“deep touch pressure is the type of surface pressure that is exerted in most types of firm touching, holding, stroking, petting of animals, or swaddling…a very light touch alerts the nervous system, but deep pressure is relaxing and calming.” (Dr. Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, who – to quote the article linked below – has made significant contributions both as an autistic self-advocate and as a consultant on animal behavior.)

These are all new finding to me, this morning, and I have yet to trial the theory for myself (but I will…and report back). Potential benefits for pain management seem self-explanatory within all the information available (again, see the resource attached below) but I’ve yet to find any link made between electro-sensitivity and a sensory therapy such as a gravity blanket. To me, the logic of a connection between them seems pretty obvious, especially if you consider that electro-hypersensitivity could be an extreme outcome of a low-threshold HPA reaction, possibly due to an attachment issue in childhood.

Because I recognise in all this a paradox….how I am both desperate for contact (massage, for instance, feels like a very necessity of wellbeing for me) but also struggle to have much contact, needing to feel absolutely right about it and for it to be on my terms with the right person. I can’t hug or touch just any-old person and there has to be trust there to start with; plus the understanding that if I need it to stop it does, before I become overwhelmed. I also struggle to make and hold eye-contact unless absolutely relaxed in someone’s presence, which depends on all sorts of subtle cues that my body works overtime picking up for me. This strange combination of traits seems so obvious to me now, in light of what I am intuiting about what infant-attachment does (or, in its absence, fails to do). This is a phenomenon that Grandin also talks about, explaining how, as a child, she both wanted to be held and yet would react negatively to the stimulation of being touched; yes, I can relate to that, especially as a child. Perhaps I got caught up in my own catch-twenty-two; where my natural sensitivities made me prone to react badly to contact and so people stopped trying. Perhaps the only person I really longed for was my mother and no substitute would do. It’s not that my mother was a bad parent; she just didn’t have enough hands for so many children at awkward ages and she wasn’t a naturally cuddly person; when, perhaps, I required extra attention. At the extreme end “When separated from the mother, newborns will actually begin to build a resistance to touch and nurturing (despite the desperate need for positive touch) and the ability by the brain to handle and assimilate touch actually becomes impaired.” (The consequences of sensory deprivation in early childhood –  Kim Knight.)

My daughter was also extremely sensitive as a newborn, I knew that right away; so I held her and held her and, while I was perhaps the only one who could with much success since she only wanted me, she came through it to where we are still so close, nineteen years later, and have always been (she has none of my health issues or painful super-sensitivities, though she is attuned to many things beyond some people’s awareness). She still needs her touch contact; we often talk about it. It was one of her concerns about leaving home…where would she get that from unless she made really great friends quickly (she can be pretty tactile with all sorts of people, unlike me). She’s so much more aware of how important this is to her health than I ever was at her age; and I like to think I helped to get her to that place through my parenting. Sometimes she wants to cuddle me even more than I can cope with; and, now she’s older, she knows this isn’t about her but about my own sensitivities, especially if she brings more energy to where I am than I can cope with, like when she comes home zimming with the energy of a busy day or when she is in high-stress. Its sad, sometimes, that I have to ration my contact time, put on the brakes, or suffer painful consequences. Its no accident, too, that I have all these realisations on the back of two months apart from her (the longest time since she was born) which has offered me all-new clarity. The constant contact and proximities required of parenting, beautiful as it is, took such a lot for me to handle as a super-sensitive when she was home. In this new space, I appreciate how precious and worth-it it has all been, for all the challenge of it.

So this recoil from touch, plus the electrical-hypersensitivity trait that I have, feels like a likely imprint of not being held enough as an infant and, in a sense, becoming so self-sufficient that you withdraw…plus the fact you overcompensate for lack of skin contact with those other sensory “relationships”, which rely on electrical currents, not warmth, pressure and other more-human cues. The result…a body that is now hard-wired for operating as some sort of electricity pylon more so than a flesh-and-blood human being, which gets progressively harder to deal with as it becomes more ingrained and overstimulated by ever increasing low and high frequency currents, wi-fi signals and so on “in the air”. It’s like those of us who have electro-sensitivity are having more of our relationships with electro-magnetic currents than with humans (if not by choice), the former crowding out the latter as we increasingly find we have to withdraw from the world to cope with such over-crowded stimuli coming at us from all angles.