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Affection is Not Optional
Touch has never been more important
I first posted this article on my own website three years ago this month, back when colleague Karen Moran and I were leading a class in Mindful Parenting. The framework for the class was built on the “5 A’s” of mindful loving — Attention, Acceptance, Appreciation, Affection and Allowing — introduced by Dave Richo in his book How to Be an Adult in Relationships. This installment in the series feels especially poignant in 2021.
Affection is how we experience true belonging
The fourth of the five aspects of mindful loving is Affection. Relative to the other four aspects, Dave Richo’s book doesn’t go on very long in introducing this topic. The emphasis is simply on the fact that we are talking about safe, non-exploitive physical contact when we talk about affection.
But I’ve been surprised as I’ve mulled over this for a couple of weeks to find how large this topic has grown for me. On one hand, it’s pretty easy to segue from the focus on Appreciation to Affection, as there seems to be some natural overlap. But on the other hand, there is a key element that Affection offers a growing child, or even a well-established adult. That element is a sense of belonging.
We may have great appreciation for lots of people, even people we don’t know. Some of our most influential…
