COVID-19 has come to rob us of many things: Our health, our lives, our job security, our economic stability–and what is even more significant–our traditional ways of relating and loving. But, how has COVID affected our relationships? How has this pandemic affected our “Loving Touch”? What has this situation done to our ways of living and loving?
From a psychological standpoint the limitations imposed on all of us by this pandemic are massive. Therefore there are unforeseen psychological consequences for humanity as a whole. The psychological after-effects of this pandemic may affect children for generations to come in unsuspected ways. In the last eight months, all our traditional ways of relating through physical contact have been thwarted by the so-called “social distancing” recommendations resulting from the need to mitigate the spread of this lethal virus.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we no longer do things the way we used to, things that were commonplace in our ways of relating only ten months ago. Face-to-face meetings, and common etiquette gestures such as shaking hands are no longer practiced in 2020.
There is no question about the fact that this is the year of the Weird Shift in Human relating.
The Effects of the COVID-19 on Our Ways of Relating
The usual distance between individuals of about 3 feet in American culture has grown to more than 6. Warm hugs between friends have turned into aloof and distanced “elbow knocks.” Affectionate hand-holding between people has become a thing of the past. Even the idea of petting, caressing, or stroking any other person, child, or pet not of our own makes us shrink. If you walk past your neighbor now—you not only wear a mask that covers your face from their sight (making it difficult to recognize who you are actually dealing with), but you carefully cross the street to the other sidewalk (while in the back of your mind you wonder whether they are actually infected). At best–you politely wave your hand back at them and say Hi while you rapidly walk past them.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic we have been cooped up in our homes watching movies, working and attending classes online, or studying from our computer screens. We have gone out as little as possible. We have been eating take out food and ordering goods online. We have been interacting personally as little as possible; and we have hardly invited any friends over or gone visiting anyone anymore. Forced by this virus–that ironically is only less than 120 microns in diameter–most of our interactions have now become virtual not personal.
COVID-19 has changed the Doctor Patient relationship
As a result of this pandemic, I am now forced to see my patients virtually using telemedicine. I have to do this to avoid the risk of infection for them, my staff, and myself, during this very dangerous period. And of course, this precautionary measure takes away many important aspects of the doctor-patient relationship, such as the hand shake, the physical presence, the physical exam, the blood pressure check, or the occasional hug requested by a patient. Unlike other specialties that require the presence of the patient’s body for examination, Psychiatric practice lends itself well for Tele-Medicine practice. And yet, it is not the same as the real thing. Virtual consults take away one of the most fundamental curative aspects of Medicine which is the presence of the other person in the visit–and the personal connection between the doctor and the patient. In a word, it removes the “Doctor’s loving touch” from the equation.
The Main American Psychological Problem: Social Disconnection
Now, this COVID-19 pandemic came along to put the last nail on the coffin of human relations in a country that was already suffering from a severe deficit in Human connections. This virus came along to aggravate the already existing virus of human disconnectedness in American society.
I believe that America Suffers from a serious case of crisis in the area of Human Relationships. I am convinced that social isolation and loneliness are two of the most important psychological problems we are facing as a nation and as a society in the XXI century.
Almost thirty years of practice in this country, and countless hours of research, have persuaded me that that we are facing a crisis in the area of LOVE of unforeseen magnitude. For this reason, I have started this series on Love and Relationships. This series is an attempt to broach the subject and to examine this problem of love and connectedness in depth and to offer practical solutions to palliate this dire situation.
When we look at the issue of Love, I started this series by looking at the importance of our ‘First Love”, which in a prior post I defined as the Love of one’s own Self. I said then that one “should start by learning to love one self in order to then be able to love someone else.” You first start by loving yourself–applying your “loving touch” on your own SELF–and then you share that love with someone else. But, Love should not be taken lightly. Love is a very SERIOUS MATTER: It must be deeply examined and understood. Love must be learned, refined, and practiced. Love is an Art–and as such–it must be cultivated.
We have to conceive of love as a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid is the physical instinctive aspect of it that we share with the other higher animals:the mammals. It is this most basic aspect of LOVE that Freud described in his theory of Sexual Libido–or the Driving force that aims to unite all living things into bigger units. The instinctive aspects of Love are found at the bottom of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs depicted below.
When we look at love at the most basic physical level, we find that we share with all warm blooded animals the desire to be physically close to other warm bodies: There is in all of us an innate desire for closeness.
Lioness and cubs sharing the warmth of their bodies touching and cuddling together: sharing love
This instinctive desire is observed in all animals that live in prides, packs, or groups such as the felines, the canines, and the primates They are those closest to us from an evolutionary perspective. In all of them, along with a desire for physical closeness comes a feeling of calmness and reassurance. This is innate in them as it is in us. LOVE IS THE BEST ANXIOLITIC THERE IS.
These soothing feelings are evident in human babies when they are picked up by a caring mother. The baby is soothed and he or she calms down by the warm pacifying embrace of the mother or the caregiver.
In the area of Ethology (the study of the psychology of animals), psychologist Harry Harlow in the XX century demonstrated the importance of a having a warm and cozy maternal figure, not just one that provides exclusively food.
Love and Attachment: Harry Harlow’s Experiment and John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory
To prove his point, Harlow designed an experiment in which he placed baby rhesus monkeys in the presence of inanimate surrogate mothers made from wire and wood.[10]For his demonstration, he presented the infants with a clothed mother and a wire mother under two conditions. In one situation, the wire mother held a bottle with food, and the cloth mother held no food. In the other situation, the cloth mother held the bottle, and the wire mother had nothing.[10]Overwhelmingly, the infant macaques preferred spending their time clinging to the cloth mother.[10]
Even when only the wire mother could provide nourishment, the monkeys visited her only to feed. Harlow concluded that there was much more to the mother–infant relationship than milk, and that this “contact comfort” was essential to the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children. It was this research that gave strong, empirical support to British Psychoanalyst’s John Bowlby’s assertions on the importance of love and mother–child interaction.
The importance of the loving attitude of care-giving of a motherly figure was corroborated in human beings by the experiences of Dr Rene Spitz who described “hospitalism” and “Anaclitic Depression” in orphan children.
Children that suffered from so called “Anaclitic Depression” (Or depression caused by lack of adequate support) were children left in hospitals and orphanages that were well fed but that were not paid enough attention to. Overall, these children were love-deprived and barely touched or held. As a result, they would become seriously depressed. These children would stop eating, they would go on to lose weight, their immune systems would weaken; and if their environmental circumstances were nor rapidly corrected, many of them died.
Many more of those children suffering from “Hospitalism” eventually developed mild forms of mental retardation, even if they were not genetically predisposed for these mental conditions because of lack of love and lack of appropriate stimulation. These observations clearly demonstrated once and for all that LOVE AND ATTENTION ARE ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS FOR A HEALTHY HUMAN DEVELOPMENT. They definitely reinforced the old Biblical adage: “Man Shall not Live by Bread Alone.”
Of course, this peremptory need for LOVE and ATTENTION, does not go away because we grow older. It just becomes a little bit less imperious as we age, we can manage to tolerate to go without it for a while longer as adults, but it is nevertheless always there. It accompanies us to our deathbeds. With its presence, we thrive; with its absence, we wither.
Love, Attraction, and Desire
But at the most basic level, love is manifested at the physical level by a desire for closeness to another person.
We call that drive ATTRACTION.
In common language we say that when we love someone we are “attracted” to him or her. The motor behind attraction is called Desire.
And when we are attracted to him or her, six things happen:
- 1-We want to see that person more frequently
- 2-We want to hear that person more often
- 3-We want to get physically closer
- 4-We want to make physical contact with the one we are attracted to
- 5-We want to increase the level and frequency of physical contact
- 6-At this highest intimacy level is where the watershed happens between erotic love that passes the barrier of tender touch into erotic touch—and beyond into sheer sexual foreplay and intercourse
The Six types of Human Touch
There are over six different kinds of HUMAN TOUCH:
- 1-Chance TOUCH
- 2-Etiquette TOUCH
- 3-Tender/therapeutic TOUCH
- 4-Erotic TOUCH
- 5-Inappropriate/ABUSIVE TOUCH
- 6-Harmful/AGGRESSIVE TOUCH
Chance touch happens as the words describes it inadvertently or because it is unavoidable. It occurs mostly in crowded situations, usually in cities, in public transportation, in subways, standing in line, when exchanging money, goods or services, etc. People that live in crowded countries, big cities, or in cramped areas are very used to be in close proximity to other people and thus they tend to ignore this type of proximity and occasional rubbing of shoulders. Americans, in general, on the other hand, live in open space areas and they move around isolated in car “bubbles. For this reason, unless they live in big cities such as New York or Chicago, they are not used to this type of human proximity or chance touch like most people are in other parts of the world.
Etiquette touch varies from culture to culture and from time to time. In the US, shaking hands was considered basic etiquette until the COVID-19 pandemic began, at least in certain formal circles. Most of these etiquette rules were enforced more frequently by previous generations of Americans. These rules of etiquette have been increasingly lost in the course of the XXI century, but overall hand shaking was still present to some extent in 2019 before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In other cultures, such as the French for instance, even men kiss (lightly on both cheeks) as a formal way of introduction.
Tender touch is the kind of touch that manifests the AGAPE type of love or the BROTHERLY LOVE as well as the so-called FILIAL LOVE (the Love of Parents to Children and vice-versa). Tender Love expressions are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for our sense of well-being. These behaviors are learned acts of overt physical affection. They are usually unconsciously learned early on in the family unit by modeling (identification). And families tend to learn them and transmit them through generations. The families, in turn, acquire them from their cultures of origin.
Cultural Differences in Display of Emotion and Human Contact
We see that in Southern European Cultures (Latins) such as the Italians, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French, tend to allow more overt displays of physical affection than people of Northern European stock.
For the above-mentioned reasons, in the Americas, the countries that were settled by Latin countries–Latin America–tend to have the same type of overt tender affection displays of affection–as the southern Europeans, while the United States and Canada, settled predominantly by Northern Europeans, tend to show much more restrained non-demonstrative traits in those areas of emotional behavior.
As a result, the majority of the US population has a tendency to have difficulties in the area of expression of tender affection and feelings. In practical psychological terms, this means, many people in this country–and this is particularly true for men, and even more so if they are of northern European descent–have problems expressing their emotions and also showing affection in physical tender ways.
The irony of this relative lack of tender touch in the US is that the less tender touch there is in a society the more sexual abuse of people–and particularly of women and children there is. There is a striking and strange inverse correlation between these two factors. I have found clinically and it can be corroborated statistically that inappropriate touch of children correlates with lack of appropriate levels or good levels of affectionate tender touch.
I will not address in this post the EROTIC touch of other forms of touch mentioned in this article. Neither will address here a special form of touch Therapeutic Touch, which is a sub-type of tender touch. These will be the subject of different posts. I will rather focus here on the importance of Etiquette and Tender touch, two of the most important forms of touch we have been deprived of by this pandemic. And I will add one most important important factor that is extremely relevant to keep in mind and consider in these times of COVID-19 pandemic: SOCIAL DISTANCING ITSELF.
The Effect of Social Distancing on Our Psyches
I said before that when we Love someone, we feel attracted to that someone. When we are attracted to that someone,
- we pay ATTENTION TO THAT SOMEONE.
- We want to SEE that PERSON.
- WE WANT TO BE CLOSE TO HIM/HER IN PERSON
- WE WANT TO TALK WITH HIM/HER.
- All of these things are subsumed under the rubric of PRESENCE.
- These are all essential aspects of LOVE that have been taken away from us by COVID-19.
COVID-19 HAS TO A LARGE DEGREE REMOVED HUMAN PRESENCE FROM OUR LIVES
As a result of this pandemic, we cannot even be close to our loved ones as they are fighting the disease, since they have to remain in the hospital in isolation. As a result, we are not allowed to hold their hands, we are not allowed to be by them in there deathbeds–and we are not even allowed to see their dead bodies or attend their funerals!!!
I can hardly think of anything more tragic than dying alone, and or not being able to say good-bye to your loved one. COVID-19 HAS ROBBED US OF OUR VERY HUMANITY INDEED!
I will continue developing tender touch in other posts, but I want to leave you here with a few suggestions to start a positive trend in your love live NOW even in times of COVID-19 pandemic.
Suggestions to improve your love live through improving shows of tender love and affection:
- Even if right now we are limited in terms of who we can get close too, there are a number of people we can get close to. They are the ones around us NOW–the ones we know are not infected.
- Get close to them and touch them. Let them know THEY EXIST AND YOU EXIST.
- Get in the habit of lying next to your Significant Other when you are watching TV, reading, or knitting–or even when you are looking at your phone.
- Cuddle with your Significant Other often on the couch and in bed; give him/her a foot massage, a back massage, or a shoulder rub; they will be thankful for it
- Get in the habit of caressing their hair slowly–it is extremely soothing and calming; it is certainly very enjoyable, non-addictive, and much cheaper and less dangerous than wine or Xanax.
- Get in the habit of holding hands with those you love: warm their hands up with yours.
- Walk hand in hand or arm in arm at times, not just with your significant other but with family members or close friends.
- Pick up your children often, put them on your lap, and play with them, including rough and tumble play
- Look at your children and loved ones in the eyes and engage them as often as you can
- Pay full attention to people around you when they are talking to you
- REMEMBER: The greatest compliment you can pay another Human Being is that you ARE ALL THERE FOR THEM IN THE PRESENT MOMENT.
- GET YOUR EYES OFF THAT SCREEN AND JUST LISTEN TO THEM AND LOOK AT THEM! THEY MAY NOT BE THERE TOMORROW!
- Get in the habit of being playful and humorous: Give them an unexpected Gift or a surprise
- Give your significant other a tickling fit; find out where they are ticklish, and what they like in terms of sensation and give it to them
- Get a pet and hug him/her, pet him/her, play with him/her.
- Pets are a real balsam in this times of pandemic as we can be closer to them and they are always more than willing to give and receive love.
- Remember that NOBODY GIVES YOU A WELCOMING LIKE YOUR DOG WHEN YOU GET HOME. NOBODY WILL WAG HIS/HER TAIL AT YOU
Can you think of other ways of showing love though physical touch and gestures that you can share with our community? Which shows of love do you practice?
Which ones would you recommend others to implement? What solutions have you found to the problem of LOVING and Relating in these times of COVID-19 pandemic
I would LOVE to hear your input on these matters
Affectionately,
Dr T