Aline LaPierre, Psy.D., is a core faculty professor in the somatic psychology program at Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, where she teaches and supervises the clinical work and research of doctoral students. An Advanced Candidate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, she is also trained in a variety of body-centered approaches, including Body-Mind Centering, Somatic Experiencing, deep tissue and neuromuscular bodywork. In her private practice in Los Angeles for the past 15 years, she has specialized in the integration of psychodynamic and body-centered approaches, with a specific expertise in the therapeutic use of touch. Her publications focus on the integration of neuroscience in clinical somatic practice. 

The interviewer: Arabella received her B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University, completed one-year’s M.A. coursework in clinical psychology, and spent many years in business management.  A Buddhist student and practitioner for thirteen years, Arabella has written a book on Buddhist reform that is in its final editing stages.

Arabella: You have studied such a breadth of somatic psychology techniques, approaches or perspectives – Reichian, neuroscientific approaches, acupressure, deep tissue bodywork, movement, etc..  How have you integrated them, and how would you characterize the personal approach to therapy that has evolved for you through your layered exposure to these perspectives?

Aline: That’s not a small question!  I have a hundred things I could say on this.  First of all, how I got into this…the first training I ever took on the body was Reichian; I started with Reich sometime over 25 years ago.  At the time, none of the newer, gentler bodywork approaches had really been developed.  There was Reichian, there was deep tissue – everything was on the pattern of “there’s a defense and we have to break it down.”   That’s where I started because that’s all there was.  Then, in contrast to that, I discovered Continuum which took a different approach: “there’s no defense to break down, there’s just a consciousness to bring into the body.”  And how do we bring consciousness into the body? Because, when we do, the defenses dissolve – there’s no need to try and break through. That’s like attacking the citadel – the war model – break down the walls!  Let’s invade!  When I discovered Continuum, I was exposed to a real life-changing paradigm of how to think about myself and my body.
Does that make sense? 

Arabella: Yes!  Completely!  And from that, it led into the newer perspectives as they evolved?

Aline: Right.  As I would hear about a new perspective, I’d be curious.  I’d think, “What’s this? And why do we need yet another form of bodywork?” And so I kept going until I thought, “My God, there’s no end to this!” So many different techniques. But what I finally realized was that each technique addressed a different area of the body: massage addressed the belly of the muscles, acupressure addressed the energy meridians, neuromuscular work the sensors at the joints, Zero Balancing talked about the bones and their crystalline structure, Body-Mind Centering was feeling the pulse and the life in the tissues and organs.  Each approach was so different!

Arabella: And what have you evolved to for yourself today?

Aline: Well, I don’t exactly know – how does one integrate the body?  How I work has become alive in the same way that my body became alive. Each new approach made me conscious of a new aspect of my own body.  And as that new consciousness became integrated, I found that I had more capacity to read the corresponding vibrations in the other person’s body.  So, how I work evolved naturally as I learned and became more integrated in my own body. Paying attention to the experiences of my body gave me access to understanding how everyone’s body holds and remembers experiences. Now, I listen, follow, and trust the wisdom of the body—my own and my client’s.

Arabella: How do you weave your current perspective – living in your body and thereby gaining access – into your teaching at SBGI?

Aline: Well, that’s the challenge isn’t it – how to teach living in one’s body?!  I think every year I do it a little bit differently, but I try to include a lot of experiential exercises– because for me, the teaching unfolds from there: through each student’s personal experience of their body.  I do experiential exercises that give access to the internal experience of the body, and we talk about it, and see how it informs the theories. We’ll visualize the internal anatomy of the body and the different organs.  I find that when we can visualize the internal anatomy of the body, it’s much easier to pay attention and be present to those areas in ourselves and in the other that need help.  So, I try to create a visual experience of the body to accompany the sensory experience. I like that synergy.

Arabella: How does the SBGI environment – in particular – allow you to explore and further your work through teaching?

Aline: Well, it’s the only place available to teach on that level, and to teach that material.  I don’t know where else – certainly for me – within an institution.  There’s no better place I can think of.

Arabella: What have you learned from your students at SBGI?

Aline: Each student brings such a distinctive perspective. The somatic field is a developing field and each student contributes to broaden the understanding. I feel that as a teacher I learn as much as the students. I find that each student has a depth of accumulated experience they bring to the class. It informs their questions and their comments. So, SBGI is a learning environment on multiple levels for everyone involved.  For me, it’s very rich because, through the student’s involvement and curiosity, I discover new aspects of the subject I am teaching.

Arabella: Your article on touch – accessible through this newsletter – is wonderful.  You discuss the institution, or re-employment, of touch in therapy.
I’ve had two experiences in adulthood that pertain to the importance of touch that will set the tone for my questions:
I studied in Italy, in college.  Prior to going overseas, we students were taught that we would experience elements of “culture shock” upon engaging Italian society.  I didn’t experience any culture shock, but wonderment at how comfortable Italians were with bodies (their’s and others’), and with physical proximity.  For instance, a friend might play with another friend’s hair – without feeling any romantic interest – while speaking to him/her.
What happened was that I experienced culture shock coming back.  Americans stood at such a distance from one another and apologized profusely when they touched one another, as if it were a grave error.  I was saddened by the fear of touch I observed; by contrast to Italians, Americans were seemingly detached and unaware of their bodies and their interconnection.
And now the question: How can we effectively address cultural barriers to touch; how do we re-educate ourselves – as a society – to the benefits of touch? 

Aline: That was beautifully written.

Arabella: Oh, thank you.

Aline: You know, this last question is exactly the question that those who feel that touch is really important are asking.  How can we reeducate ourselves to the benefits of a touch that is caring and conscious?  Because, the problem is, some touch is harmful. Not all touch is good. I don’t think the way is developed yet.  It’s in process, and that’s what makes working with touch both frustrating and exciting.  Overall, there is fear about what it might mean. The discussion on touch is still focused on whether “to touch or not to touch.”  And you can see how, in Italy, that’s not such a problem. For them, touching each other is integral to relating. We’re still wondering if we should open the door to touch. And it keeps us at the periphery of the subject. When are we going to open that door and really explore the territory?! I’m using we as if I knew who ‘we’ are….I should rather say that this is my general impression based on many conversations I’ve had with psychotherapists and people in the work place. To speak to the deeper question: “When we do open the door to touch, then what happens?”  How do we actually explore what happens in the tissues when they’re touched. Our skin is covered with receptors that feed the experience of touch directly into our nervous system. That makes it very powerful, so it’s understandable that we would fear to enter the territory. As therapists we wouldn’t think to say, “You’re going to see these clients, but don’t look at them!  Whatever you do, don’t look at them!”  But we do say: “Don’t touch them!” After all, touch is one of our senses on par with all the others! Why do we think that our sense of touch wouldn’t be as important as our sense of sight?!  Or our sense of hearing?! 
It seems to me that only through embodying ourselves, can we reconnect with our sense of touch.  When you described the Italian scene of a friend playing with another’s hair…I’m from a French background, and I related to what you said. Touching involves togetherness, sharing the experience of being in our bodies, and more important touching each other is pleasurable. Again, I have to be more precise: the right kind of touch goes a long way toward telling us we’re loved, cared for, accepted. When we are touched with love, we exist! Touch makes us aware of our body. Our taboo against touch reflects our disconnection from the body.  And reconnecting with our bodies and with touch is an important way to bring physical tenderness back into our relationships. The body thrives on tenderness. Now, that’s a challenge in itself. 

Arabella: (laughs) Yeah!

Aline: “How do we do it?” – I’m glad you’re asking that question rather than asking the legal questions. Rather than asking: “What about being sued?!” You know, I’ve answered that question dozens of times. It’s a way of staying on the outside!

Arabella: Now, the second experience.  For several years I volunteer-visited a convalescent hospital.  I spent time with the elderly and observed how starved they were for caring touch – old age being a time when people commonly revert to memories and feelings of their childhood.  It occurred to me that excellent therapy for them would be to be held afloat in a pool; since water is sufficiently buoyant, they might re-experience the joys of their infancy, and have the sense of being cared for by their mothers.  I then worried that this practice could raise ethical problems, which – again – made me feel sad. 
As a fellow advocate of touch in the client-therapist relationship, I wondered:  How do therapists find solutions to the human need for, and benefit from, touch while addressing the ethical issues that can (and do) arise, as well as the potential for touch to cultivate excessive attachment (resulting in inevitable “hurt”) in the therapist-client relationship?

Aline: Right.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot.  Because it’s such an enormous issue.  Some years ago, I started working with a couple.  They wanted to have a deeper intimacy and they didn’t know how to do it.  So I asked this question of each one: “Do you like how your partner touches you?”  And each one said, “No, he/she doesn’t touch me the way I want to be touched.”  And so, here they were wanting to deepen their intimacy, and yet they hadn’t ever thought that they could learn to enjoy each other’s touch.  Then I thought, “My God, why are we placing so much emphasis on using touch in therapy, with all the attendant problems you mentioned, and why aren’t we teaching families and  couples to touch each other in the intimacy of their lives. They’re not limited to 50 minute therapy sessions. They have their whole lives to touch each other! I thought that this would bypass so much of this problem.

Arabella: Explain how it bypasses the problem.

Aline: It bypasses my limits as a therapist. At the root of things, people often don’t know how to touch each other. People come to therapy because they have either been neglected or abused, and it most often involves some misuse of touch. Working in therapy with one person at a time may be very healing, but it still doesn’t give that person what he or she really needs or wants in their everyday life: a partner with whom to experience bonding and nurturing.  As therapists we do a lot of repair work so that they can get there. On the other hand, if I help couples learn to touch each other, they take the touch into their intimacy, into their families, and they feel more comfortable touching their children. I love teaching people how to touch each other. There is a limit to what I can do as a therapist in a session, but those limits don’t exist when a couple takes the knowledge of loving touch into their lives, or when a mother takes the knowledge of nurturing touch to her children, or friends take their knowledge of healing touch to each other.

Arabella: When, in their histories, clients were abused – sexually, through physical violence, or through neglect of caring touch – how does the therapist provide the safety to initiate contact with them in order to repair the physical neglect, rejection, and/or damage?

Aline: You have to work with reestablishing ruptured boundaries first. This relates to trauma and how it affects the nervous system. When there’s been abuse, there’s been a violation, a breech, some kind of destruction of the integrity of the person’s boundary. So much of touch happens in the implicit realm because touch bypasses language. Actually, touch is its own language.  So, a therapist works implicitly, with the distant boundary first – having the person look around and see where they feel comfortable looking, where they don’t feel comfortable looking. This begins to reveal where the breeches in the boundary are. This kind of information from other senses can then guide how to approach the more proximal breeches at the skin. We can work with positioning oneself at different distances from the person and seeing what kind of responses happen in the felt sense. What happens as we come closer.  We can work with the eyes: is the person comfortable being seen, not being seen, closing their eyes in the presence of another?  Just slowly building the capacity to look into another person’s eyes can be incredible powerful.  It’s very slow work because it’s work that addresses implicit memories and seeks to reorganize the nervous system.

Arabella: Can you give us an accessible explanation for the term “neuroaffective touch”?

Aline: I was looking for a term that would focus on what it is that we’re touching.  Because we’re not just touching the surface of the skin!  So what is it that we’re touching in the person?  There are all these sensory receptors at the skin, and they’re connected directly into the nervous system, and they are direct roads to the brain.  We are touching the nervous system directly when we touch the skin. And we contact the nervous system over the whole surface of the body when we touch the skin!  So, that’s why I used the term “neuro” because we’re touching the nerve receptors. And then “affective” because to be touched has a strong emotional impact.    

Arabella: I found your closing line – in the article we’ve linked to the newsletter – to have immense implications. “…the touch taboo and resulting touch illiteracy limit our psychotherapeutic horizons and rob us of effective, perhaps critical, forms of clinical reparative interventions and interactive couple and caregiver education.”  Would you respond to your own statement.

Aline: Well, yes…let me see. What comes to mind is this: we have eyes, we have smell, we have taste, we have hearing, and we have touch.  So, why is it that touch is not of equal in importance with the other senses? Why do we so mistrust it? We do get a tremendous amount of valuable information from touch.  But we tend not to pay close attention to that information…at least not consciously. We most often don’t know how to make sense of the information we get from our sense of touch. Or we push it away, like we push the body away.  In that sense, by not learning to read the felt touch, we are robbing ourselves. I think that if we don’t develop our sense of touch, we are missing so much in terms of how we relate to each other. It would be like not using our ears, or not using our eyes even though they work perfectly well – not using the information we get from our sense of touch is, to my mind, equal to that. That’s why I think: This is very important!

Arabella: I spent eleven years in Buddhist training with the intention to become monastic – a Buddhist monk.  I was alarmed by the degree to which the monks and nuns I knew had become disconnected from their bodies, as though their bodies could not provide a passageway to spiritual experience and/or higher states of consciousness. 
I noted two of your statements in response to this issue:
a) “From blushing, to goose bumps or hives, the association between mental states and the skin is quite direct.” 
b) “When we ‘lose touch’ with cutaneous sensations, we become unfamiliar to ourselves.  To be numb to touch is to live in a world in which the body feels strangely deadened and endangered in its capacity to interact with its environment.”
 Could you discuss the link you perceive between human touch – sexual and non-sexual – to greater spiritual truths?

Aline: Ooooo.  (laughs.)  Can I think about this for a minute?  Actually, what I need to hear from you is what you mean by ‘greater spiritual truths’?  I’m not sure I know what that means.

Arabella: Well, o.k., I’d be curious as to what that evokes for you.

Aline: Oh, o.k.

Arabella: Whatever you think that is. 

Aline: Whatever I think that is.  Well, I’m going to keep it on the level of the body.

Arabella: Sure.

Aline: Let’s see…. Hmmm.  (Long pause.)

Arabella: I’ll tell you what, I’m going to help you. 

Aline: (laughs) o.k.

Arabella: I’m going to put in another question, in tandem.  I’m skipping one question.  In fact, in your chapter in Sex, Love, and Psychology: Sexual Health, Vol I Psychological Foundations, you speak of the body’s own internal interconnectivity.  Might the body not be seen as a representative sample of our larger human – or sentient – interconnectivity, as a representative sample of the larger picture?

Aline: (calmly) Yes.  Yes.  Oh, thank you.

(Both laugh.)

Aline: Well, you know what’s interesting is that I don’t have a lot of opportunity to talk about touch on this level.  I’m thrilled with the questions you’re asking me because the discussion – as I said – is usually about, “Are we going to open that door, or not?”  And so this – what you’re asking me in our conversation – is like walking into the garden.  Oh!!!  It’s as if we had been kicked out of the Garden of Eden…and somehow, touch is a way back in. Back into our bodies and experiencing the Garden.
From the spiritual perspective – let’s see – it relates to that aspect where one comes to look at reality in wonderment.  Where layers are peeled away and there’s a capacity to almost ‘touch’ the mystery of nature that we are, and the incredible complexity and beauty of what we are experiencing. I have no words for this! So then, to be present to and curious about the body from this place of wonderment: What is this sensation?  And what is this movement that it is making?  To be really present to what the body can do, feel,  and to the sensory information that it gives us – that the brain registers. With awe. The deeper we take our attention into the body, the more wondrous it becomes. I do see it as a sensory experience of spirituality.

Arabella: My comments and questions that follow pertain to many religious or spiritual groups that value meditation.
I’ve noted that meditators from many traditions – although wanting to foster the highest sense of interconnection of beings – seem unable to entertain simple human love.  They often behave with interpersonal disconnection, rather than vast connect.  It seems that our vast connection as sentient beings cannot be exclusive of our interpersonal interconnection. 
Could you discuss the relationship between meditation and touch, in your view or experience?

Aline: What you just asked  brings to mind the wounds in the attachment and bonding process. When there is no attachment or bonding – and touch is such an important part of that process – then there is a disembodied flight into the mind.  It’s a schizoid place – the person is unattached.  And then….can I say this?

Arabella: You can say anything!

Aline:  I can?  Well, think about all that we are now learning about the importance of attachment and bonding. To me, many forms of meditation, spirituality, and bodily transcendence offer a way to create a sense of meaning without human attachment. Some approaches seem to cater to people who have disturbances in their attachment process. We need to feel attached, and when we don’t have the sense of being attached to a physical person – we attach to non-physical things, to beliefs, or to physical objects rather than to people.  I’m not saying that doesn’t have value.  I’m just saying that touch is an essential component for the embodied experience of bonding to a physical person – it comes through the contact of the baby’s body to the mother’s body – through first being inside the womb, then being belly-to-belly at the breast.  All of that is part of, can I say, the spirituality of our physicality?!

Arabella: Mmm hmmm!  I found your comments fascinating, and I’m glad that you said what you said, “Can I say this?!”  Because I have really thought about these kinds of issues quite a bit.  I perceive a need for reintegration of this mind-focused spirituality with the body-focused spirituality – you know, as though the two were ever separate in the first place!  And the hierarchical approach, as though the body is on a lower level and the mind is theoretically on some higher level!

Aline: Exactly. If we use our attention like a microscope and start going into our bodies and start traveling into the world of sensation and its associative imagery – what being with the body triggers in the brain – then I think we enter spirituality from a different door.  I learned this from Continuum and Body-Mind Centering, actually.  Going into the very, very micro-awareness and feedback systems, witnessing the body in its microscopic parts – the cells – you know, how are the cells in the kidney are different from the cells in the stomach, different from the cells in the heart?  And the theory, at least the way I understand it, is that if we give our cells focused attention, we get fed this incredible information about life. We can be so much more present to our own healing and to our own growth. And to each moment.
 
Arabella: Does any of what we’ve covered speak to the work that is currently closest to your heart?
 
Aline: Yes, I think this is at the heart of it. It touches the core of so many issues of intimacy between couples, and between parents and children. That’s what draws me the most to this work and why I find it so immediately interesting. Touch is at the center of our sexuality—right at the core of our most intimate moments. This is precisely why it is frightening to many. But independently of sex, touch is so very immediate to the experience of closeness, it is essential to our feelings of connection with each other, and to our expressiveness in all manners of relationship.