A Short History of  Therapeutic Touch (TT)

The conventional explannation is that Therapeutic Touch was developed in the 1970s by Dolores Krieger (a nurse) and Dora Kunz (an expert healer). Today, TT is practiced in about 90 countries by more than 100,000 practitioners all over the world.  Even with those large numbers for some reason it is not yet well known.

Dolores Krieger had no prior involvement in meditative touch therapy other than as an "ordinary" nurse until she met Dora Kunz. But, Dolores was extraordinary in that she recognised the potential for healing that people like Dora Kunz utilised AND was prepared to choose and walk her own path. Together the two of them founded Therapeutic Touch. 

Dora Kunz had been involved in meditative therapies since she was a child. She became involved in meditative healing therapies about 40 years before she met Dolores Krieger. It was in the 1930s that she developed an interest in healing and the methods of other healers. By the time she and Dolores founded TT, Dora was an expert in the study of how healers heal. Her main teacher was also an expert healer who came from a long meditative touch healing tradition with an equally complicated history. Traced back far enough it shares common ancestral roots from which the quite separate method of the late Dr Ainslie Meares also evolved. Dr Meares' method and TT both developed completely independently of one another. 

Ainslie Meares and Dolores Krieger mixed in medical and nursing meditative touch therapy circles. In some instances, they attended and delivered papers conferences run by the same organisations a year apart. It is not known if they met.  

Owen was drawn to Therapeutic Touch due to its common ancestral roots with Meares' system and as sensitive people can be offered meditative touch therapy without contact by hands reaching out and hovering an inch or several from the body.