You Might Be Wondering How NeuroAffective Touch® Can Help You...

If you have come across NeuroAffective Touch® (NATouch) and found yourself curious about what it actually involves, or what it might offer you, this is often where people start. Not with the theory, but with a simple question of what would this be like for me?

NeuroAffective Touch® is a polyvagal informed somatic approach that brings together relational psychotherapy with the therapeutic use of touch and bodywork. In practice, this means working with the body directly rather than relying on talking alone, so that the parts of you that formed before language, the parts that hold the earliest imprints of safety and connection, have a way of being reached and supported.

Perhaps you know yourself well already, having done a good deal of talking therapy or self-development work over the years, and yet there is still a nervous system that stays switched on even when nothing is obviously wrong. Perhaps you carry a quiet sense of holding everything together, or you have noticed yourself reaching for the things that take the edge off, a drink at the end of the day, overwork, staying too busy to feel. Often this shows up as pain, a physical pain with no clear cause, tight shoulders, a locked jaw, an ache that moves around the body, or an emotional pain that surfaces at moments that do not seem to warrant it. The body has a name for the kind of protective holding that creates this. It is sometimes called armouring, the tension we build, often without realising, to survive what could not otherwise be avoided at the time. For many people, this is the piece that has been missing. Understanding your patterns intellectually matters, and it can only take you so far, because some of what we carry was never stored as a story with words attached. It was stored in the armouring itself, in bracing and pain and a kind of readiness that never quite switched off. This is the layer that somatic work is able to reach.

It helps to know this is not simply a belief somatic therapists hold. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown that an emotional response originates in the body itself, in bottom-up signals the mind then interprets and appraises, rather than the other way round. The psychologist Eugene Gendlin found something similar in his research into what actually made therapy work. It was not the technique or the modality that predicted good outcomes, but whether a client could access what he called the felt sense, an inner bodily knowing that has to be given time to form before it can be understood. Both point to the same thing. The body often knows before the mind has words for it, and healing tends to follow that order.

I want to share something of what this can look like, because I think it is more useful than trying to explain it in the abstract. Recently I was on the table myself, in a demonstration session with Dr Aline LaPierre, the founder of NeuroAffective Touch. The session began at the thoracic inlet, the gateway where throat meets chest, where so many of us hold the bracing that keeps overwhelming feeling contained. But rather than following a fixed protocol, Aline followed her own intuition, and her hands moved to the back of the heart. There, she found what I can only describe as a portal, and a place where I had been carrying months of muscular tension and pain, the same kind of armouring I have just described.

I felt it too. Something opened that at the time had no words or meaning to describe it.

What came next arrived in waves. My mind labelled it grief, although labelling is really the wrong word, because my mind was barely involved. There was a guttural cry that moved through me in surges, rising and softening and rising again, and I was able to feel all of it because Aline was there, present and witnessing without trying to shape or hurry what was happening. I could not have done this alone. Having her presence alongside me was what allowed my body to trust that it was safe enough to let go this far.

This points to something important about how this work supports change. It is rarely about the practitioner doing something to you. It is about creating enough safety that your own body can do what it already knows how to do, in its own time and its own way.

Towards the end of the session, something shifted again. My body began to tremor, small jerking movements moving through me that I did not choose and could not have stopped. This was not the body malfunctioning, it was the nervous system completing something. Survival responses that never had the chance to finish, protective reflexes that had to be held rather than expressed, gradually find their way to discharge once the body senses enough safety to let them move. The trembling was not a sign that something had gone wrong. It was a sign that something long held was finally able to release.

What followed the tremoring was new sensation arriving into various places in my body. I could sense this new energy, the life force arriving, moving into places that had been closed for a very long time. It felt like arrival. It felt like something in me that had been waiting was finally being met.

In the time since, I have come to understand this as touching something close to the root of my own story. Early in life, before we have language, we are asking a question underneath everything else. Am I safe here? Do I belong? Am I wanted? When those questions go unanswered for long enough, the body organises itself around their absence, and it carries that organisation forward, often for decades, often without our conscious awareness. What I experienced on that table felt like those questions finally being met, not through explanation or insight, but through the body itself.

Yes, I exist.

Yes, I am loved.

Yes, my needs are important.

Not as ideas but as something lived, directly, in the body.

What surprised me most was not the session itself but the days that followed. I felt more confident, more at home in my own body, as though I had quietly stopped minimising the space I take up. The biggest shift was in how I spoke with people. I noticed I had stopped filtering myself, working out in advance what I was going to say, rehearsing it internally, and then never quite saying the thing. I was simply saying it, as it arose, without the usual editing process running underneath.

This is often what people notice as this work unfolds, whether in a single significant session or gradually across many. A new sense of steadiness begins to emerge, not because the old patterns have disappeared entirely, but because there is more room now, more capacity to meet what arises. People often describe feeling more confident, more at home in their own bodies, more able to say what they actually mean rather than the edited version, and more able to access a felt sense of aliveness that had quietly gone missing somewhere along the way. This tends to happen slowly, layer by layer, rather than all at once. But it builds, and it lasts, because it is not simply understood. It is lived and felt in the body, which is where lasting change tends to take root.

What this might look like in practice

If you have not experienced somatic touch work before, it might be worth saying plainly what a session actually involves. You remain fully clothed throughout, on a massage table, and the pace is always yours to set.

We often begin with something called a nurture surround, a way of building your capacity to notice what is happening inside you, moment to moment, while also getting used to something many people find surprisingly difficult at first, being asked what you like and what you do not, and having that answer genuinely matter. We might use heated pillows placed around the body for extra support, gently encouraging your body to let down a little further. Learning to notice and voice a need or preference, even a small one, is often an important part of the work in itself, especially for anyone who learned early on that their needs and preferences were not the priority.

There is also dialogue woven through the sessions. Understanding your history, including any adverse childhood experiences and earlier trauma, helps me know what your body may be carrying and what it needs from me in return. From there, we follow the body, letting it lead rather than directing it toward a particular outcome.

Underneath all of this, we are gradually building a different relationship between your mind and your body. I sometimes describe this as a bit like a divorced couple, two parts that once knew each other closely but have long since stopped speaking, rarely even occupying the same room. Through this work, we get curious about that relationship. Rather than letting the mind continue in its usual privileged position, judging, managing, overriding, we help it learn to hold the body instead with care and curiosity, so that the critical, judgemental stance the mind has often taken towards the body can slowly begin to soften.

If this speaks to something you recognise in yourself, and you are curious what this work could offer you, I would love to hear from you.

And if you feel ready for more personalised support, 1:1 Somatic Therapy  including NeuroAffective Touch® offers a relational, body-based space that works with your nervous system directly, with care, honesty and without judgement. Available online and in person in Beverley, East Yorkshire - you can book a free inital consultation HERE

Heller, L. and LaPierre, A. (2012) Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship. North Atlantic Books.