The Magic of Forgiveness by Tian Dayton

Author:Tian Dayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Health Communications Inc

THE IMPORTANCE OF HUMAN TOUCH

The experience of being loved in childhood echoes from cradle to grave. When pediatrician Harry Bakwin took over the pediatric ward of Bellevue in 1931, there were signs all over instructing nurses to wash their hands and not to touch babies and “spread infection.” Baldwin recognized the horror of this, took away the signs instructing personnel not to touch and put up signs instructing nurses to pick up the babies. Paradoxically, the infection rates went down. Apparently, touch and caring are more useful to our immune systems than “healing” policies that isolate us from human closeness. In the thirteenth century, Fredrick II of Prussia conducted a strange experiment in which he had a group of children raised without being spoken to in any way, because he wanted to see what language they would “speak naturally.” All the children died. We are meant to form secure attachments, and we’re meant to feel pain when those attachments are ruptured. It is a matter of survival.

Tears shed in grief have a different makeup from other kinds of tears. Who among us doesn’t know the feeling of relief in our bodies, minds and hearts after a good cry? Feeling sadness, hurt and grief is what allows a wound to heal. Just as we lance a boil to allow a physical infection to drain, we cry to relieve a swollen, hurting heart. An important thing to remember in grieving is that we’re not only allowing our feelings of sadness, hurt, resentment, confusion and despair to surface and be felt; we’re also allowing the meaning we’ve made of experiences in our lives to emerge. In a sense, the limbic system weeps in tears and physical sensations, and the cortex weeps in word and symbol. Both need to be experienced and made sense of.

Our early experiences lay down a neural template that impacts how we experience and what we do with our emotions throughout life. They influence our emotional fluency and the quality of emotion that we are capable of feeling and expressing.

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