Intimacy Intimate
Intimacy indicates an opening of your more private feelings and connections with another being or even object. Such an intimate connection means you are taking into you new experiences, part of the others being and consciousness, also memories and links that you can never lose.
Such intimacy does not just mean sex, it means connection, living close to another. For example we are very deeply intimate with our parents, siblings or anybody we make connection with. But we are usually unaware of it. Most people are often totally unaware of the experience they take in and how it interacts with them when we love or live with or are friends with someone. In other words the memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. You have taken in millions of bit of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with someone and they are what makes you the person you are. Your dreams tend to put all that in the image of the past person when you are dealing with the influences left in you from the relationship. Please read this wonderful example, it will show how much we take in from those we love or lived with, been intimate with.
The person we are relating to in the dream is an image not only of our own desires but also of how we relate to intimacy, love and pleasure. The interaction with them reveals all your difficulties and skills in regard to living and being loved. Unfortunately we do not go into relationships empty of problems; we carry into them the possibility of jealousy, of possessiveness, of a whole range of childhood problems that we may never have faced before.
Example: My mother did something so powerfully harmful when I was five that I could not mature or learn love. So it was not until I was in my forties that I began to learn to love. And that was when I regressed to a five year old and had to follow my mother/wife around for fear of losing her. Of course I gradually grew up, not from reading books, but by living out all the pain and disturbance of growing up as a forty year old. I certainly didn’t hide under a guise of Mother Theresa or of a Buddha figure.
Therefore intimacy can face us with ourselves with such depth most often we blame it on our partner or another person, even the world. Blaming is something children do. Most of us have not actually matured to the point of being capable of love. The very roots of love arise out of the incredible survival drives of a baby totally desiring its mother to give utter and complete attention to it. Without that attention, millions of years of survival in harsh environments, tell the baby it will die. So it holds on to that connection with its mother or carer with every jungle trick it knows. These includes tantrums, acting out sickness, sulking, anger, emotional cut off to see if the parent still cares; and if you haven’t outgrown those, then you will use them in your adult relationships.
Quite honestly, few of us have outgrown them, so we are mostly five or six year olds when it comes to the business of love. I remember a man driving many miles to consult me because, as he said, “My wife is going to leave me if I do not change.” He explained that his wife said that he was so jealous that if she talked to another man it would cause a row. So I asked him to remember the first time he felt like that. It took him a while before he said, “I was about five”. I then explained that he had not learnt to grow emotionally since then.
Often we make a satellite character of the person we “love”. In other words we try to make them swing around us in the way that suits our emotional and physical needs. Notice how many people have breakdowns, depression, or even commit suicide when their partner leaves them, goes with another person or dies. Those things point to pretty desperate internal situations – in other words the baby level of feeling response.
What ‘lovers’ are really saying is, “I will love you if – if you don’t go against any of my childhood needs – if you remain my possession – if you don’t do those things that remind me I am a vulnerable baby and open up that incredible pit of feeling.” Mature love is when we accept that the person we care for is a separate and unique individual with their own needs and directions in life. We do not love them “if”. We love them simply because they are who they are, because we respect and admire them, and we allow them the freedom that hopefully we give ourselves.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Have you ever grown out of your childhood form of love?
What problems do you meet in intimacy?
Do you feel it is natural to feel pain in losing?
See Beware of Love – Learning to Love – Inner World – Emotions and Mood in Dreams