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Intelligence depends on Feeling.
TOUCH IS THE FIRST SENSE which we are known to develop.
We are not alone. All species of animal studied so far seem to indicate that they also develop their sense of touch before birth. Touch depends upon the growth and development of the largest organ we have: our skin. It is our skin which "sees" for us before we are born and conveys the reality of our surroundings to our brain.
BEFORE WE ARE BORN our bodies feel the world.
Temperature sensitivity is present before birth as is shown when a premature baby refuses milk which is not the temperature it expects. Sensitivity to pain largely does not develop until after birth thereby lessening the potential for birth trauma.
AT BIRTH, it is the face which is more sensitive to touch and pressure than other parts of the body. Our skin is both one of our largest and most vulnerable organs we have. There are more known diseases of the skin than of any other organ system. This is likely because we can see our skin, it can be examined easily, it represents our interface with the external environment, it is capable of being our most stimulating organ, and, it is often given and assumed to socially provide a mirror of our self-esteem, health, and identity.
SKIN DISEASES AND MUTILATIONS ARE ENDEMIC.
To live is to experience skin challenges: birthmarks, freckles, warts, acne, scars, hair loss, dandruff, discolorations, burns, bacterial and parasitic infections, moles, wrinkling, cellulite, skin cancer, cysts, .... With good nutrition, hygiene, exercise and stimulation --- most of these can be avoided, limited, or remedied. While still in our fetal form, our skin functions more like a substitute for our yet-to-develop brain.
Growth and Sensuality.
THE SKIN AND OUR NERVOUS SYSTEM grow from the same basic outermost embryonic cell layers. The human fetus can react to touch stimuli about 8 weeks after conception. By this time, some basic sensory capacity has developed. Sensitivity to touch develops from the head downward, as if radiating in awareness outward from the processing center --- the brain.
AFTER THE 8th WEEK OF LIFE the fetus becomes responsive to touch stimuli on the nose, lips, and chin, and the area sensitive to stimulation gradually increases with time and the life experience in the womb.
BY THE 13th or 14th WEEK after conception, only the top and back of the head lack sensitivity. Drives and needs of the fetus are automatically satisfied by the mother: nutrition; shelter; warmth; hormonal stimulation; acceptance; sensuality.
WITHIN THE WOMB, the fetus is constantly cuddled, caressed, stroked, and kissed. Our lifesystem assumes as normal the patterns of our mother's emotional life. If she feels verbal, physical, or spiritual abuse --- we do also. If she feels constant anxiety, fear, anger, contentment, love, or grief --- we do also. Her external environment is mirrored in our and her internal environments.
PATTERN COMPULSION.
If such a pattern is not constructively coped with and positive --- we develop energy blocks. Those biochemically-wired connections between stimuli and reaction compel us to try and re-construct --- through our attitudes and behavior an equal hormonal pattern after birth. A sense of security may be expected to be found in environments of insecurity.
In OUR REPTILIAN BRAIN STRUCTURE, the patterns of our mother are recorded as the norm for our "feel" of reality after our birth. Her hormone rushes and emotional ups and downs become ours. Her contentment, fear, anxiety, depression --- set a guideline for us before we even arrive. If she or our father, or those others close to her are hypersensitive and expressing symptoms ... it is likely that she will develop additional Energy Blocks. Her expressed traumas and energy blocks become our behavioral tendencies, just as all of the unresolved traumas of her heritage have been passed to her as energy blocks.
EMBRYONIC CELLULAR LAYERS grow to form skin and nerves.
They also grow to form hair, teeth, and sense organs of smell, taste, hearing, vision and touch. These sensory systems form the basis for our awareness and perception of the external reality around us following birth. There are four somatic senses --- pressure (touch), pain, cold, and warmth --- which are located in the skin. At birth, each of these is poorly developed. It is only by exposure to variations in each of these variables that the nervous system develops a recognition of degrees and changes in these variables. Yet an amazing requirement exists.
Survival depends on Sensuality.
IF THE SKIN DOES NOT RECEIVE STIMULATION following birth --- all of the other sense and thinking structures fail to develop ... and we die. Following birth, the needs which were constantly attended to within the womb are suddenly frustrated. The outside world is cold or hot compared to the even temperature womb. For the rest of our life we will seek to re-establish that womb-feeling of being part of another person in the most intimate sensual manner available to us and allowed to us.
IF WE ARE SENSUALLY DEPRIVED as infants and children we are certain to develop energy blocks which force us to behave and rationalize our actions as if we were motivated to seek forever more --- what we had less of. This is particularly true with sex addicts who crave intimacy constantly, NOT for the intercourse --- but as a means acceptable to their identity and training to pursue and obtain the benefits of sensual expression.
THE QUALITY OF INTIMACY between one's caregivers (mother, father, brothers, sisters, sitter, maid) and oneself implants the feelings of the family and larger social culture about intimacy and sexuality into our SuperEgo. If those around us model behavior and feelings of disgust or lack of respect for their bodies and for pleasurable contact, we will also develop such feelings --- not from experience or personal trauma --- but as infused collective heredity.
FEELINGS OF TOXIC (inappropriate and unjustified) SHAME
may motivate the person and twist their true personality and capabilities into "acceptable" yet personally destructive and self-defeating habits. The motivation here, for you, is that the opposite is also true. The opposite --- healthy shame and self-assertion --- has been shown to bring better health, better coping with challenges, better interaction with others, a greater sense of belonging and self-worth. It is largely from our sensual expression or deprivation as youths that we develop our sense of trust and mistrust.
POWER, Dependency, and Sensual Deprivation.
BOYS ARE OFTEN REWARDED FOR SELF-DENIAL with phrases such as "Boys don't cry," creates men who are often emotionally distant, spiritually aloof, manipulative, competitive, and whose morals are rationally ambiguous. The tactile-deprived individual remains confused and anxiety-ridden. Avoiding touching others and resenting the touch of others ... in order to feel accepted, masturbation, toe- and finger-, or thumb-sucking, pulling or fingering one's ears, nose, or hair may be taken up as substitutes.
STUNTED SENSUAL GROWTH and awareness often produces adults who lack the love and tenderness skills to maintain a contented and balanced intimate relationship. Sex may become an activity for tension and sexual libido release or a substitute for the absent parent, rather than a shared, expression of respect for one another and a celebration of sensual reality. Sensual deprivation and depression, OR, sensual sharing and optimism: we have a choice.
VIOLENT EXPRESSIVENESS FOLLOWING SENSUAL DEPRIVATION has been associated with and is evident both in many biographies and in scientific studies. Neither Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini experienced parental acceptance and sensual satisfaction as children. Dr. James H. Prescott, a developmental neuropsychologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, wrote in The Futurist, April, 1975:
- "Recent research supports the view that the deprivation of physical pleasure is a major ingredient in the expression of physical violence. The common association of sex with violence provides a clue to understanding physical violence in terms of deprivation of physical pleasure."
THE RESULTS OF SENSUAL EXPOSURE are also well documented.
The presence of positive sensual pleasure limits violence.
Spouses often react to the threat of physical abuse by seductively offering sensual involvement --- often in the form of sexuality. This can confuse totally a jury or a social worker who --- not being present to see, hear, and experience the dynamics of the pattern --- is left in disbelief that the so-called victim seems to have done nothing to limit, resist, or redirect the abuse they have received.
FOCUS: IN an AUTHORITARIAN society, sensuality is frequently employed to manipulate, deceive, control, and frustrate. Individualism is imposed on persons who would normally seek human social support. The socialization of the "outsider" encourages the development of over-rationalistic distant relationships based upon purpose, need, and demand ... rather than voluntary shared choice through mutual appreciation and respect.
In an EMOTIVE (assertive, band organized) society, sensual participation by consensual choice, offer, and opportunity is usually a shared, relaxing, reciprocal appreciation. You cannot feel alone, abandoned, avoided, or a victim --- if one or more other persons are physically being attentive to you and you are assisting them. It is difficult for a person to feel anger and rage, and be violent, when hugged.
EMOTIONALLY AND SPIRITUALLY HURT (abused) persons frequently convert sensual attentiveness into less emotional and more physical expressiveness in the form of sexual engagement. This pattern has been well known yet its influence on the relationship has been greatly misunderstood and avoided. A pattern may quickly develop into a pre-coital ritual in which one participant threatens, abuses, or rejects the other in order to create a requirement for reconciliation which is concluded with sexual intercourse. The reward is a continual avoidance of sensual and emotional support ... encouraging an addictive return to a sexual experience ... which may become less and less fulfilling.
AGGRESSIVE-PASSIVE PATTERNS of behavior and communication in the above fashion, are responsible for many date-rapes, spousal rapes, physical abuse, fits of jealousy, and seemingly unrepetitive and depressing instances of interpersonal conflict. Empathy is often much more constructive and respectful than this form of manipulative sympathy. Empathic communication depends upon a variety of personal experience.
CO-DEPENDENT NORMS FRUSTRATE NORMAL COPING SKILLS.
A highly structured culture, over-protective parents, emotionally oversensitive individuals, and an absence of media and mentoring examples --- make empathic sensitivity almost impossible to
develop. The individual becomes co-dependent upon the structure and protections of the society which has abused and deprived him or her. With positive communication and coping skills being discouraged through gender stereotyping (role segregation) and peer group initiation practices --- a society may actually "train" its citizens to relinquish their personal power of choice to central "political" authorities so that "support" services can assist the wounded.
AN EXAMPLE:
In North America, we have a political - medical heritage of taking prescription drugs so that we can ignore and deny symptoms of ill-ease arising from our overburdened and unbalanced body and emotional health. The symptoms are effectively suppressed. The ill-ease influences remain. Damage continues to build, quietly. More subtle symptoms of anxiety, lack of attentiveness, hyperactivity, indigestion, emotional volatility, confusion, and depression --- seek to gain our attention and healthy involvement.
FURTHER SUPPRESSION OF SYMPTOMS AND AWARENESS encourages the development of addictive behaviors including:
alcoholism, caffeine stimulation, nicotine downers,
sexual, sports, and work distractions,
aggressive and competitive acting out,
and, illegal drug demand.
THE RESULT:
Erratic, spontaneous, and "unsafe" behaviors yield job turnover, relationship and marital breakdown, child abandonment, sexual abuse, chronic dis-ease, homelessness, and lawful conviction and detention for theft, burglary, assault, murder.
THE REWARD:
The state, having been an over-protective and abusive "parent", must now develop "mothering" support institutions and industries to encourage further co-dependency: physician-technicians, pharmaceuticals, entertainment, hospitals, counsellors, scientists, re-training, police and security forces, armies, penitentiaries.
THE DOWNFALL OF AUTHORITARIANISM:
The "effectiveness" of the above non-sensual cultural system is that as the year 2000 approaches, North Americans represent the most chronically ill, most marriage fractured, most depressed, most drug addicted, most imprisoned, most co-dependent population in the world! The cost to feed this political ill-cycle has exceeded its ability to generate and collect revenue.
YOU WANT IT. YOU GOT IT.
Emotional compulsions have fed physical degradation leading to spiritual starvation ... and increasing desperation for survival. To add insult to injury, cultural "authorities" continue to deny workable solutions, withdraw social support mechanisms, and, promote attitudes of depression, desperation, intolerance, alienation, distrust, and self-centeredness. Self-sufficiency and self-awareness has certainly been a threat to ....
TOUCHING: The Human Significance of the Skin,
(1978), Ashey Montagu writes the following:
- During the first year of life the association between looking at objects, touching them, and taking them into the mouth is a closely linked one. The association between looking and touching is especially closely connected. The experiences of urination and defecation are pleasantly relieving ones and warming.
If, however, the oral needs are unsatisfactorily satisfied, and come to be characterized by greed, hunger, insatiety, with fears of the ensuing hostile aspects of these processes, the visual functions may come to have a similar compulsive, devouring quality, and later tend to be defended by complex inhibitory systems of various sorts. Instead of libidinal oral, anal, tactile, and visual functions being harmoniously integrated, these functions become anarchically and dysfunctionally associated.
Thus, looking comes to replace normal sexual outlets as in scopophilia, as does touching, often in abnormal ways such as pinching, scratching, or biting, with or without the accompanying desire to inflict pain, or the various forms of exhibitionism. Women do not usually expose the genital region in exhibitionism, but they will expose breasts or buttocks. ... Love establishes itself as 'skin-deep'. The more skin she exposes the more lovable the female becomes.
This kind of scopophilia has become normal for most males in the Western world .... The true exhibitionist, however, may be an extreme prude insofar as nudity is concerned, and may never allow either himself or his wife to see the other in the nude. Puritanical attitudes of this kind are well known to be characteristic of the families of exhibitionists. In such families cutaneous as well as related deprivations are common throughout childhood."
BENEFITS OF SENSUALITY.
If we deny sensuality, we deny the capacity for a sharing love, empathy, compassion, respect for oneself and for others --- all of which contribute to health, and, all of which guard against the development of hypersensitivities and ENERGY BLOCKS.
PRO-SURVIVAL characteristics of persons with positive sensual experience and positive sensual attitudes compared to those without include these:
- more curious, less fear-driven;
- more relaxed, less tense;
- better able to learn coping skills;
- increased problem solving ability;
- more self-confident and pro-active;
- heavier weight of brain;
- more advanced neural development;
- skeletal and body growth are more advanced;
- more efficient immunological system;
- faster recovery from traumas, accidents, ...;
- greater emotional stability;
- better at learning and retention;
- sexually more responsive.
YOU have an OPPORTUNITY with the options described in these pages to acquire all of those benefits and ensure that your children and theirs also share those benefits. They are NORMAL NATURAL capabilities which as humans we are born with. They are either allowed expression, OR trampled for the sake of power and exaggerated feelings of insecurity, fear, desire, shame.
You can change the world.
Begin with yourself.
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