NeuroAffective Touch®
NeuroAffective Touch® (NATouch™) is a neurologically informed psychotherapy that uses somatic and body-centered approaches as vital psychobiological interventions.
The body cannot be touched without engaging the mind, and the mind cannot be engaged without affecting the body
The neural tube forms at the very beginning of pregnancy. It forms before the brain. The beginning of the human feeling into space, is the foundational way we orient to life. We sense into form. From this place of sensing, through what becomes the nervous system, we experience safety in our body, and then, safe being alive.
Touch accesses the very beginnings of our human experience.
As we grow, the great sensitivity of this nervous system allows us to experience the miracle of living. It’s also what reacts to relational trauma. When we face rejections, in all the ways that we may as children, a sense of lack-of-safety registers in the body, and stays in the body until we learn to be with it, and let it heal.
When psychological identity is built on the shaky foundation of an early traumatized physiology, an integrated psychobiological approach is necessary
For many of us, by adulthood we have had to deny, deflect and distract ourselves away from the pains of our youth, burying them away so we can focus on developing our current life, and managing our responsibilities well. Those traumatic energies have been locked away for years, and now, in adulthood have started to manifest as dis-ease in the body.
Our bodies tell the story of our struggles to love and be loved
NeuroAffective touch honors the inherent, integrative relationship between the body and the mind, and opens up the possibility for a unified healing relationship within them.
NeuroAffective Touch®
NATouch reaches domains of the person which cannot be reached by talk therapy alone. One of the reasons NATouch is so effective, especially for those who feel they have seen countless therapists with some or little help, or those who feel they can think their way through the therapeutic process with few emotional changes, is due to its “bottom-up” approach to treatment. A “bottom-up” approach to psychotherapy allows for the interventions being used to bypass the higher, reasoning brain and impact the client from the primitive part of the brain. For those who have experienced long-term, chronic, or early childhood traumas, impacting the mind-body from the “bottom-up” is often the only way to make lasting change. NATouch can address issues that seem to have no words, only feelings - issues and experiences that words can’t seem to describe. This method moved beyond limitations of traditional talk therapy to impact core wounds, reaching nonverbal and preverbal states.