Healing Touch forHealing Touch for Children Children

Using the Power of Touch andUsing the Power of Touch andTrauma Release To Heal Trauma Release To Heal

Children and Their FamiliesChildren and Their Families

Daphne White, CHTPDaphne White, CHTPCertified Healing Touch PractitionerCertified Healing Touch Practitioner

Healing Touch is offered at 35 hospitalsin the U.S. to relieve pain and increase the relaxation and healing response.Photo courtesy of Healing Touch International

Why Healing Touch? Healing Touch is an ideal complementary

modality for children in a hospital setting. • Hospitals = high tech, low touch.

Offer external resources: procedures, pharmaceuticals, surgery.

• Healing Touch = low tech, high touch.Stimulate inner resources: body’s innate ability to heal itself.

Hospitals offering pediatric Healing Touch include:

• Scripps Rady Children‘s Hospital• Wake Forest University• Chicago Children’s Hospital• Cincinnati Children’s Hospital

Healing Touch and Planetree

Healing Touch practitioners enable hospitals to live up to the Planetree mission by embodying the organization’s principles:

• we are human beings, caring for other human beings

• we believe care giving is best achieved through kindness and compassion

• we offer a holistic approach to meeting people's needs of body, mind and spirit

– we recognize that illness can be a transformational experience for patients, families and caregivers.

Results of Healing Touch include:

• Pain relief• Decrease in trauma symptoms• Reduced anxiety and stress• Accelerated wound healing and post-op

recovery• Improved mobility after surgery• Improved quality and quantity of sleep• Decreased length of hospital stay

Healing Touch works with the body’s innate healing

abilities to:• Increase immune function• Increase the relaxation response• Decrease stress and trauma• Decrease pain • Stimulate the self-healing effect

Healing Touch may be performed on or off the body.

Hospital Trauma• “One common and frequently overlooked source of

trauma in children is routine and emergency medical procedures.”

• “In 1944, Dr. David Levy [published in American Journal of Orthopsychiatry] found that children in hospitals for routine reasons often experience the same ‘nightmarish’ symptoms as ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers.”

– “The younger the child, the more likely he is to be overwhelmed by common medical events that might not affect an older child or adult.”

• From “Trauma Through a Child’s Eyes,” Peter Levine,PhD and Maggie Kline, MS, MFT and school psychologist

Children and Hospitals• Even routine hospital procedures can

trigger a traumatic reaction in children.

• For some children, the reaction to hospitalization is sheer terror.

• Trauma can also result in pain, a sense of loss, and overwhelming helplessness.

• Trauma involves grief reactions in addition to flashbacks, startle, , hypervigilance, numbing, etc.

Trauma in children• Trauma is defined as any event that overwhelms

the nervous system and leaves us unable to fight or flee.

• Babies and children may shut down (vacant eyes, non-responsive behavior, hypotonic muscles) when faced with more stimulation than their nervous system can handle.

• Nightmares, tummy aches, excessive vomiting and other symptoms are often related to events perceived as traumatic by the child.

• Children may begin to “act out” or “act in” when traumatized.

Trauma and the Body• Traumatic experiences are “held” in

the body until they are released.

• These “holdings” often manifest as symptoms that are difficult to diagnose because they are not tied to a specific disease pattern.

• Depression, chronic pain, anxiety attacks, and other syndromes that can take years to develop may have their roots in unresolved trauma.

How does trauma release work?

• Somatic Experiencing recognizes the varied symptoms of incomplete fight/flight responses, and helps children release them in a calm, slow and safe manner.

• As the activation of trauma is released, the body relaxes its hold, regains its resiliency, and healing can begin.

Why use Healing Touch and Somatic Experiencing

in pediatrics?• Both techniques use the power of touch to

calm the nervous system and enhance the relaxation response and placebo effect.

• Both involve a very calm, centered and empathic form of listening.

• Both techniques are patient-centered: the child sets the pace and determines the focus of the session.

Together, Healing Touchand Somatic Experiencing: Calm the sympathetic nervous system andenhance activity in the parasympathetic nervoussystem, resulting in:

• Deeper and slower breathing • Increased blood flow • A relaxation of the GI system• Calming of the vagus nerve• Relief of pain and other symptoms.

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