Trauma, Touch, and the Nervous System: Rethinking Boundaries in Therapy

We don’t talk about touch enough. Not in therapy, not in culture, and certainly not in the context of healing. Yet research shows that touch is one of our most powerful tools for emotional and physiological regulation—and it begins before we’re even born.

Touch is our first language. Long before we speak, we feel. A parent’s gentle hold, a friend’s hand squeeze, the quiet comfort of presence—these are the moments that tell our nervous systems: you’re safe here. You belong.

Over the last decade, neuroscience has caught up to what our bodies have always known. Studies of C-tactile afferents—specialized nerve fibers that respond to gentle, stroking touch—have shown that this kind of contact releases oxytocin, reduces stress, and fosters emotional safety. These “pleasant touch” receptors activate the insula, the part of the brain that governs emotional awareness and empathy.

Even brief, warm contact can dampen our body’s stress response. In one study from the Cleveland Clinic, holding a loved one’s hand was shown to reduce activity in the brain’s pain centers and quiet the fear circuitry. Safe touch doesn’t just feel good—it changes our physiology.

And yet, despite the mounting evidence, touch remains largely absent from therapeutic settings. Understandably, trauma histories, cultural context, and ethical concerns all factor in. But let’s be honest—touch avoidance is also drilled into most psychology students from the start.

I once taught a group of Clinical Psychology students who shared that their program explicitly instructed them to decline hugs from clients. Yes, you heard me. Imagine being in pain, reaching out, and being met with a polite refusal. Or feeling a wave of gratitude and wanting to offer the most human gesture of all—a hug, a hand on the shoulder, a simple moment of closeness. I understand the importance of boundaries. I really do. But sometimes, the absence of touch—when it’s safe, consensual, and attuned—can feel more confusing than comforting. I don’t know about you, but I’d need to process that kind of rejection in my own therapy session.

This fear of “doing harm” by simply being human may, in some cases, do more harm than good. 

The irony? We’re so often trained to protect ourselves that we forget how to show up for the person in front of us. The research is clear, the body is wise, and still—so many therapeutic environments leave people feeling untouched, and worse, unfelt.

In fact, when people say they feel “untouched” in therapy, they might mean they’ve never been truly felt. 

I’ll never forget sitting with a young adult client, her body curled into my lap like a child, grieving the death of her mother—grief that had lived in her system for years. She sobbed. Wordless. And I said nothing. I didn’t need to. My presence, and the safety of that embrace, did the holding.

It was a moment that didn’t belong to the mind. It belonged to something older. Something cellular. A return to co-regulation. To being felt. To being safe. And in that return, the healing began—not because I had the right words, but because I stayed.

Trauma lives in the body, and so does repair. That’s why more somatic and integrative therapists are returning to this essential form of connection—not to replace talk therapy, but to support it. To anchor the nervous system in the here and now. To remember that sometimes, the deepest work happens in silence.

At re:treat, we believe healing often begins in the spaces beyond language. Our work is rooted in the belief that connection—true, attuned, embodied connection—is medicine. And that sometimes, the most powerful therapy isn’t what’s said, but what’s felt.