Intimacy and Its Many Imposters

Intimacy. Few words in our pop psychology vocab are as pervasive or misused.

Depending on the context, it can be something we want; something we have issues with; a euphemism for sex; a vague, meaningless term referring to the "ideal" "romantic" relationship, i.e. a fairy tale; or a mysterious quantity that everyone else seems to understand but you must've missed that day in 10th grade. Or all of the above.

Unfortunately, the oversimplification and lack of clarity around the word has spawned a healthy list of relationship dynamics that people think are intimacy, but aren't. For example...

Compatibility. Having stuff in common feels amazing. You like to do the same things, you like the same food & TV shows, you can finish each other's sentences. Your mate understands you, and feeling understood feels like love. Love is great. Compatibility is great. But it isn't intimacy.

Nurturing. Expressing loving by taking care of your partner feels good. Feeding them, buying them things, being affectionate... It feels right. It feels like love. And it is love. But it isn't intimacy.

Emotional Accommodation. When your partner gets upset or angry, you change your position/behavior in order to restore your partner's emotional order. When I put it like that, it's pretty obvious that this isn't a healthy way to go. However, it's insidious. Emotions are tyrants in many relationships, and when you're in it, it can feel like an art or a dance, finding a path around the problem. It can feel like you're in it together, dancing in time and in step. And you are. But it isn't intimacy.

Sacrifice. Giving up your own ambitions/dreams/desires in order to support your partner's or to sustain the relationship is a strategy many of us (especially women) were programmed with growing up. It feels like what we're supposed to do to demonstrate love and commitment, but it's a losing deal for both parties. It's also known as codependency or martyrdom. It's not intimacy.

Radical Acceptance. Having a partner who trusts you enough to show you their dark side feels like intimacy, and actually, it's in the ballpark. But it blows out of bounds when your partner adopts a "take me as I am" stance, refusing any responsibility, and you have to accept their rage, abuse, addiction, incapacity, victimhood, craziness, etc... if you want to have a relationship. Accepting another's humanness is healthy. Accepting their pathology isn't. And it sure isn't intimacy.

So what is real intimacy?

Real intimacy is sustainable mutual vulnerability. It is not for the faint of heart. Vulnerability is an extremely uncomfortable state for most of us, and tolerating it (or even embracing it) requires a lot from us as individuals: healthy and realistic self-image, self-containment and soothing skills, assertiveness, generosity, resilience, self-responsibility, authenticity, and most of all, emotional courage. Constant emotional courage.

As a couple, intimacy requires true equality -- a partnership in which neither partner occupies a one-up or one-down position on more than an occasional, situational basis. It's a proactive, conscious relationship in which both partners are awake and alive, all the time. It's amazing.

Notice I haven't used the word love at all in this description. That's because love is in a different class from intimacy.

Love is a basic need. Intimacy is a highly evolved, advanced relationship state between mature adults.

Love is something you have a right to, from birth. (And you have it, from the creative force responsible for your existence.) Intimacy isn't.

You are not entitled to intimacy. It's a mountain you are welcome to climb, and it's a beautiful journey with an incredible view, but no one can carry you to the top. You need to gear up, find a climbing buddy and take each step yourself.

Stop Swatting, Start Sleeping

Certain self-care and psychological truths are just... pesky. They're things we know very well, but we don't manage to use the knowledge, put it into practice, derive any benefit from it. Because it's... pesky. It's like swatting away gnats.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I should exercise and eat better. I know I should get more sleep. I know I should probably work on my unresolved grief. (Just had to throw that one in.)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

"But I don't have time." This is the gnat swatting phrase. Because you don't! You work, you maintain relationships, you keep the house somewhat clean, you feed yourself, you try to stay up on news and entertainment so you aren't a complete loser... and if you're raising kids, forget it. Who has time to eat better, exercise, sleep or go to therapy?

Sorry, people. Not having time is just a socially acceptable excuse for hitting the self-destruct button. You're channeling your feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness into a program of self-punishment. Your inner critic loves this. And, there's a bonus: if you're tired and stressed out all the time, and you're a martyr to all your demands and duties, then no one can fault you for being imperfect.

If you don't relate to this, if you joyfully give of yourself to your work and family, and you look over all the commitments in your life and can't imagine giving any of them up because of how fulfilling they are, and you rarely feel resentful or overwhelmed at only having 24 hours in each day, that's awesome. Truly awesome. You're not normal.

Everyone else, out of the pool. It's bedtime. Because you need your sleep.

Sleep is a mystery, a mystical experience, a daily touchstone to spiritual surrender. I mean really. We go unconscious. We give ourselves over to vulnerability, to dreams, to our humanness. We trust enough to let go, at least for a little while. We trust that we'll wake up in the morning. We trust our bodies to know what they're doing. And we do this every day.

Except those who don't. They don't sleep, they can't sleep. When clients come into my office with sleep problems, it signals likely trust & safety issues. They almost always turn out to be atheists (bitter ones) or to have serious, knotty issues with god/God/gods. This is an extremely painful way to live, not being able to let go and rest and sleep. It makes people nuts.

The rest of us, the ones who don't get enough sleep because of the self-destruct program and the pesky nature of the need for sleep, well... we're just making ourselves nuts.

So cut it out.

You know how much sleep you need. It's an individual thing -- some are truly fine on 4-5 hours and others need 8-9 just to feel like themselves. You know what it is for you. There's no "I shouldn't need so much sleep" allowed. Your body knows, and you need to let it lead.

Start carving that time block out of your nights (or days, if you work swing) and go to bed. Just do it. Bzzzzt. Just do it.

If you have trouble falling asleep, it'll be tempting to just chuck the whole pesky idea. Don't. Retraining yourself is part of the process. Here's an article with some pointers.

The benefits will make it worth it. You'll have more patience & clarity. You'll treat people better. You'll treat yourself better. Your body will heal itself more quickly and easily.

You may feel like you're supposed to be this way, have these qualities, anyway -- that how much sleep you get or what vegetables you eat or whether you take walks isn't supposed to impact who you are and how you treat people.

Wake up. You're a human animal, and who you are is a fluid concept. It absolutely changes according to how healthy your body and mind are. So do yourself and your people a big favor: take care of yourself. Get some sleep.

Who Do You Listen To?

We humans are a remarkable species. Despite all the wars and genocides and other stupidities, we've continued to grow in wisdom, to develop our arts, to conceptualize the world in new and productive ways. Technology is taking creativity to a whole new level. Nearly anything we can think up, we can create, or at least fund a research department at a university to study the possibility.

We've figured out a lot of stuff over the centuries. We've written lots of books, full of great ideas. We have amazing people all around us -- on TV, on the web, on our street and across the world... elders and thinkers and just plain insightful folk. We're blessed with an abundance of wisdom and tested theories and educated guesses.

The problem is, we don't listen to much of it.

We're choosy. We're choosy about how we spend our time and we're choosy about how much information we let in, and from what sources. Being choosy about who we listen to... it's smart. If we weren't choosy, if we followed authority unquestioningly, we'd almost certainly end up fighting a senseless war or committing genocide or perpetuating some other stupidity. So questioning is good. It's very good.

Except when it's not.

At some point, being choosy can turn into being rigid and closed-minded. We decide we'll only let in the really valuable information, and in our culture, we tend to decide a thing's value according to how much we paid for it.

There are hundreds of books in the bookstore that could change your life, but if you only paid $15.99 for them, you'll only give them $15.99 worth of attention and credibility. We don't want to believe this about ourselves, but it's true.

We therapists, lots of us, join this profession with lofty ideas of helping people even if they can't pay. We learn fast. If a client doesn't pay something -- an amount that means something to them, that costs them -- then they don't listen to a word we say. We have no credibility in their consciousness, no matter what they say or believe to the contrary.

We still see lower-fee clients, but usually, the work is harder and the client gets less out of it. My higher-fee clients think I'm a miracle worker. My lower-fee clients "aren't sure it's helping." And I'm quite certain there is no difference in how I'm treating them.

[Truly. Therapy is not like making widgets, where you can slack off and only do 50 an hour instead of 100; withholding in therapy (or any relationship) takes more energy, so we don't bother, even if we wanted to.]

My point is that humanity knows a lot, and we don't need more books or gurus or next-big-things to tell us how to improve our lives. The answers, especially here in our culture, are floating around us all the time. They're on TV, on the radio, in books, in magazines... in the house next door, maybe even in your own house.

If you honestly can't see them and need help to open your eyes psychologically, therapists are great.

If you can see them but you don't really like the direction they point in (i.e. unresolved grief) and so you're just looking for different answers, well... the entrepreneurial machine will continue churning out the same ideas in new forms, so you'll have an endless supply of information to consume and dismiss.

Just know that you're not getting anywhere. You'd probably be better served by stopping, picking one source of wisdom -- one book, or one teacher -- and working with it on a long-term basis.

Confronting Confrontation Aversion

You know those people who seem able to approach anyone and confront them calmly and respectfully about any potentially prickly subject and come away unruffled, still centered and confident in themselves, as if all they'd done was walk up to a bank teller and make a deposit?

They're not normal.

We envy them. We admire them. We watch them suspensefully in movies. Forget combat -- confronting someone, armed with nothing more than our vulnerable, personal take on the truth, is way scarier (partly because we civilians can actually relate to it).

When a guy on screen lifts his chin and strides into that particularly stomach-twisting situation, like a courtroom or a hostile boardroom, we women swoon. Don Draper, we love you.

In real life, it's less plausible, more baffling, mildly suspicious, even. How do they do that? They must be out-of-touch with their feelings, or in denial, or... maybe he's a robot. (Should we test that theory? Has he ever injured a human being or, through inaction, allowed a human being to come to harm?)

Calmly confrontating someone is not something we naturally know how to do. We have to learn, and we can't learn the easy way -- books, lectures, watching instructive videos -- we have to learn-by-doing.

One obstacle to the learning-by-doing is fear. Most of the likely outcomes of a confrontation are experiences we fear: someone disagreeing, disapproving, getting angry, yelling, attacking, or -- perhaps worst of all -- dismissing us and refusing to give our concern any validation. These are really unpleasant experiences; just writing them out makes my stomach turn. Our nervous systems can't help but shrink when faced with a task that will potentially provoke them. We'd rather choose the path of least resistance. Strongly.

Another obstacle to the learning-by-doing is low self-esteem, also known as, "Who am I to say?" We don't feel like we have the right to speak up. In a primal sense, we feel weaker and decide to just submit to the alpha. It's another form of self-abandonment. When combined with fear, it's practically unquestionable. We accept inferiority. Cheerfully.

The final obstacle, and one that's very difficult to overcome, is the deeply embedded belief most of us were raised/programmed with that says "Good people don't confront."

We learned it intellectually, by being told not to challenge our parents, teachers or anyone else who outranked us.

We learned it experientially, by being punished or suffering other negatively reinforcing consequences (such as others not liking us) when we did it anyway.

And we learned it subconsciously, by example. This was most insidious.

The adults in our lives avoided confrontation, or handled it badly. Living examples of adults calmly confronting someone, not using anger or intimidation to manipulate, and not falling apart, venting or grumbling/griping about it later were not abundant, maybe not even existent (except on TV, and the characters were so one-dimensional or the acting was so lousy that it didn't count).

Learning by example. It would have been a beautiful way to learn it effortlessly, to integrate it early as a natural way of being. Alas.

So deep, deep down, carved into the bedrock of our being, is a belief that good people don't confront others. It's not true, especially now that we're grown up and therefore equally as entitled to assert ourselves as every other human being on the planet, but that's neither here nor there. The untruth of the belief is not the problem. The fact that it's written in stone, is.

What do we do?

First, learn-by-doing. Choose the path of most resistance. Practice asserting yourself. Take every opportunity. Feel the fear and do it anyway. It's simple behavioral discipline. And reward yourself for each attempt, no matter how the interaction turns out. Seriously, if you ask your boss for a raise, even if they say no, reward yourself with a massage or a great meal or something. It will help retrain your nervous system so next time will be less painful.

Second, change the belief.

• Carve an edit into the bedrock. Change it to say, Good people confront sometimes. This is true. Absolutely, positively true. And, it doesn't suggest you have to.
  
• Test it. Look for examples of it being true. Who do you know and admire who occasionally confronts others? What other people do you now, people whom you don't want to emulate, who avoid confrontation like the plague? (Yes, there will be mixed examples, but for now, for the purposes of reprogramming your subconscious, just focus on these.)
  
• Actively imagine examples when confronting is the right thing to do. When would "good" people confront? And when would "bad" people avoid it?
  
• Watch cinematic examples, like To Kill a Mockingbird, A Few Good Men, The Insider or Erin Brokovich.
  
• If you're so inclined, write it somewhere visible. Remind yourself of it regularly, in all different moods and circumstances.

All of these will help undermine the old version and help you adapt to a new way of being that involves feeling safer and more engaged in life and having less fear of other people. Seriously, they're just people, too.

Parents: Do your kids a favor. Calmly confront, speak your truth, keep your cool, and avoid the conspiratorial debrief with your kids afterward. Wait til your spouse gets home and the kids are asleep before letting the facade crumble.