Using the Power of Touch and Trauma Release To Heal Children and Their Families Daphne White, CHTP Certified Healing Touch Practitioner http://hands-to-heart.com

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

3. 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.

4. Hospitals offering pediatric
Healing Touch include:
• Scripps Rady Children‘s Hospital
• Wake Forest University
• Chicago Children’s Hospital
• Cincinnati Children’s Hospital

5. 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.

6. 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

7. 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

8. Healing Touch may be performed
on or off the body.

9. 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

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. Together, Healing Touch
and Somatic Experiencing:
Calm the sympathetic nervous system and
enhance activity in the parasympathetic nervous
system, 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.

16. ?? Questions ??