at every step, the therapist may offer to place their hands on specific areas. Lightly following your breath and shifts in your body, their touch communicates, "I'm here with you.”

Research corroborates the idea that empathic touch — such as a steady hand on your back — can soothe pain, synchronize brainwaves, and lead to more regulated breathing. In NATouch sessions, connection extends beyond simple comfort, as your body receives the support it needs to emerge from fight-flight-freeze, making space for new insight and awareness to appear

Phase Two: Resonance and Repatterning
As the sense of trust through attuned touch deepens, you and your therapist synchronize at a profound energetic level. NATouch therapists describe this phase as resonance and repatterning. Body sensations and emotions present themselves, and it becomes easier for you to access historical memories within the felt sense of their origin. Your therapist maintains a stable and attuned touch, supporting your body to participate in telling the story of what had previously been inaccessible or overwhelming terrain. 

As you untangle unconscious physical and emotional memories, your body and mind meet in a place of collaborative communication. Untangling protective bracing and inherited cognitive beliefs allows a sense of yourself as a regenerated, embodied being to take shape. The integration of new insights from implicitly held emotions and cognitive beliefs, together with physically held memories, opens a sense of new possibilities. This is healing developmental trauma.

In this phase, you might notice:

  • Warmth spreading through areas of tension
  • A feeling of letting go as you yield into the quiet space of safe  connection
  • A gradual slowing down and deepening of your breath
  • Subtle movements or pulsations as your tissues come alive
  • Unexpected emotions or memories arising, now that you are held in safety
  • All leading to a sense of expansion and well-being

 

Phase Three: Closure and Integration

The third phase focuses on integrating the profound shifts that often occur during NATouch sessions. Your therapist will help bring it all together by reflecting on what happened during the session and welcoming back any parts of you that had been "frozen" by trauma but re-emerged in your session—like missing pieces of a puzzle you've worked together to find.

You and your therapist may spend the last part of the session discussing how to continue nurturing this new growth, expanding your capacity for connection, and buoying your emotional resilience. Your nervous system now has an opportunity to reorganize itself around new options better suited to your current life. 

Nurturing Our Neurophysiology 
Meaningful change happens when we feel secure and genuinely heard. Your therapist's attuned touch works at a neurophysiological level, similar to how a regulated parent's touch helps soothe and regulate an infant's nervous system.

Because NATouch therapists offer their clients what a good parent would offer a child, some people believe that this approach may be infantilizing or create dependency. The outcome is the polar opposite! By including the attuned touch that talk therapy dismisses, NATouch clients report that being seen or feeling found— often for the first time — is a profoundly relieving experience that liberates them to move forward in life.

Going Beyond the Session: Long-Term Benefits
Any worthwhile trauma therapy should have benefits that extend well beyond the therapy room. With NATouch, the benefits lie in learning how to attune to your body's signals and decode the stories it has to tell you. This teaches you to access an internal guidance system you may not have known you had, enabling you to navigate life's challenges more easily, trust in yourself, and have a greater capacity to show up authentically. 

NATouch clients often connect to a sense of greater inner well-being. Many people experience improved emotional regulation, develop stronger intuition about what is healthy for them and what is not, and finally feel at home inside themselves. 

Embracing Your Whole Self 
The NATouch approach is a gentle yet powerful path toward wholeness. As you weave together your cognitive mind with your body and heart, you organically build a healthy foundation from which you can experience the vitality, wisdom, and dignity of your whole being. 

With this foundation in place, it is possible to weather life's storms with greater ease and enjoy times of lightness, beauty, and peace along your journey.

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Find a provider in our directory of trained NATouch therapists.