First, let me get this bad pun out of the way—I'm very touchy about touch. Thank you.
I've long avoided considering any therapy that involves touch, but lately I feel that maybe I should, and/or find a more general somatic approach. While I do some general exercise routines (and used to love chopping wood and other “natural” exercise), I'd like to work towards relieving the body armoring and tension that I carry around. The flip of hoping to get very far with it is my fear of any touch (even self-touch). Much of what happened in my youth was internalized and I've retreated from human touch of any sort, for the most part.
***TRIGGERS next 2 paragraphs*** I can't ever remember being touched in a nice way, either at home or at school. In the first, I was regularly a victim of the m's attacks on me, usually in bathrooms (I still have a strange aversion to bathrooms; as in “where is the quickest exit”; as a kid, I was often constipated as that room I thought of as a danger zone and sought to avoid going there at all costs; unfortunately that fed right into the m's fondness for “other” solutions for a constipated kid, which seemed to make her very happy).
***TRIGGERS CONTINUE***At the private school I attended, negative touch was also out of control. It went beyond mere corporal punishment, although there was plenty of that. One teacher had this truly awful technique of pressing down on both your shoulders while intensely staring into your eyes, holding you like this so you couldn't look away; he kept his fingers moving massage-style but maintained his fierce downward pressure all the while. There wasn't always a “reason”—he just stopped me, held me in the shoulder lock, and stared. Perv is the mildest I can call him. Sometimes, though, it was just a prelude to his next actions, more physical than even that awful touch.
***END OF TRIGGERS***
Those sort of memories had me resisting touch of any kind for most of my life. Once in a therapy group of around 10 folks, the leader asked if we could do one thing as a group activity, to ask. So I asked the group's permission to share a short hug. It was beautiful, the first time I'd ever felt any sort of safe hug in my life. Minor detail...I was in my 40's. It's not like I didn't have any relationships, they just didn't involve much hugging. And people could sense my unspoken message if their actions resembled a hug: don't go there. I mean, shaking hands was a huge leap-of-faith for me. It's not like I'm some total wallflower around people, anymore. I've been a popular speaker, actor, teacher, etc., but when it came to touching beyond a minimum...nope. Only exception involved some hospice situations, where they felt more than okay. The prob comes with the “normal” social interaction.
Once I allowed someone to try therapeutic touch/reiki, which don't involve actual physical touch. But even those felt awkward. Instead of relaxation they couldn't get me to any level of trust with hands moving around me. I really got bold and even tried standard physical massage, even some rolfing, but I just couldn't relax enough to get much benefit.
Well, okay, I'm still an adult (surprise) or at least well along in my arrested development. So in one of my wanders around the OOTS site archive, I ran into an approach called the “butterfly hug” and found it interesting (link at bottom of this post). Although when I tried it the first time, I literally flinched back as the first step involves touching the shoulders; all I could think of was that horrid teacher's “hug”. But it was still nice, even just to think it through the way it was described. There's another simpler technique in Kristen Neff's wonderful book “Self-Compassion” which I'm finding helpful as well.
As I'm sure many here probably have had a huge problem with touch, has anyone tried some of these approaches and found them beneficial? Specifically self-hugs? All I can offer you here are these sorts of hugs

which is huge for a non-hugger. Feels good, though. Thanks for allowing me.
Okay, here's the link to the butterfly hug, courtesy of some site called OOTS:
http://outofthefog.net/C-PTSD/forum/index.php?topic=667.0 Sorry for the triggered parts...it was cathartic to spit them out.