Intimacy & Sex

Do you have trouble getting close to people?
Do you find yourself loving people who don’t love you back?
Perhaps you know someone who tries to get too close to you or who keeps you at a distance?

Intimacy is complicated and our comfort level with intimacy is heavily influenced by our earliest relationships, starting with our parents or caregivers and progressing into our earliest friendships.

What is intimacy?
Intimacy refers to an emotional, physical, spiritual or intellectual connection felt between people. It usually includes a sense of closeness and familiarity that grows over time and promotes the sharing of private feelings and more personal information.
Intimacy can exist between friends, lovers, siblings, colleagues, neighbors, and people who have shared a common tragedy, a common victory, or a common history.

Intimacy is measured by the depth and quality of close personal relationships, and has trust, communication, and closeness as its building blocks. Intimacy can be displayed in unique ways and the behavioral markers of intimacy differ across relationships, across individuals, and across cultures.

Intimacy is not the same thing as sex.
Some sexual encounters might be strictly transactional and will therefore not feel intimate to one or both parties. In fact, the easily accessible and explicit sexual content available on the Internet and in the media has increased the decoupling of sex and intimacy. It is therefore now more common for people to engage in non-intimate, impersonal sex or to direct their sexual thoughts and energies to pornography and sex with strangers. This non-intimate sexual behavior, when repeated, can corrupt and crush healthy sexual desire in loving relationships.

Fear of Intimacy in Adult Love Relationships

Many factors can contribute to intimacy avoidance in relationships. If you’ve been hurt or traumatized in an earlier relationship—through shaming, abandonment, rejection, abuse, loss, or emotional inconsistency—you will likely associate relationships with danger. Although this association may not be conscious, your intimacy fears will reveal themselves by your tendency to avoid relationships, keep them superficial, cut them off quickly, dilute the intimacy in them, or by your tendency to engage in behaviors that push prospective partners away.

When clients seek my help breaking free from the shackles of fear that are keeping them stuck in bad relationships or are keeping them from committing to a good relationship, they describe many common fears associated with intimacy including:

• Fear of exposure: “I’m afraid if she/he sees who I really am, the positive feelings will disappear.”

• Fear of abandonment: “I’m afraid to get too close because it will hurt too much when he/she abandons me.”

• Fear of conflict: “I’m afraid to argue or stir things up and lose my partner’s love. Either my partner will see me as too disagreeable, or we won’t be able to resolve our argument. So silence seems like the safest course.”

• Fear of losing control: “I don’t want to be controlled by another person. I will no longer be powerful if I am not in control. If I’m too vulnerable, he/she will have the upper hand and I will lose my power in the relationship.”

• Fear of losing one’s individuality: “I am afraid I’ll be smothered, and I will no longer be my own person.”

• Fear of one’s destructive impulses: “I realize I have a lot of anger in me, and if I lose control, I could hurt my partner or drive him/her away with my hostility or negativity.”

Vulnerability in Adult Sexual and Love Relationships

People are often afraid to give in to the intense emotions that emerge when falling in love. Letting ourselves open up and trust another person requires courage. We may have developed habits to close ourselves off from others as a misguided form of self-protection. Those habits are based on the idea that the more we care, the more we will be at risk to get hurt. The truth is, if you are seeking a loving relationship, keeping yourself alone will have a greater cost (loneliness) to you than the risk you take opening your heart to love. Heartbreak is temporary, while self-imposed isolation or intimacy avoidance is similar to a life sentence of loneliness.

Alfred Lord Tennyson summed it up best when, upon the death of his closest friend, he said:

How Our Past Relationships Affect Our Current Relationship Behavior

Our Earliest Relationships Shape Our Attachment Style and Intimacy Behaviors

Strong emotions related to past relationship trauma may get triggered or reawakened when beginning a romantic or intimate relationship. Our relationship experiences in childhood affect the way we approach people and relationships in adulthood. They also shape our expectations: what or who we expect to get and how we expect to be treated. When opening up to someone new, old feelings of hurt, grief, rejection, or anger may emerge. Although the feelings may not be easily identifiable, the old relationship habits (like fleeing or grandstanding) might be our cue that feelings from the past are getting stirred up. When we notice our old relationship habits surfacing, we have an opportunity to pay attention to our feelings in order to make conscious choices about how we are actually being treated in the present moment. We can then reflect on the person we are with, and their intentions, instead of confusing them with someone from our past and reacting impulsively. With attentiveness to detail about what we are feeling, we can be empowered to choose whether to continue to recruit old relationship habits that may not serve our healthy goals, or to employ new strategies to promote our goals.

Childhood experiences with our parents usually influence our attachment style in adulthood. Our attachment style can influence our beliefs about romantic love: the trustworthiness and availability we expect from romantic partners, our expectations about the likelihood of relationships working out, and our perception of our own worthiness of love. Research shows that people who experienced their parents as warm and responsive have more positive views of themselves, others, and of relationship success than do people who experienced inconsistent, unresponsive, or abusive treatment from their parents.

How to Begin to Improve Your Relationship Insecurity

• Your first relationship is with yourself. If you are cruel to yourself, you will expect or accept cruelty from others. Recognize when you criticize yourself and take action to identify and challenge the voice of your inner critic.

• Do not act out with cheating, running away, or lashing out despite any feelings of anxiety, disappointment or anger toward your partner or intimate friend. While you may feel temporarily uplifted by putting down or hurting your partner, in the end, you both lose.

• Perfection is a myth. See your partner as a whole person with strengths and weaknesses instead of evaluating your partner’s actions based on an unrealistic standard. Try to treat your partner and your friends the way you long to be treated. This doesn’t mean you should accept abuse or mistreatment and try to eliminate it with kindness. But make sure you are not contributing to an unhealthy relationship dynamic by worshipping or demanding perfection.

• Be true to yourself and allow yourself to be loved, first by you. If you cannot love yourself, it is unlikely you will be able to deeply love and accept another person.

• Get help from a psychologist, coach, or other mental health expert with substantial experience in attachment and human sexuality so you can bring your best self to your relationships.

Sex, Eroticism,
& Sex Addiction

To Be Continued.