Why Do I Feel Most Myself When I Am Not Being Touched?
The Pattern
You feel most yourself alone. The morning when no one is in the bed. The walk by yourself. The long stretch of being un-reached for. You feel something light and clean and fully you. The moment touch enters the picture, even welcome touch, you feel yourself dim slightly. You wonder if this means you are bad at love. You are not bad at love. You are someone whose self-access depends on the absence of the touch that has historically required you to perform. The untouched state is not a problem to fix. The untouched state is information. It is telling you that something about touch has not yet been integrated, that touch and selfhood have not yet learned how to occupy the same room.
Origins & Context
Carl Jung's work on individuation describes the specific developmental task of being able to remain a separate self while in close contact with another. Jung noted that adults who have not completed this developmental work often experience their full self only in solitude, because solitude is the only context in which they have not learned to perform.
Mary Pipher's writing on women in particular identifies this phenomenon as a common somatic residue of having been trained from a young age to organize the body around the watcher. The self that exists when no one is watching is the self that has not been adapted, and so it feels truest, because it is.
Pete Walker's work on the fawn response provides the trauma-specific context. The fawn-trained adult automatically reorganizes around any presence in the room, and so the only context in which she has access to her undistorted self is the context in which there is no presence to organize around.
Untouched is the only state in which you have full access to who you are.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the morning solitude. You wake up alone. You move through the apartment freely. You make the coffee. You do the small things that are yours. You feel like yourself. The partner comes home. You shift, almost imperceptibly. You are still yourself. You are also slightly less of yourself. You cannot fully name what just happened.
It shows up in the way you crave certain solo trips, certain solo nights, certain hours alone. You love the partner. You also need the rooms in which no one is reaching for you. The needing is not a flaw. The needing is a real requirement.
It shows up most painfully in the quiet realization that the deepest version of you has never met the person you love. The deepest version only comes out alone. The version they know is the touched version, and the touched version is slightly compressed. You feel guilty about this. You also do not know how to bring the deeper version into the touched state.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as Differentiation Incomplete (Carl Jung, later Murray Bowen), the developmental gap between the solo self and the in-contact self. It is also named as Fawn-Mediated Self-Compression (Pete Walker), the automatic reorganization of the self around any present other. Mary Pipher names the feminine version of this the Watched Self.
Related entries in this library: Adaptive Self vs Original Self, Fawn Response, Self-Abandonment.
Nikita's Note
The solitude is not the problem. The solitude is the proof that the full self exists. The work is not to abandon the solitude. The work is to slowly bring the version of you that exists alone into the room with another person, so that touch stops requiring compression.
The practice is small. Bring one solo-self gesture into the touched moment. A song you play when you are alone. A sentence you would only say to yourself. A way of moving your body that is yours. Let the partner meet the solo self in small doses. Over time, the compression thins, and the version of you who exists alone becomes the version of you who exists with another. The solitude remains as a sanctuary, not as the only place you are real.
From the work
Untouched is the only state in which you have full access to who you are.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.