We Need Healthy Contact!
By Dr. Keith Witt
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December 3, 2025
We are an ultra-social species that needs intimacy/contact to survive and thrive.
In the US we’re not as guided and supported in face-to-face contact as previous generations have been. There are advantages in this of more support for individual expression, and disadvantages in chronic loneliness and social disconnection. These dynamics put a lot of pressure on all of us to find ways to live healthy social lives.
As individuals we can choose how to affiliate, and there are clearly healthier and unhealthier ways to connect with others. Social science and neuroscience have given us lots of data about optimal and suboptimal friendships, intimate partner relationships, parenting, and family relationships. Check out previous blogs and lectures on drkeithwitt.com for more details on all of these.
Psychotherapy and change work is fundamentally a change worker creating healthy affiliation in ways that help clients do the same. This involves observing and regulating drama and defensive states into problem-solving and states of healthy response to the present moment. Increasing mastery in problem-solving and regulating to states of healthy response reflects increasing altitude on the integration-of-defenses line of development.
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