Introduction to NeuroAffective Touch™

Touching is as necessary to the body as words are to the mind. Our skin is our largest sensory organ, containing hundreds of thousands of receptors that gather tactile information and pass it on directly to the brain. Loving, respectful touch is essential to healthy growth and development, while lack of touch is so damaging it can even impair the desire to live. Unfortunately, for over a century, the world of psychotherapy has disregarded half the equation—its clinical efforts have focused almost entirely on the mind and cognition while largely ignoring the body’s urgent need for touch, an important neurological component that allows us to integrate what our bodies are feeling with what our minds are thinking.

To address that need, Aline LaPierre has developed NeuroAffective Touch™, an innovative therapeutic approach that bridges psychodynamic, developmental, and body-centered modalities. Drawing on LaPierre’s decades of experience as a practicing somatic psychotherapist, as well as on current neurobiological understanding, NeuroAffective Touch™ offers a vital bridge between our verbal and nonverbal selves.

Introduced in Healing Developmental Trauma (North Atlantic, 2012), NeuroAffective Touch™ is a valuable tool that speaks the language of the body, yet invites the mind as an active partner. It uses direct contact with the skin and connective tissues and brings focus to the body’s many systems including nervous, endocrine, and circulatory. Facilitating access to feelings through this somatic conversation, it supports self-regulation and the awareness that leads to fulfilling connection with self and others.

As a therapeutic approach, NeuroAffective Touch™ addresses early attachment and developmental deficits by engaging the body on its own terms, at the deepest biological level, to heal the relational matrix.
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Coming soon!

book

NeuroAffective Touch™
Healing the Relational Matrix
by Aline LaPierre, PsyD

In this definitive guide to NeuroAffective Touch™, Aline LaPierre lays out the neurological and psychobiological science behind the innovations of her therapeutic approach. Placing touch in its appropriate medical, historical, and cultural contexts, she demonstrates how it can be harnessed to facilitate access to feelings, address breaches in the developmental matrix, and provide a pathway to healing.

Packed with clinically-valuable examples and informed by current research, NeuroAffective Touch™: Healing the Relational Matrix sheds light on the critical need for a therapeutic approach that integrates the nonverbal with the verbal, that brings together the body with the mind.

Can’t Wait?

Go to book description

Order Healing Developmental Trauma
in which NeuroAffective Touch™ is introduced
or read about Aline LaPierre’s other publications HERE.

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