You can’t do relationships just in your head!
Like it or not intimate relationships involve a lot of feeling and how we manage them is a vital factor in the health of your relationship. In the beginning we’re willing to embrace these feelings as they’re mostly a cocktail of all things wonderful. Even fear seems like nervous anticipation, anger close to passion and needs feel like desire. Over time as we get a bit more real in the relationship (hopefully) we let our warts show and a greater range of feelings come to the surface.
(Annette says she has been told it is a positive sign of intimacy if your beloved allows themselves to fart in your presence) (Not that women fart at all of course!).
Emotional Intelligence
If we lack the emotional intelligence to deal with these feelings as they become more uncomfortable, we judge them as wrong. In order to manage them we focus on our intellect instead of the discomfort, making elaborate mental rationalizations about our feelings, the situation, our partner and/or ourselves because while we are thinking we’re not feeling.
We then choose one of three responses:
We vent our rationalizations and uncomfortable feelings all over our (formerly blameless) significant other. Or we dump them on ourselves making us feel bad, or we simply squash the feelings down inside of us. None of these are a good look.
Obviously if we turn our feelings into a drama and vent our anger, fear, shame etc onto our partners they are likely to get hurt and retreat, or get pissed off back, resulting in the ugly downward spiral of ‘he said/she said/you never and I always’.
Dumping blame might feel good but…
Dumping blame onto ourselves obliterates our self esteem and done often enough, our sense of self worth as well.
The other choice- to not feel at all, may seem nobler but it’s not. The thing about a feeling is that once you’ve created it, it still exists. Squashing down a feeling doesn’t get rid of it, it simply remains in your body, unconsciously fuelling your future thoughts and behaviours.
You might remember a time being surprised at how clearly long forgotten feelings can surface at inappropriate moments, such as when your partner was particularly late home and you were assailed by the hurt of his car accident 10 years before. As you can see not feeling now simply creates more opportunities for it down the track. Science is proving more than ever before that the stress of repressed emotion underlies the development of much physical disease and poor health.
The proactive relationship (and life) step is to practice feeling your feelings, for once you feel and witness a feeling fully it’s gone.
Because we either feel or we don’t.
If we want to feel the ‘good’ things we need to feel everything.
The skill is in learning to do it without escalation into drama, dumping or suppression, unlike this little example:
The way not to do feelings!
Annette can recall some years ago getting into an argument with her (formerly blameless) significant other whilst driving home from the supermarket one night. The venting reached such proportions that he stopped the car and with words something like “I’m not taking any more of this shit!” stormed off home. Annette jumped out of the car and ran around to the driver’s side whilst continuing to vent even more loudly the rightness of her stated position, pointing her finger at his departing back to further make her case. All of a sudden she had the realization that here she was behaving like “those very unconscious people” she had seen and judged in the past for arguing in public. Thanking goodness there was no one else around she continued her spiel a few moments longer but with more perspective and less invective before driving herself home.
This very ugly scene was the result of a deeply triggered emotional pattern and could have been avoided if one or both of us had chosen to practice going within and feeling instead of dumping!
But sometimes no matter how good our skills are we can still fall into being human and just need to forgive ourselves for that and learn from the experience…
Can you think of time when you felt or ‘knew’ something in your heart that helped you, or that you needed to listen to?
doesn’t mean the heart tells you to ignore your fear, it goes beyond it to a place of deeper logic. The heart uses more simple language that may be about letting things be, letting them go or finding compassion, acceptance and understanding. Sometimes it might be about getting off your butt, holding a boundary or maintaining some tough love which is ultimately the best choice even though it might be a hard one to take. Heart outcomes are ultimately more satisfying and better for the whole, helping you break out of old ways of being.
Practical Intimacy-
This can be as simple as sitting next to each other on the couch, holding hands, lying together with arms holding each other. It can involve active touch or complete stillness. It may or may not include genitals.
Sharing our bodies through touch with a desire to experience the sensations as they arise, without any attachment to an outcome, just being in the moment. It may or may not include our genitals.
presence of the other to experience ourselves, similar to what we experienced, if we were lucky, in the first few months of life with our mother in an atmosphere of love and safety and where we all long to go back to. If we weren’t lucky enough to experience it at some level we’re always looking to do so. We can experience this in the early days of a new relationship, when we are so in love and open to each other it feels like there is a blissful sense of no separation. It can feel good to the one who is lost in the other but is generally uncomfortable for the one on the receiving end and is not healthy on a long term basis. As adults we need to move on from this childlike sense of intimacy and find ourselves more fully. We can also be intimately enmeshed with our beliefs, our family, our culture, community and society, unaware of how we give ourselves away to these parts of life.
experiencing, with empathy and compassion for both ourselves and our partners. The deeper we open our hearts the more fully we experience this kind of intimacy. This is where we start to see behind our masks and take chances of being fully seen in our naked humanity. It’s where we start to get messy, creating the cracks where the light gets in. Up until this stage we’ve been able to keep our cool exterior in place yet now our imperfections need to show. It is these very cracks that create the sense of deeper togetherness, with a feeling of connection and shared experience. Despite our illusions about intimacy this stage is not always pretty as we reveal ourselves and our Shadows come out to play. This is the stage of intimacy we love to hate! It is important to balance this kind of intimacy with intimacy with ourselves to be able to stay grounded in it.Our Hearts have a multitude of talents and is much more powerful than we give it credit for – it is a place of painful feelings, a place for healing our pain as well as a place of rest, love and inner safety. It is where our Ego self meets our Higher or Whole self, so it is both messy and a portal to Spirit.
Our sense of ourselves becomes pure awareness and feeling, ‘we’ still exist yet have a oneness with everything that is, including God or Spirit. In this heightened state we have no awareness of anything outside of the present moment, or of any personal needs. Spiritual intimacy is often experienced in sex, eye gazing, meditation, prayer and other religious experiences.
still retain awareness of ourselves in the experience.
We have all witnessed, or experienced ourselves, the surging intensity of emotion that appears to explode out of nowhere over some insignificant happening.
insignificant with an ensuing, and projected intensity that is way out of proportion to the alleged incident. When this happens, people are caught up in their own unique mixture of reactionary emotional responses and a couples communication goes out the window.
Projections are a natural response in defending ourselves when we’re feeling attacked or criticized (whether this is the actual reality or not). We project because of our own unresolved emotional baggage that is being presented to us by someone else. This someone else often doesn’t understand our emotional triggers as they are totally unique to us, as their triggers will be to them.
