About Intimacy

Many of us think of intimacy as having sex, being physically or emotionally close or exchanging deeply held confidences. But if specific behaviors such as these produce intimacy, then why don’t we experience intimacy each time we do them? What makes one sexual encounter intimate and another not? If cultivating closeness is an avenue to intimacy, why do so many couples who have attained it report flatness, boredom, loss of vitality or a sense of being “stuck” rather than feeling passionately alive in each other’s presence? If confiding in another is supposed to bring about intimacy, why does one communication make us flush to our roots while another leaves us untouched and unmoved?

Behaviors are not the source of our intimate experiences. That is why the use of the term intimacy as a euphemism for being sexual is so misleading. While some of us have experienced true intimacy and union through sex, what is intimate is not the behavior itself but the state of being we reach within ourselves and with our partners.

We all know what it feels like to experience a deeper part of ourselves, outside our daily routines and superficial exchanges. It is this feeling that we reclaim during moments of profound connection with another – a deep experience of ourselves. This is the key to intimacy: our ability to dive below the familiar world of our “outer self” into the less understood provenance of our human potential.

Finding intimacy begins with discovering ourselves, not with “fixing” or “controlling” ourselves or our partners. We have to be visible before we can be seen. We have to be available before our hearts can be affected. And we have to be present before we can be intimate. When we can drop all pretense and relate with a heart that is undefended, we can finally discover the unmistakable connection with our authentic selves and with our partner that we long for.

On Gender Differences

In our work with hundreds of clients-individuals, couples and groups-we have found that the intrinsic capacity for intimacy is the same in women and men, that men are just as willing and capable as women of moving through their defenses. Gender conditioning can delay this inclination in men, but once they recognize this and experience intimacy, the work of identifying and dissolving their defense structures is exactly the same as it is for women. We have also found no appreciable difference between how straight and gay partners do this work. The content of the conditioning might differ, but even this material is not as diverse as one would initially expect.

Intimacy is experienced when we relate from the gold of who we are. Emotionally intimate couples are committed to digging below experiences of opposition and difference until they strike gold. Viewing all differences, even male and female, as two different castings of the same gold and our “gender-conditioning” (in this particular example) as stains obscuring its brightness, each of us can engage in the challenging work of cleaning and polishing ourselves to bring out the gold from under the dust and grime.

In the course of striving to expose this golden core – our common ground – we become more available to one another and we feel increasingly intimate. The more intimate we become, the less alienating are our differences and the less emotional distance we experience when these differences do emerge.

What is Our Essential Self?

In the work of cultivating intimacy it is helpful to draw a distinction between our essential self and our essential nature. In many of the world’s spiritual traditions, the most profound realization, the culmination of all spiritual quests, involves directly experiencing our essential nature. Variously referred to as the Absolute, The Ground Of All Being, our True Nature or our Original Face, this is the underlying nature of all existence. It is the impersonal, formless, timeless and changeless aspect of who we all are. Our essential self is our uniqueness. Think of a cloudless, star-studded evening sky. Now imagine the stars as cut-aways, letting light from beyond pass through them. That all-pervasive light from beyond is our essential nature, and the light that takes on the shape and form of each star is our essential self. We all share the same essential nature, that all-pervasive light, but each of us is a separate and unique manifestation of it.

Like snowflakes, we are all of a common substance, yet no two of us are alike. It is our “individuality” that we tend to fall in love with in each other: the way we hold and bring forth our essential nature through some very unique pattern that distinguishes us from others.

If all our ideas about who we are, who we aren’t and who we are supposed to be were boiled away, the nectar remaining would be a sense of personal being, a pure sense of existence, of presence, of “I am.” This is our essential self, and its qualities, like those of the baby and the enlightened master, are pure and unrehearsed. Through undefended encounters, we come to know and share with another this essence of who we are. Sometimes the experience is of a personal and individual love, an outflowing from the unique experience of our essential self. At other times the love is more universal, for everyone and everything, emerging from our connection with our essential nature.

The Role of Compassion

As we begin to unmask our negative self-images, we can feel a great deal of hurt and the fear of being hurt further. We may also experience self-loathing rising from the shame and assumed ugliness associated with our initial inability to absorb this new information. Usually, we contract around these feelings. We want to protect ourselves, run away, hide, defend, attack or go to sleep. Staying with this investigation in a nonreactive way requires something special, something to help us hold our ground and observe the truth exactly as it is, without trying to change it.

But we are extremely vulnerable organisms and our knee-jerk reaction to seeing a truth that is confusing or threatening is to remove ourselves immediately. What can we do about this? Our hearts naturally want to be open, but when exposed to deep pain we behave like wounded animals – our instinct is to close down, escape and protect ourselves. Emotional pain can be a powerful obstacle to our hearts being open in a completely undefended way.

And yet our fear, pain and even self-loathing is precisely what we need to approach if we wish to be less defended. “The distance from your pain, your grief, your unattended wounds” remarks authors Stephen and Ondrea Levine, “is the distance from your partner.” Our discomfort is a great indicator, pointing out the places where we are disconnecting from ourselves and from each other.

Compassion is specifically helpful in facing our fears and allowing us to remain committed to the truth. Compassion is the personal ally that will help us take on the difficulties we face as we strive for a completely undistorted view of ourselves. Its purpose, simply put, is to allow the heart to stay open in the face of fear and pain. It allows us to tolerate these uncomfortable feelings so we can restrain our impulse to avoid or control them; it allows us to remain open to the present moment.

Closeness, a Safe Container

There is nothing wrong with using our relationships to work through issues of dependency. In fact, relationship may be the best place to work through them. What we are concerned with here is not that we are dependent but the level and duration of the dependency. The ability to move beyond an “other-focus” requires that we remain attentive to the feelings and reactions stirred within us, rather than turning our attention toward our partners to the exclusion of ourselves. Our closeness becomes a safe container, a kind of greenhouse in which we feel secure and supported to look at ourselves while we are developing our own self-reliance. Ultimately we must leave the warmth and comfort of these controlled conditions, recognizing that it will be harmful if we try to stay safe for too long. We must remain mindful that these are temporary supports – training wheels – and that our dependence on them must be incrementally released as we develop greater balance and self-reliance. Through vigilant self-examination of our impulse to blame others for the discomfort we are feeling, we can get closer to exposing our negative self-concepts for what they are. We must remain mindful, however, that to develop the inner resources necessary for undefended intimacy we need both support- in the form of closeness – and the absence of support – times when we feel abandoned, betrayed and unwelcome.

The mutually supportive context of a close relationship provides the constancy that is necessary for us to begin shifting from an outer-directed life to one that is inner-directed.

Agreements: How they can Prolong Closeness and Prevent Intimacy

A partnership rooted in the healthy closeness stage values equality; the couple places an emphasis on creating and maintaining a foundation of “shared-power” as opposed to “power-over.” Since we choose to take someone else’s desires into account, we negotiate instead of simply taking or being taken from. This ability and desire to compromise, however, can lead to more sophisticated approaches to maintaining our defense structure. Surprisingly enough because making agreements is based on a couple’s common interest in resolving a problem or issue, this method surpasses the fighting and despairing experiences that are common at the level of unhealthy dependency. This capacity reflects an increase in the maturity and flexibility of the partners. When an agreement is not kept, they generally go back to the bargaining table and negotiate, compromise and barter in order to get the relationship back on track.

This ability to forge and keep agreements is a prerequisite to undefended loving. However, instead of helping us find ways to dismantle the walls between us, making agreements leaves them unchallenged and intact. If we wish to move beyond healthy closeness we must shift our focus off agreements and onto what we are trying to “get” by making them. For example, when an agreement breaks down, rather than re-negotiate a new one, we can instead use the opportunity as a gateway to new levels of personal growth.

Dissolving our Defenses

If we are to realize our potential to know ourselves as whole and loving, to express the open, present beings we are, and to love ourselves and others from the undefended core of our being, we must turn and face all the places where we are stuck, wounded, withholding and contracted. We must work directly with all that we fear, resist, vilify, disown and reject. This includes our primitive or undeveloped aspects, negative self-images, emotional attachments, what we project as “other” and deny within ourselves, our self-doubt, judgment, greed, hostility, shame, confusion, and anything else that we consider negative or unpleasant.

It is in grappling with these “demons” rather than avoiding them that we dissolve our shields. Undefended partners do not conspire to eliminate emotional pain and uncomfortable feelings; they are allied with each other in learning how to use whatever presents itself – unresolved losses, disappointments, dissatisfactions, needs, unworthiness, boredom, loneliness, depression, resentments, lust – in ways that allow them to reveal their essence to themselves and each other.

Embedded in the desire for intimacy is the understanding that our potential includes a wide range of experience, whose expression brings out the richness of all that is human. When we live within the comfort zone of our defended personalities, we confine our existence much in the way a pianist would be limited if the only key he could use was Middle C. The journey to the heart of undefended intimacy is about regaining the use of our entire keyboard, not repetitively banging out our Middle C identities.

Intimate Allies

Exposing ourselves to what we expect will be emotional annihilation is not easy. It means staying with an issue in the presence of our partners when continuing is the hardest thing to do. It means stretching to stay open even if shutting down is our main line of defense. It means speaking about what we are feeling when we are paralyzed with fear. And it means remaining fully present without lashing out when we experience our partners as critical, blaming or attacking. It even means staying with feeling bad, inadequate, less than or lacking without doing something to distract ourselves so we can feel better.

In an undefended relationship, instead of bandaging the symptoms, we make a conscious choice to perform the operation that will get to and remove the cause of the pain. We are committed to helping each other dissolve, not resolve, our issues. We encourage each other to dive into the truth of our raw inner experience – encountering the core emotional belief that we are unwanted, “less than” or flawed – certain that shoring up the personality’s defenses is not going to serve either of us in the long-term.

While our partner’s role is to resist the temptation to fix or distract us from what we are feeling, our role is to endure the resulting discomfort until we unearth the root of our distress. We realize that all our fears and inadequacies are demons we need to encounter on our way back to our open hearts.