Steve Haines > Quotes

“Slow, relational touch can help us move from fear, contraction, and isolation to play, expansion, and community.”
― Steve Haines, Touch Is Really Strange

“Fears around abuse of power, sexual harassment, and blurred boundaries have resulted in a 'touch taboo' in psychotherapy and teaching. Ordinary gestures of shaking hands, hugging, and reassuring touch are strongly discouraged due to fears of touch being misconstrued. If, as is argued here, touch is not secondary to language and concepts but is primary to our sense of self, then this touch taboo is to be lamented.”
― Steve Haines, Touch Is Really Strange

“Touch can help us reconnect to, and in some cases change, primal experiences of how we created our sense of self.”
― Steve Haines, Touch Is Really Strange

“The big, radical idea in this book is that touch--safe, relational touch that meets a whole person--can be transformational if it is approached with this new understanding. Touch can be a lever to enhance our sense of self. Touch can help us feel safe, alive, and real again. It has the potential to turn down the volume on pain, trauma, and anxiety.”
― Steve Haines, Touch Is Really Strange

“Health is the ability to manage intense sensations in the present moment without being overwhelmed.”
― Steve Haines, Anxiety is Really Strange

“Children without touch, stimulation, and nurturing can literally lose the capacity to form any meaningful relationships for the rest of their lives.”
― Steve Haines, Touch Is Really Strange

“Causes of anxiety range from gut bacteria to adverse childhood experiences to existential angst.”
― Steve Haines, Anxiety is Really Strange

“Touch can reconnect us to early experiences of negotiating safety and agency.”
― Steve Haines, Touch Is Really Strange

“In trauma, pain, and anxiety, touch can be a safe, novel stimulus to access new possibilities in our physiology. Touch can help us meet our wordless places in a way that is hard to access through conversation alone. Touch is stranger and more powerful than often assumed. We can learn to be more skillful as we touch inward and touch outward. Feelings that are habitually scary can be re-framed and transcended. Slow, relational touch can help us shift our emotional core and release us to feel alive and connected.”
― Steve Haines, Touch Is Really Strange