Episode #66 

How To Find Intimacy

The desire to be loved, needed, touched and supported by another human being is completely normal.

But how can you achieve that kind of relationship in your own life?

What is healthy intimacy?

How can you deal with trust issues to successfully form a close, intimate relationship?

In this episode, Dr Julie shares with you the CBT tools and mental framing that can help you improve your ability to achieve real, healthy intimacy in your relationships.

Click to listen now!

Reference Guides:

Full Episode Transcript

Hi, and welcome to My CBT Podcast!

My name is Dr. Julie Osborn, I'm a Doctor of Psychology and a licensed clinical social worker specializing in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

So first, I like to share an email that I always like to do at the beginning, because I really appreciate you guys taking the time of reaching out.

This one says:

“Hi, Doctor Osborn, I just had to let you know how grateful I am that you devote so much time and energy into your podcast. You've really helped me pull myself out of some horrible mindsets and thoughts, and I never thought I could be as positive about the future. But your methods give me so much hope and trust in myself. I just had to say thank you. All my best, Abby.”

So thanks, Abby. I'm so happy that my podcast has made a difference. I'm really humbled when you guys again reach out and share with me what's going on and that the podcasts are making a difference because that's my intention is to get the CBT tools out there so you guys can use them in your life and start to feel better. So today I want to talk about finding intimacy, and none of us want to be alone.

We all want to touch and to be touched by relationships in our lives. And some of us search our entire lives for feeling of oneness with another person. It's kind of hard to describe really what we search for, but we know it when we finally achieve it. Maybe we tire of that dark feeling of being ultimately alone as we struggle through life. If only there was someone else here.

We say to ourselves, we could understand and share our burdens to have a partner or companion. They want to be so lonely. It wouldn't be so hard. Or perhaps in our more positive moments, we want to share just not the burdens, but our pleasures, too, and our strength and our beauty. We want the powerful impact of our internal experience to have an impression on someone else, as if to say that you know what I count.

I'm whole. I want to impart my feelings with another person and not just have to just be by myself. It's all normal to feel that way, because as humans, we're social beings. That's why we search for intimacy with others. It's in our DNA.

We're not supposed to be alone in the quest for intimacy, the reason we commit ourselves to another person in marriage or some other public declaration of loyalty. Right? I'm trying to find intimacy, and we're simply searching for that ultimate feeling of bonding that we fell toward a parent during our infancy. That might be part of it as well. That connection, again is just part of our DNA.

So the search French must see maybe one reason we form social groups. It may even explain why we have this quest for spiritual fulfillment in our lives. And sadly enough, it's really common in our society today that many, many people feel lonely. It's one of the biggest problems out there. To be honest.

And for all the benefits we derive from living in a highly technological world, we seamlessly instant and complete communication with others. We still find it difficult to discover ways to form that intimate relationship because it's just not the same as seeing someone face to face. And actually, in fact, our high tech society seems to fragment our social connections, and it drives us away from other people. So, for example, an email seems to make connecting with other people easier. But in truth, our messages are usually just flashes of ideas, briefly written, briefly, read, instantaneously deleted, and they barely fulfill our desire for more complete relationships based on our own inner experiences.

How many times have you sent an email that you regretted or you wish you read through or you weren't so impulsive and just sending it out, right? You didn't take that time to really think it through to figure out what am I thinking about? That's causing me to feel this way. And so the behavior, writing the email and then you send it out and you can never take it back. In our modern society, we lack ways to see, hear, and touch other people, not in person, and not to the extent that humans have in the past.

Our high tech world has brought us to this abundance of stress and stress and intimacy are highly compatible about fellows. So to form an intimate connection with another person requires first. So we have access to our own personal emotions and ideas. Right? So that's what our ideas are, what we're thinking.

What are our thoughts? We can't expect to be intimate with another when we're out of touch with our own internal experiences. So our intimate experiences may involve our own emotional, our cognitive, social, physical, sexual and spiritual lives. And two people, each of whom is in touch with his or own internal experiences, may be able to share an intimate relationship on any one of those levels, and hopefully all of them and all of them are part of the cognitive behavioral therapy. Right?

So true intimacy is one of the ultimate expressions of the human experience, and that may be why we strive so hard to find it. We must explore and become more familiar with our own personal thoughts and feelings before we can share them with someone else. And that's where during the fall record can help you stop and say, what am I thinking that's causing my feelings? And are they even true? And what is this about me?

Why am I even thinking these possibly negative thoughts? Am I feeling bad about myself? Am I feeling insecure? This can help us explore that before we share that with someone else. So we can really find that person we can feel trustworthy enough to share with.

So how do you reach intimacy? So each person seems to understand the intimate experience in your own way. It's not the same for everybody. And in a sense, it takes a journey of personal discovery to learn how to share intimacy with another person. I don't think it ever changes.

I'm married and me and my husband are always growing, and we have our different issues that come up and just sharing with what I'm going through with my cancer and my treatment has been another experience that we've never had to go through and how we've had to work on really staying connected and being intimate, being able to share our fears and all of the feelings that have come along with us and what our thoughts are that are making us feel how we are at that time. So it's never like, oh, I connected with this person.

I'm done. If you're having good personal growth, it's something that goes on all the time. So I'm going to give you some guidelines that may help you to find that journey.

All right. So first is to know yourself. So I want you to get in touch with your own private experiences. Your thoughts in our stressed our world, this is often hard to do because our attention is directed outward most of the time, so it helps to sit, actually do nothing and being distracted by nothing and spend time in reflection and introspection. And this is how I figure out and observe my own thoughts to understand what my feelings are that I'm having your brain has pleasure centers.

Close your eyes and imagine yourself experiencing pleasure. Become familiar with those parts of yourself that are strong and feel whole and integrated and learn to feel comfortable with that part of yourself that senses calmness, confidence and peace. Again, it's getting to know yourself. Some people like to spend a few minutes every night before bed, perhaps with just a candle burning, maybe a little room of therapy reflecting on the events of the day. Others prefer to keep a daily Journal of your private thoughts and feelings.

Some prefer to learn a technique like mindfulness meditation. They're all good. And until you know your own private thoughts and feelings, it's difficult to share them with someone else. So whatever works for you, if you can, if you live near a beach, maybe taking a walk on the beach, going to your favorite park or whatever works. Whatever works.

Trustworthy person, I want to say, is one who can honor and respect you for sharing your most intimate experiences because that's a really vulnerable place to be. So another guideline is to communicate with another person. Share what you know about yourself with another person who can be trusted. This involves several steps. Okay, so first you need a sense of commitment to that person.

Strangers passing through your life, not the appropriate people with whom you share your deepest feelings. Intimacy has to be reserved for a person who will be there over the long haul, a close friend, a partner, a family member, or if we're lucky our soulmate. You also need a feeling of trust if the other person is not able to appreciate the delicacy of what you're sharing, it's futile to try to achieve intimacy. In the worst case, your words might be held against you later, which can be damaging and may lead to cynicism and distrust and holding you back from trying to connect with someone.

Knowing whom to trust involves acquiring good judgment about other people.

And finally understand that intimacy involves making yourself vulnerable. Right? The thing that lots of us run from the guarded and defensive person will never find true intimacy. Finding intimacy means taking a risk opening yourself up, sharing the most personal part of yourself with another person. Can the other person handle this?

Can the other person care? If they can, you may no longer feel alone. So again, it's not easy, but those of us that have people in our lives we've been able to trust. We know what a good feeling that is and that ease and calmness when you're with that person. So I don't have to worry about the judgment or if they're going to use this against me, they're just going to be there for me because I've had this relationship of trust with them.

Also, intimacy is reciprocal. A healthy intimate relationship is one in which both partners. When I say partners, whoever that is a friend partner regarding a relationship, know themselves and are able to come together in a sense of equality. Certain relationships are not meant to be reciprocal. For example, with your therapist, this often involves a high level of deeply personal communication, but this is on the part of just the client.

So just to kind of be clear about that, perhaps the most intense and lasting levels of intimacy are achieved when partners are able to share equally with each other. As a listener, you have to be able to honor and respect the openness. The vulnerability and courage of one who is communicating personal ideas and emotions. Value judgments, criticisms, and advice giving have no place in intimate communication, so the goal here is to appreciate and acknowledge the validity of the other person's deepest feelings. All of us want to be acknowledged.

Whether you just say I understand you shake your head, maybe hold their hand. It's just being acknowledged. And if you're aware of your own thoughts and feelings, you may then have the ability to really appreciate similar experiences on part of the other person. So you guys understanding what your thoughts are, what your hot thoughts are challenging them isn't just for you, but it's going to help you connect with other people and keep the light alive. Once two people have entered into a deep level of sharing.

They usually want to stay there. If there's true equality between the two, they achieve a balance that feels right and they don't want to lose. They don't want to lose. If, however, one of the partners feels the need to lessen the level of intimacy, the probability of conflict increases. You can avoid misunderstandings by maintaining your commitment and trust during these natural cycles that occur within any relationship because intimacy takes work and a sense of maturity.

So the Schwarz the responsibility of keeping an internship alive invites a return to be isolated, right? You're going to go back to being by yourself, and the intimate relationship is a healthy one. Intimacy allows us to end loneliness and to share the deepest and most personal parts of ourselves with a trusted partner. As social beings, we respond physically to the experience of intimacy as well, and people of intimate relationships live longer and healthier lives, and they report more personal happiness and satisfaction with the way they live.

So intimacy gives us a feeling of comfort, security, and a sense of being loved and accepted.

Who doesn't want that right? It gives us the freedom and support to stay true to the special qualities that define each of us as a unique person. One thing I want to share is what's a healthy connection, as well as everything I've said already is that sometimes you feel really what I call that symbiosis like, you are just really connected with your friend, your partner, whoever is in your life that you're sharing with and that we're not always going to be 100% connected. There's this ebb and flow, but that's okay.

Don't be nervous that nobody's going to be 100% connected all the time.

And sometimes when the relationship really isn't healthy or one person isn't really healthy, that they're always looking for that, and then they get nervous like, oh, why aren't we connecting wise and understanding me vice versa. Why isn't she understanding me? But understand that you'll have those times that you feel super connected, but it's normal because we're all working, dealing with life, we have jobs, we're doing different things, and then we come back together. So that's all. Normally, I just wanted to share that with you, and I wanted to share also about how therapy can really allow you to explore your own deepest and most intimate feelings in a safe and accepting setting with a professional who's trained to understand these inner processes.

I have a lot of people say, oh, you're going to think I'm crazy or this or that. And I don't think anybody's crazy because I understand why someone is feeling and thinking the way they are based just on my training. And so if you're really not comfortable going to a person in your life, finding a good therapist that you really connect with can be a really safe place where you won't be judged, and the person will really understand because the therapy relationship allows you to learn to stay true to your own uniqueness and feel comfortable in sharing and being authentic with another person.

So it's kind of an experiment as well that, oh, this is not the exact same, but I can start sharing with someone and I can be acknowledged and it can be safe. We can also explore who can be trusted and who can't as well as different features of our lives that may lead us to hide ourselves from others that can really help in therapy that we can cover.

Why don't you share? Why aren't you authentic with others? Why are you so afraid to be intimate? And also therapy has the potential to teach you how to break out of isolation and loneliness into a world of love and acceptance. And it can also prepare you to explore an intimate relationship outside of the therapy setting.

So if you're kind of not sure if I want to go therapy or I'm nervous about it or you think there's a stigma, find someone that you feel connected with, that you can feel safe with and give it a chance because it can really make a big world of difference. So I want to just talk a little bit about the healthy benefits of intimacy other than what I've shared already, there's a lot of research studies that have shown persuasively that people in intimate relationships again live longer and happier than those who are not.

So, for example, we know that people in marriages or other committed relationships live longer than people who are single. There was a classic study which I thought was interesting to share that found that 95% of people who described their parents as uncaring had diseases by midlife, while only 29% of those who described their parents as caring had midlife diseases and having supportive and close relationships with parents in our childhoods leads to healthy relationships in general, when we grow up, and it's these healthier adult relationships that are linked to lower prevalence of heart disease and cancer midlife.

In other words, one can compensate for a deprived childhood by learning later in life how to sustain supportive relationships.

I believe that 100% because we really learn from our childhood what a healthy relationship is, what an unhealthy relationship is based on our home environment. In another series of studies, researchers also found that people are actually isolated are two to five times more likely to die prematurely than those who have a sense of connection and community, which, oh my gosh. I believe that 100% at a study at the University of Texas looked at patients who had undergone open heart surgery. Those who had neither ongoing group participation or were able to derive strength from their religion were more than seven times more likely to have died six months after their surgery, and women with metastatic breast cancer were assigned to support groups, which men once a week for a year.

The women in the support group lived twice as long as those who were not in groups.

Another study has even found that people with fewer relationships of any kind friendships, a partner, family work, social groups, religious affiliations were four times as likely to develop a common goal as those who had more relationships. The last thing to share Interestingly is research show that people with pets are healthier than people without them, and they make fewer visits to the doctor. I agree with that because my Doggies always make me feel better doesn't mean you have to go out and get a pet. Just a little bit of research I'm sharing.

But going back to the loneliness.

My mom, she passed away back in January, and although we were in her life, she lived in an apartment by herself with other seniors, but a lot of them didn't come out of their apartments. They would have activities downstairs. We'd be like, Where is everybody? And I feel and I believe to the state of my mom just had a companion, a boyfriend where she could have her best friend. That was around enough to go out and Tracel and do things.

I think her dementia would not have come on as it did. I think she would have done better and who knows if she would still be here with us. But I think her feeling lonely and isolated because we couldn't be with her 24/7 definitely impacted her. So I really believe in connecting and having these really good relationships. So the last thing I want to just share is talking about trust, right?

Because that's a really tough thing for a lot of people and having the ability to trust because it's difficult to achieve intimacy relationship unless we can trust, right? We tend to focus on other people when we think about trust, that is, we might ask who out there can be trust and who cannot, which is a fair question, but it may be more helpful to look inside and think about trust also is something that we do well or not. Some people grew up with a good ability to trust appropriately and others because of their needs and life experiences have more difficulty with the issue.

I find people either trust people and then if they get hurt and they're like, I'm done with you and then other people don't go in trusting and have to build that up. Those are the two I have found to be true.

Working with people, and whichever one you have is okay. But you want to be able to get to that place to trust. And having a good eye for trust involves having a healthy sense of your own identity. So this means having a positive selfimage, the ability to value yourself and your own decisions, right? Honoring yourself.

I talk about a lot a good sense for protecting our own boundaries. So we need to know what we stand for and what is best for us, trust also involves acquiring an act for making good judgments. So when we have the self confidence that comes with knowing and liking ourselves, as well as the ability to make life enhancing decisions, we should be able to decide fairly easily about whom to trust, and it's not about trusting everyone. It's about finding people in your life that you can trust, and you can confide in trust between two people emergence from a process of mutual self disclosure.

Right.

So we gradually reveal more and more about ourselves to the other person achieves that sense of intimacy we're looking for, and the first person self discloses only to the degree that the other person has in a series of steps. So a good balance is maintained between both people. If the balance is disrupted, it's difficult to maintain the trust. So to give you an example, if one person reveals everything all at once and the other person reveals nothing, the balance is broken and neither party will be able to trust the other.

The building of trust is a mutual process, and remember, it takes time.

Sometimes we want it to be overnight, but we need to build. We feel comfortable revealing things about ourselves. When the other person has shown that he or she is willing to take the same risk. Think about that in the relationships you have or had in the past. And then, as I said before, some people trust blindly, but that's more of that.

They reveal everything all at once, expecting that a person will be able to reciprocate immediately. I've met people not in my work, but just like as a friend, that they just shared so much that I wasn't comfortable. Like, I don't think I'm supposed to know all this about you yet. And what's more likely is that the other person will feel overwhelmed, which is how I felt and may back off from being close. So people who trust blindly may want to look into issues like boundaries, self image, and why they need to be so close so quickly.

I said, some people trust first and see if they get hurt. That doesn't mean necessarily the blindly type of trust. It just might be like, okay, I'm going to see how this relationship goes trusting blindly again. It's just kind of spilling all your beams without building up that relationship first. And then, as I mentioned earlier, other people find it difficult to trust at all, which is really sad because they feel that they have to protect themselves.

But the walls are so high that they never find an intimate relationship in their life. And what a price to pay for protection. Right? You end up creating what you fear the most, which is not being close. So people have difficulty with opening themselves to trust may want to look into the pain that has closed them off, and they may want to look into ways of improving their communication skills, and that's where some therapy can be helpful and the rewards of intimacy are well worth it.

So whether you're sharing too much or whether you're not sharing enough, that's where your CBT can really come into play and doing some thought records and figuring out what are my thoughts that are keeping me from trusting my partner or my friend or my sibling or whoever it is in my life that is there for me and wants to get close and is maybe shared a little bit with me? Or why am I feeling like I need to say everything at once, so really figuring out what those thoughts are that are connected to the behavior and then make you feel sad or lonely or isolated or scared can really help you start changing and also looking at which I've talked about before.

And there's a podcast on core beliefs. What's the underlying core beliefs that are getting in the way from being able to have the kind of relationship you really want to have?

So as always, make decisions based on what's best for you, not how you feel. I appreciate you spending time with me today.

Please send any feedback to MyCBTPodcast@gmail.com.

You can follow me on Instagram.

I'm on Facebook.

Aand my website is MyCognitiveBehavioralTherapy.com - a lot of good information on there.

Be safe and take care of yourself. Have a good week.

Bye!