NOT LONG AGO, a couple went to a marriage counsellor with a problem. The wife objected violently to being touched. Although she freely enjoyed her sexual relationship with her husband, she could not, to his bewilderment and hurt, bear the affectionate caresses he liked to give her hand or arm or hair.

Another family, concerned about a teen-age son's rebelliousness, consulted a psychiatrist who spent weeks trying to restore communication between the emotionally estranged boy and his father. One day, the father suddenly got up and embraced his son. The boy hugged back, and both began to cry. "It's the first time you've held me since I was a child," the boy said.

These incidents are not as unusual as they may seem. Whether we can admit it or not, many of us are painfully inhibited about touching and being touched even by those we love.

Reasons are not hard to find. The average American tends to think of bodily contact in terms of sex or combat--both of which are prickly with cultural and psychological taboos. Our Puritan heritage leads many of us to disapprove of any touching as "sensual."

Those who have created this invisible barrier have lost something important: the part touch plays in giving encouragement, expressing tenderness, showing emotional support. Touch is a crucial aspect of all human relationships. Yet, except in moments of extreme crisis, we often forget how to ask for--or offer--this boon. We forget, for instance, how it can heal the wounds of a quarrel. I was told about a mother who tried reasoning with two daughters, 11 and 12, who were fighting bitterly over clothes for a party. When reasoning failed, their annoyed father ordered them to be quiet. But it wasn't until the mother impulsively flung her arms about both girls and held them close that the bickering stopped.

An instinctive awareness of the power of touch to convey deep feeling is reflected in such expressions as having a "touching" experience, being "touched" and keeping "in touch." When "words fail," we reach out physically. Hellen Keller-- blind and deaf from birth--wrote in her diary: "My dog was rolling in the grass. I wanted to catch a picture of him in my fingers, and I touched him lightly. Lo, his fat body revolved, stiffened and solidified into an upright position. He pressed close to me as if to crowd himself into my hand. He loved it with his tail, his paw, his tongue. If he could speak, I believe he would say with me that paradise is attained by touch."

Studies of infants and children have shown repeatedly that nothing is more important to early physical and mental growth than touching. In various experiments with normal and subnormal youngsters, those who had the most physical contact with parents or nurses or attendants learned to walk and talk the earliest and had the higher I.Q.s.

Research with animals yields similar results. In a famous experiment, psychologist Harry F. Harlow built two "surrogate" mothers for monkey babies. One, a motherfigure built of wire, gave milk. The other, built of sponge rubber and terry cloth, gave no milk. Given a choice, the baby monkeys went to the terry-cloth mother for the comfort of her soft "touch." These results contradicted the accepted theory that a baby loves its mother primarily because she provides food.

Despite what science, instinct and common sense tell us, many Americans seem to cut down--almost deliberately--on the amount and quality of physical contact. After infancy, words replace touches; distance replaces closeness. With toddlers, touch is used to guard and control children, but less often to play with or show affection to them.

The warning is drummed into them: "Don't touch!" Touching is "not nice." Moreover, care is often taken to make sure that youngsters don't see even their own parents touching each other affectionately. And many parents, who confuse the sexual touch with the tender, caring, restorative or sympathetic touch, are either afraid or ashamed to make physical contact with growing sons and daughters. Little wonder, then, that so many of us learn to do without touching or being touched.

Where does one begin? How does an undemonstrative person learn to touch? Here are suggestions--and cautions--gathered from psychologists who have taken an interest in the matter:

@ Discuss the idea with your family first. "Don't just suddenly and singly become a 'toucher,'" says psychiatrist Dr. Alexander Lowen. "Nothing is more upsetting than an unexpected and unexplained change in another person's behaviour."

@ Begin by performing simple acts of physical contact that are customary in some, but far from all, families: kissing good night or good morning; hugging when greeting or saying farewell.

@ Learn to discern when others are in a mood to be touched; otherwise physical contact can be irritating. Children often go through stages of rejecting a parent's touch.

@ Be emotionally honest when you do touch. Dr Nicholas Dellis, a New York psychologist, told me that once, when he was extremely busy, his daughter came to him seeking attention. "I put my arm around her, but my mind was on my own problems. She sensed at once that I was not emotionally with her. She said, 'You're holding me away from you.' I looked, and the arm I had around her shoulder actually was forcing her apart from me rather than bringing us together."

@ Try to make the act of touch a source of comfort and reassurance, rather than a veiled demand. Touch should never be a vehicle for clinging to or possessing another person.

@ Realize that touching does not always have a sexual connotation. Many of us have failed to learn that different kinds of touching, meaning different things, are possible.

Dr Herbert A. Otto, a pioneer in the search for ways to foster personal growth and expand human potential, believes that much more takes place through touch than most of us realize. It can, he says, almost magically dissolve barriers between people. It can break down the emotional walls we build within ourselves. "Touch," says Dr Otto, "is always an exchange, if not a sharing. Through touch we grow, and we enable others to grow."(#)

copyright @1970 by Fawcett Publishing Inc.
appeared in Women's Day