Do You Want Emotional Intimacy?

Do you want a blend of emotional and physical intimacy?

• Keep your heart open if you want closeness. If you struggle to stay open to yourself and others, we can help with that. This skill is vital to being intimate and connected.
• Soothe yourself when you feel like clamming up. Clamming up interferes with passion. That means you need to relax yourself on the spot and tolerate some difficulty. Passion is not always easy. If you can talk yourself through it, stay there and remain open, you will be amazed at what you can achieve. One author calls it “open hearted living.”
• Gottman calls it “DPA- Diffuse Physiological Arousal” when your heart rates goes above 100 beats per minute and it kills intimacy, conversation, vulnerability and blocks access to parts of our brain. You need to relax or parts of your brain are not open to you. It is helpful if your partner can help you relax when you need it, but it is ultimately your job to cool yourself down. You need to have this skill if you are to be successful in relationships and in life.
• James Coan of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory- wrote that the “prefrontal cortex is key to calming the emotional brain. A fear response is expensive to the brain and usurps many of its processes. fMRI-see what gets it worked up and what calms it down. When partners (healthy and happy relationships) held hands "everything went quiet" massive decrease in emotional responding”
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  “Prefrontal cortex helps you regulate yourself when you are by yourself- exhausting. You can do it but you are self- involved, which inhibits focus on the task at hand, like having sex. Holding hands is more efficient brain wise- leaving you more able to play and connect w others. It offloads what is not relevant. There are fewer distractions. "
• Opening up is easier when you do not feel defensive, challenged, threatened or anxious. The challenge is to remain open even when things are difficult. My teachers would joke that when you can do this, it means you are now an adult.
• Can you still be you, even when things get difficult, when you feel rejected, can you still be true to yourself? That is preparation for passion. Can you handle the passion or does it trigger you to either collapse or go off?

Please consider reading the next few blogs as we will focus more on sexual intimacy, which is predicated on emotional closeness. If you have the emotional connection, the playfulness and ability to have successful conversations, your sexual connection will benefit.

Exercise: Write down your fear-based behavior in this relationship. What am I doing that is based on fear/scarcity/lack? That was probably enough for day 1. Why don’t you leave the following for maybe day 2 or beyond. What impact does that fear based behavior have on other people around me?

Exercise: People who face their fears feel more confident, and have fewer fears at the end of the day. A. Which fear (choose one that involves other people) am I going to face first? How am I going to face it?

With whom am I going to work to face it at first?

What will my life look like when I face this particular fear?

B. Which fear am I going to face next? How am I going to face it?

With whom am I going to work to face it at the beginning?

What will my life look like when I face this particular fear?