What Is Transforming Touch®?

Do you continue to have anxiety attacks or depressive episodes, despite “doing all the right things”? Do you have difficulty feeling safe in your relationships? Are you sick and tired of feeling sick and tired? Have you been told that your physical health symptoms actually have an emotional root cause?

Transforming Touch® is a modality that was designed to allow the nervous system to heal from early traumatic experiences, making it very effective for those who have experienced developmental and attachment trauma.

Transforming Touch® works with two different systems within our nervous system: our stress responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) and our attachment system.

If you experienced stress early in your developmental years and/or experienced ruptures in your attachment to your caregivers, these experiences are coded and stored in your nervous system. These experiences can continue to shape how your nervous system develops. Additionally, your experiences shape how you view the world and how you view yourself in the world as well as your overall sense of safety and regulation. These early experiences also determine your attachment style. You will develop either a secure attachment with your caregivers or a non secure attachment (anxious, avoidant, or disorganized).

Stress Responses

When your nervous system perceives a threat or danger, the nervous system turns on one of the stress responses. The system will try to fight the danger away, and if that doesn’t work or it isn’t possible, the system will move into flight and will try to move away from the danger. If flight isn’t possible or it doesn’t work, the system will attempt to stay safe with the fawn response, and if that doesn’t work then the system will freeze. If you experienced developmental and/or attachment trauma, it is likely that the threat or danger was an emotional threat or danger that you were living with on a daily basis. So, the nervous system can be chronically stuck in a stress response. Over time, this would have worn down your capacity to process stress in your nervous system. This in turn creates a very small window of tolerance. With a narrow window of tolerance, it doesn’t take much to kick someone out of their window of tolerance and into a stress response.

Transforming Touch® brings safety into the nervous system. With this protocol, our therapists are somatically communicating to your nervous system and letting it know that you are safe. When your nervous system feels safe, it can process stored trauma and release stuck emotional energy that it wasn’t able to process and release when it was stuck in fight, flight, fawn, or freeze. This process will thereby widen your window of tolerance and increase your capacity to handle life’s stressors in all forms (mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, etc).

Our therapists work at the nervous system level because healing cannot happen unless you are able to close the stress responses that your body chose in an effort to keep you safe. This is especially true if you continue to experience triggers that have roots in your back story.

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Attachment System

The experiences you had with your caregivers when you were young determines your attachment style. In adulthood, you will show up in your relationships through the lens of your attachment style. This informs your behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions in the context of your relationships. Most children and adolescents move through their developmental years with a non-secure attachment style to some degree. This is not because your parents didn’t love you. In fact, it would not have been possible for your parents to meet every single emotional need that you had as a child. It is also unrealistic to think that your parents would have had the emotional capacity to be attuned to you at all times. Because of this, you likely will have a non-secure attachment style to some degree.

Anxious Attachment

If you have an anxious attachment style, you will experience a great deal of anxiety about having your needs met in relationships and will feel as though you are unloved or unlovable. In childhood, your parents would have shown you love, and it was unpredictable about when they would get distracted and no longer be able to meet your needs. With this attachment style, the story you have internalized is “people always leave”. You are hypervigiliant about anything you perceive as being abandonment in your relationships.

Avoidant Attachment

In the avoidant attachment style, you keep people and intimacy at a distance. The story around connection that you internalized is that there isn’t enough of it, either because you were left alone too much as a child or because when you tried to connect with your caregivers you were rejected in some way. In this attachment style, you are going to prioritize your career, business goals, money, etc. over interpersonal relationships. You will need to learn how to reconnect with other people in a safe way.

Disorganized Attachment

If you have a disorganized attachment style, you will feel a great deal of fear in your relationships. The story around connection that you learned is that it is scary in some way. You may have had experiences where you wanted to reach out to connect with your caregiver(s) and felt an internal conflict because your caregiver(s) was actually a source of fear and distress. Often times you are vascillating between the avoidant and anxious attachment styles depending on the type of relationship.

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With that being said, it is important to heal your attachment system and teach your nervous system how to have a secure attachment with self and others in order to experience healthy relationships as adults.

Our Transforming Touch® practitioners become the safe and secure base, which makes it possible for you to experience trust and safety in the therapeutic relationship.

The protocol is the same in every session, so your nervous system receives the experience of consistency and predictability, which often was not the experience for those who have developmental and/or attachment trauma.

Your therapist will build somatic trust with your nervous system whereby your nervous system will begin to experience a secure attachment. As the Transforming Touch® work continues, you will move from having a non-secure attachment style to a safe, secure attachment style.

If you are ready to get started with Transforming Touch®, please reach out using the button below to schedule an appointment with one of our trained therapists.

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