I am really glad you posted about this. My thoughts are not about the role of touch in therapy. I think whatever both people negotiate is perfectly professional. I believe that touch can be healing and that it can be detrimental to the person. I work with very traumatized people, and I still remember 20 years ago the first time I touched someone in empathy-- I patted her knee gently as she was crying. And she nearly knocked her chair over trying to get away from me. So I now use my words and I don't touch anyone unless they touch me-- sometimes people reach out to me for a hug and I am not going to shove them to the floor.

I think the issue is more about how to deal with not getting what you want from people, and it looks like the work you did on this issue has really moved you forward. I think this issue surfaces in T a lot because a lot of us are there to get what we are not, or haven't got, from others. The supportiveness of the T role primes us to expect, maybe even demand at times, that we get what we want. But T, like everyone else, cannot be totally devoted to giving us what we want even if they understand what that is. So sometimes they deliberately refuse (if they know), other times they don't get it so they don't have the opportunity. There are times when what we learn from this is that we have to be better communicators of what we want, and that increases our chances of getting it.

But people will always disappoint us, in and outside of T. Nobody is perfectly attuned nor do they have the attention or capacity to always provide what we want. So we can kick and scream about it, and induce guilt in them for not giving it to us. We can adjust our expectations, consider the reasonableness of our requests. We can reject everything from everyone to avoid being disappointed that we don't get what we want. Or there's probably lots of other emotional and behavioral responses that I haven't thought of.

It just occurs to me that this work you've put in to deal with your disappointment will serve you well in the future. Thoughtfulness and reflectiveness is never wasted.