musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

A hug is always the right size.


I did not grow up in a hugging family. It’s something I had to learn -along with shaking hands, and little taps on the arm to indicate I was both listening and understanding what the other person was saying. We did not touch each other very much. I don’t want to suggest that we never touched each other; my mother was an expert with the one-armed hug, but I don’t remember ever being enveloped in her arms. Still, for that matter, nor was I ever spanked.

This may not sound like a very emotionally enriching family, but it was. Love can be expressed in many ways. Different ways. My mother would spend hours asking me about school and about my friends, going so far as to invite them over on weekends for lunch, or to accompany us on day trips in the summer.

My father would read stories to me each night when I was small, and talk to me about his work and quiz me about what I wanted to be when I grew up. If I happened to be playing on a school team, I knew he’d always be in the bleachers, or standing on the side of the field watching.

My parents were very involved in my life, and interested in my progress. When I was in grade school, the fridge door was always crowded with my drawings hanging precariously on magnets, and when I brought home a report card in high school, they would always praise me for the good marks and offer to help on those subjects in which I was only average -even if they had to puzzle through the text books along with me.

Although my father would often ruffle my hair in an embarrassed show of pride, and my mother would frequently reach out to caress my face tenderly with her fingers, no doubt they were copying the way their own parents had shown their love. They usually just substituted eye contact for physical contact, voice modulation for physical anger, and body language for physical persuasion. It seemed normal for me; it was only later, when I went to school, that I began to see how my friends and their parents were different -or maybe how I was different.

But that’s not really fair, is it? Love is love, and I felt surrounded by it as I grew up; it was not a touchy-feely thing, though. It was not until much later in my life that I grew accustomed to hugs. But the first one that I really remember -possibly because it was initiated by a male friend of a girl that I was just starting to date- seemed awkward. I immediately stiffened and barely reciprocated, so he cleverly defused it with a chuckle and followed it with the more familiar male greeting: a light punch on my shoulder. What I remember more clearly, though, was that his wife then winked at him and wrapped her arms around me as if to show me what a real hug was like. I don’t suppose her embrace lasted more than a few seconds, but it suddenly dawned on me what I had been missing all those years.

And yet, it is a learned skill. Much like greeting kisses (which I have not yet mastered), with hugs you have to learn where to put your arms and your head. It would seem there are at least two styles: crisscross, and neck-waist[i]; you don’t want to get them wrong with someone you don’t know very well. The neck-waist one seems, well, a bit intimate to me, although I suppose that’s because I’m a beginner at this stuff. But, at least that one is easier to remember: your arms are either up or down; you don’t have to fight about whether your right arm or left arm goes over which shoulder, and what happens if the huggee chooses the same side. I’m easily embarrassed.

But the point I suppose, is about the primacy of touch. It may, in fact, be the one sensation which accompanies us unfailingly through the years. It is necessary both in how we assist and care for others –instrumental touch, and how we comfort and communicate with them –expressive touch[ii]. I suppose I knew that, even as a child: every touch from my parents seemed special -a gift. But it was not given as a reward for something I had done, or to entice me to behave the way they wanted, but merely a gift, a show of love that could not be contained without contact.

Indeed, as I later understood, it is a language without the need for words. And as such it is sometimes able to do things to us that we are only lately able to explain. One particular feat that, among many others, impresses me, is its ability to release the hormone oxytocin which, along with other things, can make us feel good. But there is an interesting suggestion that ‘oxytocin might promote processes of multisensory integration, the so called ‘glue of the senses’ – the way the world typically presents itself to us as a coherent picture, rather than as multiple distinct streams of sense data. Multisensory integration, in turn, is at the root of our sense of body ownership, the feeling that most take for granted, that our body is ours[iii].’

I find that fascinating! Our brains are subject to so many different types of inputs from our senses; how is it possible to weave these disparate entities together into a feeling that they are all happening to provide a coherent message to the one individual who is me? It’s something that seems so normal -so obvious, I suppose. And yet… And yet, somehow a hug with its sensation spread so widely over the body knits them together seamlessly.

In a way, I think I’m lucky that hugs arrived rather late in my life: they are so very special that I’ve come to regard them almost like poems –touch-poems, I suppose… Silly, perhaps, and yet poems they are: metaphors for how we spread our feelings amongst others… agapē, without the religious implications. As Winnie the Pooh once said, ‘A hug is always the right size’.

[i] https://www.science.org/content/article/how-hug-according-science

[ii] https://aeon.co/essays/touch-is-a-language-we-cannot-afford-to-forget

[iii] Ibid.

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gozzter

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