Safewords For Non-Sexual Touch.

I have a safeword for non-sexual touch. Okay, I don't actually have a safe-word for non-sexual touch. Well, I did come up with one (to use within my primary relationship), it was *elephant*, and I used it a few times, and still sometimes do, but I haven't quite trained my brain to use it instead of just asking not to be touched in so many words. It's really not about the safeword, it's about why it is needed (for me, and other people who have the same issues).

A certain level of (platonic) touch is unconsciously built into our social, familial and peer-based relationships, especially within certain cultures. People embrace, they hug when they meet, they put their arms around you, they brush the hair off your face, they squeeze your shoulder to reassure, they physically handle you to get past you, they adjust your clothes for you, if you appear to be in distress they attempt to physically placate you, they sit leaning against you, they put a blanket over you if you fall asleep, they hold your hand. I don't mean people on the metro or in the supermarket, that's a different beast altogether, I mean the people in your lives, in your home, the ones who love you and you love as well. People express many things through touch — affection, familiarity, love — and a lot of the conventions of acceptable platonic touch are unspoken (depending on the nature of the relationship). It's *just okay* for your mother to try to hug you. Your sister to hold your hand. The person in your bed to put their arm around you. Your best friend to touch you for reassurance. The people who are fucking you to squeeze your cheeks or play footsie in bed. It's not about whether *it should* be okay, as of now, it is (and until you draw a boundary around it, people assume that it is) but all of it is a nightmare to me.

It's not that I am touch-*phobic*. It's that most touch is so overwhelming to me I just shut down. The way I have been explaining it to people is to tell them to try to imagine that someone is holding their hand really close to their face and flailing it around at a rapid pace, unceasingly, that's how it feels. I cannot think, I cannot focus, I cannot remember what we were talking about, I have to reboot everything. The main issue I have faced with that is how people perceive boundaries around touch of this sort. A lot of times, it is perceived as an issue with intimacy, and people in my life have attempted to assess the success of our personal relationships on the basis of whether my boundaries regarding touch have *softened* over time within that relationship. Honestly, I have bought into that reasoning myself, it made some kind of sense, and the circumstances within which that explanation was presented to me, made it easier to believe.

My former partner used to say that I am damaged and that is why I have such problems with intimacy. He posited that if I was comfortable with sexual touch but uncomfortable with all other forms then that must mean that I was okay with a destructive form of touch but not with a healing/restorative form of it. I bought into that idea when I was younger even though there were some glaring fallacies. It's not that I think of sex as destructive, it's that I thought of *him* as destructive (and he was). There is no dichotomy between sexual and non-sexual touch of the nature that one is bad and the other is good. One is destructive and the other is healing. In fact, the reason I enjoy sexual touch (by which I mean, all the things that engage me sexually from whips to chains to PIV) is the exact reason why platonic touch is so hard — It shuts me down. When it comes to sexuality, I want to be shut down, I want to be paralysed out of thought and into sensation, I want to be overwhelmed and most importantly when it comes to sexual touch, the boundaries around establishing consent are much more acceptable and established into social convention (at least, in the circles in which I sexually engage). Sexual touch is the entirety of the touch that I enjoy and desire. I enjoy it a great, great deal and always have. I am very sexual, hypersexual even, and that is the touch I desire. There is nothing outside of it for me.

The problem is, well, when people have a sexual and emotional relationship with you, the assumption is that platonic touch is already an acceptable part of that equation. *I just fucked you, surely it's not such a big deal if I stroke your shoulder casually while I read?* Well, yeah, it is but I can see why it is also not. It's not because of a consent/non-consent thing, to be honest, I understand why this arises, say with my husband, right? The nature of the relationship is such that he can quite literally make a claim to *owning* me and within that configuration, I would relent (but see, in my head, that's a sexual thing). Also, given the very physical nature of our relationship, it is very easy for him to unconsciously touch me. Like, attempt to hold me, right after he beat or fucked me. Hug me if I am crying (for non-sexual reasons, he has a very different response when I cry for sex reasons). Of course, he *knows* me and also all my issues so he is likely to be more mindful than most people but I can see how easily the conventions of touch that come naturally to him could be his instinctive response. He is not doing it to violate me. Most people aren't (and while I certainly appreciate the hell out of the many people in my life who always know they need to ask before they approach me physically, I also understand how a certain kind of relationship enables familiarity that normalises some things that are part of the neurotypical social convention, and some of it is okay, like my stepson hugging me more easily and without asking permission each time because he has both love for and familiarity with me, that touch is not *easier* for me but my emotional investment in the relationship is high enough that I am willing to make an adjustment in my comfort for his).

I am willing to make a lot of concessions for people, but a part of the truth is that I learnt to make a lot of these concessions because of the response I get when I outrightly state(d) my boundaries around touch in situations and relationships. People get offended when you decline their offers to hug you, and some push harder than they need to because they think they are helping you overcome something. They believe that a certain amount of affectionate physical leeway is proof that we are actually *close*. People turn your issues into gossip fodder and associate your right to demand bodily space with how they feel about you as a person. They assume that you are cold. You are doing it because you want to appear eccentric. In longer-term relationships, and I have had this problem in many, the refusal to cede that space is interpreted as proof that the relationship is not moving *forward*. Some partners have refused to be bogged down by my physical boundaries and taken it upon themselves to erode them leading to me ending the relationship (and then being viewed as the person who refused to *truly* open up in the relationship).

That's why I need a safeword.

I need it because a safeword indicates that I need this to stop for the reason that this is unbearable, traumatic, not okay and *my* boundary. A safeword, at least as a concept, does not carry the emotionally ambiguous or potentially passive element of communication. It doesn't have to be a word, it doesn't have to play out in the exact traffic-light format that is common, but it must be necessarily understood a certain way by all parties that are involved. When I ask not to be touched, I don't mean that I don't want *you* to touch *me*, I mean that I don't want to be touched because I am overwhelmed by it. There is no emotional message I am trying to send, I am not trying to tell a person that I don't like them, I am not trying to send a passive message about being upset with them, I am not withholding my body for any of the many interpretations people make of situations (of which, I frankly have no idea until someone tells me later). I am not doing it because I don't love you or feel affection towards you. It is not an issue of intimacy.

Look.

I get how it is interpreted this way but I challenge you to expand your understanding of intimacy and maybe even attempt to divorce it from touch. I have very close and rich relationships with people in which I am often open, vulnerable and honest. These are intimate relationships. Sexual expression is a very intimate thing to me too. Within kink scenarios, the place where this often falls apart is aftercare, it's not that I don't *need* it, it's that the established conventions of aftercare often include a comforting touch and to me nothing is more jarring, particularly right after sexual play. I explain this to people well before I play with them (and it is a major reason why the coterie of people with whom I will play is very small), but in the moment, when someone sees me broken down, crying, in shock or utterly destroyed, they feel like they *must* comfort me physically. My husband largely does not do this at all, he gets it, but it took a little while for him to get it as well, and every once in a while he sees me in a state in which he just cannot help himself. I usually shut it down immediately (with my non-safeword, safeword) and he immediately backs off, but I get why it happens. It's like, you know when people tell you they don't want to talk about something? But really, they do, and you are meant to wear them down or keep asking. Well, some people really mean that when they say they don't want to talk about it, and I get why it takes some time to believe it because we all have engrained practices of communication that have taught us otherwise (and if you continue to be and /or be with someone who practises them, then you continue to get the same feedback and feel there is no other effective way to communicate and see, I don't want to demonise, we all *pretend* we are perfect and laud an ideal, but even the best relationships have some communication practices that could benefit from being changed).

I have no problem asserting my boundaries around my issues with touch, I have no problem doing it repeatedly, I am even happy to explain them to people who wish to understand them better. The problem arises when I am not believed, when I am labelled, when someone tries to wear them down *in my best interest*, when someone refuses to adhere even despite my protests because *they know better*. That's why I would really like to have a safeword, that way, I feel like they would know it is not about them, it is about me. It doesn't mean anything. It's just what I need.

Surely, that's okay?

....