Meet Claire: Why Connection, Touch and Co-Regulation Matter to Me
I’m Claire, Co-Director of Face The World, CIC, and I’m delighted to have been asked by Liz at Face The World to host this October’s Pro-Touch Awareness Month while she works hard behind the scenes on our exciting new pilot project.
For as long as I can remember I have believed that human beings are not meant to live without safe contact. We are social animals. Our nervous systems settle when we are held with care. Our breath slows. Our shoulders drop. Something in us remembers that we belong. That knowing is what pulled me into professional touch and connection.
I came to this work as a qualified massage therapist and holistic tutor. From 2004 I spent years helping people with aches, tightness, and the ordinary wear of living in a body. Massage was valuable. It still is. But I kept meeting the same missing piece: people who were touched only when something was “wrong,” or not touched at all. Loneliness. Skin hunger. Grief. The quiet ache of going weeks without a hug that asked nothing in return.
In 2013 I opened BeSnuggled, the UK’s first professional cuddle service. I wanted to offer platonic, consensual holding as a legitimate form of care — structured, boundaried, and non-sexual. The work was intimate by nature and ordinary in its humanity: sitting close, listening, holding, letting someone rest. I learned quickly that the public conversation around paid platonic touch was full of suspicion. That is exactly why the work needed standards.
In 2015 I launched Cuddle Professionals International. CPI was the very first training, accreditation and membership body for touch therapists, and it became the organisation I had been looking for when I started: ethics, insurance pathways, a directory of vetted practitioners, and a shared language for what this work is and what it is not. Our mission is to treat consensual, non-sexual holding of adults, within defined boundaries, as a valuable holistic therapy, and to take the stigma out of professional platonic touch.
What I have learned, over and over, is that the quality of the touch is never only about the body. Consent is not a signature at the start of a session. It is a living conversation. It can change mid-sentence. It can be withdrawn without explanation. A professional’s job is to make that easy. Boundaries are not cold. They are what make warmth possible. Clothing stays on. Intimate areas are off limits. The session is platonic. Those limits are not a lack of generosity; they are the container that lets a nervous system trust the contact.
Presence is the real skill. Technique matters. Protocols matter. But people feel whether you are actually with them. They feel hurry, performance, and agenda. They also feel steadiness. When I am regulated, the other person has a better chance of regulating. That is not metaphor. It is physiology.
Safe connection is built from all of that: clear agreements, ethical touch, time, listening, and the courage to stop when something is not right. I have seen people arrive braced and leave softer. I have seen touch deprivation ease in an hour of being held without being wanted. That still humbles me.
Alongside CPI I became Co-Director of Face The World CIC, working closely with my long-time friend and collaborator Liz Badger. That role widened the frame. Professional cuddling is one doorway into wellbeing. Facing the world — isolation, stigma, the ways people fall out of community — needs more than a single modality. A community interest company asks a different question: how do we put connection to work for the public good? I care about training practitioners. I also care about the culture around them: education, access, and the belief that needing touch is not a personal failure.
That is why the Pro-Touch Movement resonates so strongly with me. It is larger than any one brand or course. It is the insistence that skilled, ethical, professional touch belongs in the conversation about health. Not as a novelty. Not as a punchline. As part of how humans recover from disconnection. Partnership with that movement feels like standing with others who refuse to treat platonic contact as suspect simply because it is paid, trained, and named.
This year’s Pro-Touch theme is co-regulation, and we chose it because it names what our work has always been doing.
We don’t only self-soothe. We borrow calm from one another. A settled body next to an unsettled one can change heart rate, muscle tone, and the story the brain tells about safety. Infants know this before they have words. Adults forget it, then pay for the forgetting in stress, isolation, and a culture that treats independence as the only virtue.
Co-regulation is not merging. It is two nervous systems meeting with consent and enough boundary that neither person disappears. In a professional setting it means I do not dump my state onto a client, and I do not ask them to perform wellness for me. I offer a regulated presence. They decide how close to come.
If you are new to this field, start there. Learn the ethics. Practise saying no as clearly as yes. And remember that the point is not to be impressive. The point is to be safe enough that another person can feel human again.
That is the work I have given my professional life to. I am still learning it. And I am still grateful for it.
Claire
Founder, Cuddle Professionals International & Co-Director, Face The World CIC
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