Why Touch Matters: Reflections from My Work as a Massage Therapist
I haven’t just worked with people experiencing poor mental health — I’ve lived it myself.
I know how it can pull you out of your body or get you stuck in it. How everything can feel heavy, dull, slow. How starting movement — whether that’s physically or in life — can feel almost impossible. That sense of numbness, or being disconnected from yourself, often shows up in the body long before words are ever found.
Sometimes the world feels black and white. Like everything is fixed on one thing — one feeling — that has been present in your life for so long it’s almost a weight you carry everywhere. And that weight doesn’t just live in your mind. It shows up in your body.
It can appear as a physical ailment, a stubborn skin condition, or a shift in your body’s natural regulatory patterns — the rhythms of sleep, digestion, tension, or breath. The body speaks its own language ,and often, touch is one of the ways to gently listen and respond to that message.
This is why I started to offer my low-income treatments, I want to reach those who might not have access to lots of support or even have the energy and confidence to come for a treatment, but whose bodies are quietly asking for something very simple: connection.
I’m not a mental health specialist. And I’m very clear about that.
But I bring with me is many thousands hours experiencing people and bodies and 2 decades of working hands-on with people — through biodynamic massage, remedial massage, biodynamic psychotherapeutic training, eco-psychology, and end-of-life care. I’ve sat with people whose physical symptoms are deeply intertwined with emotional discontent or imbalance. And I’ve witnessed, time and time again, how powerful intentional, respectful touch can be.
What Touch Can Do
It’s extraordinary to watch someone walk into my space with their head low, feet shuffling, body dragging itself forward, sometimes non- verbal— and then to simply make contact. To meet them as a whole person.
Sometimes it’s not even about “doing” much at all. It’s about reassuring the body that it exists. Helping someone feel their edges again — feeling where their physical body ends and the outside world begins. Helping them experience what’s going on inside with curiousity.
Science is beginning to catch up with what many of us working with touch have known for a long time. Large-scale research has shown that human touch can significantly reduce anxiety, depression, pain, and stress, while supporting the nervous system to shift toward a state of safety and regulation. Touch has been shown to lower cortisol (the stress hormone) and increase chemicals like oxytocin and serotonin, which are linked to calm, connection, and wellbeing.
The Wellcome Trust, among others, has invested heavily in mental health research that looks at how the brain, body, and environment interact — acknowledging that mental health is not just something happening in the mind, but in the whole human system.
Massage research also suggests that intentional touch can reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, sometimes quite quickly. I see this in my practice all the time — someone walking out with their head held just a little higher, making eye contact where there was not before, breath a little deeper, able to talk a little more freely about what’s going on for them.
These moments can be subtle, but they matter.
Not a Cure — But a Place to Arrive
Massage isn’t for everyone. And it’s never a replacement for mental health support when that’s needed. I always make sure that people who are struggling have someone to talk to outside of the treatment space if it feels appropriate to suggest.
But massage doesn’t have to be heavy.
It doesn’t have to involve analysing or fixing.
Sometimes it can simply be a place to arrive, receive, and leave and take with you what feels useful and available in that moment.
A place where the body remembers has time and space enough to feel — even for a moment.
Where This Began for Me
This takes me back to when I was 21, before I’d even qualified as a massage therapist. I was studying choreography and living in a strange old boarding-school-style building — cell-like rooms with single beds, a window, a sink.
There was a man I knew through university who I later learned was Asperger’s. He used to knock on my door, head down, arms hanging heavy, eyes on the floor, and simply say,
“Hi Miranda. Can I have a massage?”
No niceties. No explanation.
And I would welcome him in and then he would often leave with a soft handshake.
He’d lie down, and I’d offer some sort of hands-on treatment — intuitive simple, present. Looking back, maybe it wouldn’t have felt safe or appropriate to everyone. But I know those moments meant something to him. He knew what his body needed when he felt overwhelmed or disconnected — and it was connection through touch.
I don’t know where he is now. The last I heard, he was living in Japan. But I often think about him, and how clearly he trusted his body’s wisdom.
Why I Keep Doing This Work
I make it my mission to bring more awareness of this work into the wider conversation — including Western medicine and systems like the NHS, where touch-based therapies are still rarely suggested as support for depression or mental health struggles. While other avenues of care, especially for those with insurance, may be claimable or supported by certain funding, massage and body-based therapies are rarely funded, though this is starting to change slowly.
And it's not because touch is a miracle cure — but because it’s human. Because it reminds people they are here. That they exist. That their body is not something to fear.
Even the smallest spark — a warmth, a breath, a moment of ease — can be the beginning of something shifting.
And that’s why I do this work.
That’s why access matters so much to me.
And that’s why I believe touch deserves a place in how we care for one another.
