Hello Jerry and welcome to this forum. I guess you must have seen a lot of evolution and devolution within the practice of psychotherapy over the last 4 decades (long time!) and imagine you may contribute some interesting metaperspectives. Over the 14 years I have been in practice so far, I think I have successfully managed to "unlearn" most of my initial training (which had a heavy emphasis on cognitive & behavioural psychology) and can sometimes now see the forest as well as the trees. (Who was it who said that "Psychology is the art of making a science from what the rest of humanity understands as common sense"?) Learning to stay consistently present with a client and open to the entirety of their experience while similtaneously maintaining enough self-awareness to monitor my own reactions seems good common sense practice to me yet can represent a lifetime of learning eh?
I too am worried by labels and am looking forward to the day when the research evidence re the etiology of various trauma-related diagnostic disorders (esp the anxiety, depressive, dissociative and personality disorders), is so overwhelming that the DSM1V will need to be re-written in terms of the common sense normal adaptive responses which can be predicted from abnormal life experiences. Hmmm I seem to be on a bit of a roll here.
I agree too that through it's inability to move beyond the Descarte's (sp?) mind-body split, that psychotherapy in general has under-valued the role of safe therapeutic touch... (ie touch which is client requested etc), and can certainly understand your frustration with this coming from an holistic framework. A little book I've found very useful is "Compassionate Touch: The Role of Human Touch in Healing and Recovery" by Dr. Clyde Ford ('93). (It includes a good chapter on "The Neurobiology of Compassionate Touch".) ya know it? However for myself I am still more conscious of the need to hear the client who says "How can I trust my therapist when they touch me without my consent" having experienced abuse of "therapeutic" touch as a client in the past. Even so, touch in therapy seems to me a very individual thing ..the client, the therapist, the context.
I have recently become very interested in what is happening in mind-body research and in mind-body therapies and recently had a Eureka find on Somatic Trauma Therapy at :
http://www.trauma.cc/
(Now included on the Synchrony links page). Anyway what I mainly started off to say was welcome to you and likewise looking forward to lots of lateral discussions here.
Elysha