Walk With Reid Facebook Live: How Affectionate Touch And Intimacy Help You Deal With Anger
Reid: Oh yeah! Figuring that I can do this, Am I live? Am I, I am live. Yeah that’s right. I think I just recreated the, the opening scene from which Quentin Tarantino film.
Hello everybody! It is a, it’s time for our walk today. I found creepy and weird about letting me know when it goes live but now I can see that people are joining us and so that means it’s working and the and as I was setting up my phone, I realized I could do that that cheesy theatrical opening trunk shot.
Today maybe I was being inspired by you know like angry films. Tarantino being one of one of those kinds of people who likes being angry in a violent way and I’m not espousing violence today as I take you for again another walk on a sunny day here in Oakland.
I’ve been tinkering with my selfie stick and, and trying to like tape it a little bit so it’s not I keep noticing there’s like a tapping as I’m walking on the phone so I’ve taped everything down and, and put like egg cartons foam on it to to try to keep it from making that sound. So let me know if the sound’s better today. Hi, Dicka! And I’m gonna walk backward let’s see if I can keep the wind from my microphone today or else I guess I could do this one it’s probably better.
So what are we talking about today? We’re talking about anger and needing a hug and how we can use touch — affectionate touch and intimacy to better take care of ourselves and for those of you who know some of my history, I’m one of the founders one of the creators of cuddle party which is a non-sexual communication workshop about affection and non-sexual intimacy. And that I started it in 2004 and Marcia Baczynski who’s an amazing educator help jumped on board after the first cuddle party. She jumped on board on second cuddle party and then together we you know basically rode this amazing so media waved and blogger waved back then because the news story of cuddle party was New Yorker’s are paying money to cuddle and the end must be near the apocalypse must be coming, Hurry! And it was such a feel good news story because so many New Yorker’s you know are just kind of proceed is being grumpy and unapproachable that New Yorker’s cuddling was this great human interest story that so we got all these coverage and Marcia and I got on the Montel Williams show and we taped in an episode of the Tyra Banks show and Marcia had a picture in People Magazine. And like everybody wanted to talk to us and we got calls at all hours of the that night from morning DJ’s in Ireland and all these other places talking about you know why do people need to cuddle and Marcia and I became the unofficial spokespeople for affectionate appropriate touch and why people need touch. Not everybody but maybe but maybe everybody at some point. Certainly there are some people who are like “don’t touch me” and there are other people that like “oh my gosh!” Like “pounce on me”, “pile on top of me.” So everyone is different but what I can tell you is studies have shown that if you’re feeling angry and emotional and just maxed out and you’re not getting any affection of touch in your life or any even just healing touch right, you can go and get massage and that doesn’t have to be I mean that can be caring and nurture ship, nutritive, nourishing and you can go get a massage and doesn’t have to be affection in the intimate kind of friend romance way. But like caring present conscious touch is really, really useful and healing and your body doesn’t really good when it has more oxytocin in it and isn’t in a fight and flight mode. And when you’re kind of stuck into a, a stress loop when you’re in your sympathetic nervous system which is fight flight you know you being in your parasympathetic nervous system which is rest and relaxation, you flooding your, your system with oxytocin which is the, the hug hormone or the cuddle hormone as it’s sometimes called that’s the same hormone that people’s bodies release when they’re breastfeeding. It’s the same hormone that that you release when you orgasm – one of the hormones.
So these things have been studied and there’s a lot of really good health effects associated with getting you know a decent amount of oxytocin in your system and since we’re, we’re not actual canines who upon seeing our owner just drop a bunch of dopamine and oxytocin in our system because we’re so happy to see to see our our owners and since we’re not dogs, you know think about how you can get more touching and more oxytocin in your life. And a hug can be one of those things not just one of those quick speed you know drive by hugs but an actual like embrace where you, you stay hugging for more than 3 seconds. I’m not exactly sure exactly the, the study and the amount of time but I’m going to say somebody who’s led over 350 cuddle parties and a lot of other kind of touch heavy event that when you create kind of conscious present embraces for more than ten thirteen seconds I’ll say it feels like when you just breathe in and let yourself uuuhhh get in your body.
But there’s a shift and I believe that that shift is the beginning of your body starting to release oxytocin and a bunch of other good stuff and your brain kind of shifting from stress to relaxation. I’ve talked in other videos about the benefits of making sound using a manually stimulating your vagus nerve so that when you take a deep breath you welcome to do that at home. Take a deep breath and just let out a kind of like uhhhhh kind of sound that you could feel in your chest if you put your hand on your chest. That kind of vibration, you’re manually stimulating your vagus nerve and that’s VAGUS for those who want to Google it right now and when you’re stimulating your vagus nerves, you’re telling your brain in your nervous system it’s not in danger and it’s a, it’s letting out that kind of sound can also be a way to kind of self-regulate and help your nervous system start to calm down and reground.
So embraces that are consensual and that you want right because if you’re somebody’s holding on to you too long and that’s what you don’t want, I don’t think that releases oxytocin. But you being held in a way that you do want and letting out sound continuing to, to breathe deeply. Those things can go a long way to helping your body course correct if you’re feeling really stressed if you have a lot of anger. And this is not about pushing anger down but it’s about helping regulate overwhelmed basically. So you can still feel, feel angry and but have it be used effectively if you’re in a state of overwhelm and your anger is you know basically in a feedback loop when you’re just getting more and more stressed. Then it’s hard to show up for work. It’s hard to show up for activism. It’s hard to show up for your love relationships and for your family and for your friends. So I’m just kind of positing my thoughts today on our walk towards that end like how can we use touch and be more conscious about the kind of touch that we want so that we can be more effective just as human beings and more effective and connected in our relationships.
So let’s take a look at some comments here. Christina Marie, hello! Thanks for sharing the video. I appreciate that you appreciate all this. For those of you who for whom this is resonating if you want to hit your, your likes and your hearts and make it kind of rain those emoticons, those emoticons that I love so much. Make it rain. Make it rain.
Share your thoughts and what you’re thinking about and how this stuff is landing on you today and I’m sharing this too like I do have a lot of conservative friends who’ve been very patient with me with all of my you know ranting and sharing about feeling upset and disturbed. But you know to my conservative friends out there and I do have them and I, I hold them very dear. They’re, they’re my friends that I go to and ask questions when I’m trying to understand you know more conservative opinions about life in the world.
Some of my friends are they’re getting bashed and they’re excited that that you know that maybe the person that they voted for is in office and they can’t understand why everybody’s angry and upset and then they’re getting angry and upset because of everybody else. And so I think this advice just in general whatever your beliefs are and views of the world I think this can be really useful advice around understanding yourself and how your needs around connection and touch and being able to use affection to just be more effective in the world and also you know if you can you know allow yourself to feel your anger, to feel your upset, to feel your exhaustion it’s not about making feelings bad and it’s not about pushing them down further. But I think if we can all learn how to be more coordinated with our emotions more self-aware, have more agencies over our feelings and how they sometimes mug us and strip us of our ability to choose and stay connected.
If we can learn how to be more coordinated with ourselves, we can be more compassionate to others who are having a bad day who can’t get that leg up. We can teach each other practice’s to be able to self-regulate in more healthy ways so that we can be connected. So you know I’m not telling you to go out and you know massage give you know give somebody you hate a foot massage but if you getting more touch from day to day is helping you be able to walk in somebody else’s shoes, understanding the people that we can’t understand I’m not I’m not making an excuse for emotional or physical abuse I don’t think you should have to put up with that from anybody especially your loved ones but I am saying that my thoughts on this are if I have my tanks more full and I have more resources and I’m not stressed or caught on some weird loop of anger, it’s it’ll be easier for me to connect to somebody and have them feel seen before they feel attacked. And your mileage may vary I I’m not making excuse for bad behaviour but I know that when I’m overwhelmed I don’t always behave at my best. I’ll leave it that.
So I think that’s the walk. I’ve walked to up and down this little path here in Alameda as the Alameda canal or whatever they call it these days on a on a patch of sunniness here in Oakland. I’ll be in Los Angeles later this week and then two weeks I’ll be in Los Angeles for the Sexual Health Expo the S.H.E. expo and I get to interview and present an award. I think maybe I maybe I, I outed something I wasn’t supposed to share to you. Not allowed maybe I fibbed forget I said that. I will be at S.H.E. and I will get to interview a lot of cool people so go to the Sexual Health Expo a website http://www.sexexpo.com/ and see if you can figure out who I might be interviewing and I’m also going to be wearing my tux my tuxedo rather than my sex geek shirt.
Thank you so much everybody! Leanne, thank you so much! Everybody I, I appreciate these videos. I appreciate the, the critique that people hate the walking. Hopefully my things that I, I did with duct tape and foam on my walking stick made it sound better today and we’ll just keep improving and then maybe tomorrow maybe tomorrow I will be on my treadmill desk. I don’t know but I think tomorrow I have a special guest joining me for our walk. So maybe it’ll be a there’ll be a little walking three way for us tomorrow. Make it rain some emoticons. Share the video if this was useful for you. Thank you so much for being part of my life and giving me something to do that feels productive on days when sometimes I feel confused, exhausted and a little bit angry to the world.
Mwah! Bye everyone! Thanks for the emoticons!