Day: May 6, 2024

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What is emotional intimacy and how do we maintain it in relationships?

Building intimacy in a relationship is a complex process and believe it or not, there are many different types of intimacy. Intimacy with another person requires self awareness, compassion and vulnerability and once you’ve achieved that all-important closeness with that person, you have to work at maintaining it too.

According to Psychosexual therapist, BBC One’s Sex on the Couch presenter and author of audiobook 12 Steps to Sexual Connection, Lohani Noor, there are two fundamental types of intimacy in a romantic relationship: sexual intimacy and emotional intimacy. They’re connected, because without emotional intimacy it can be hard to connect with your partner physically, but they’re not the same thing.

Emotional intimacy is all about getting to know your partner on a deeper level, making sure that you each feel safe and secure, being able to communicate clearly and building trust so that you can be your most vulnerable selves with each other.

What is emotional intimacy?

“We need emotional intimacy. As humans, we are hard-wired for connection.” explains clinical social worker, Debbie Radzinsky. “Emotional intimacy brightens our mood by activating feel-good neurotransmitters: oxytocin, endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin. Intimacy can even extend our life expectancy.”

When we feel connected to others it makes us feel good, promoting feelings of calm and contentment. But often, we can find it difficult to tap into this connectedness. “But,” says Radzinsky. “emotional intimacy in a relationship doesn’t just happen spontaneously. Building and maintaining emotional intimacy takes time.”

Talking about your feelings, especially in a new relationship can be challenging. It’s not easy to just open up, particularly if you don’t fully trust the person you’re dating. And this trust might not be possible for you, if you struggle with attachment for any reason.

Intimacy can be difficult for those who find it difficult to communicate their feelings or be vulnerable with others and Noor explains that these issues usually begin in childhood. The good news is that we can unlearn what we know and reset our brains and behaviours to build more healthy intimate relationships, it just takes time.

Issues with emotional intimacy
“When you’re little you might think you’ve got a really good strategy for getting your needs met. And you’ll scream until you’re sick.” says Noor. “And someone comes and picks you up and it works. It works because it’s acceptable when you’re four. Unfortunately, our parents don’t teach us how to ask for what we want in a more meaningful way. We understand that on a primal level, [screaming is] the strategy for getting what we want. So then when we’re an adult, and in a difficult relationship, and we’re really struggling, we’ve got no reference point and no internal narrative around these difficult emotions, so we might decide to act out in a very similar way to how we did before.”

It’s no wonder that as adults we can find it so difficult to ask for what we really want. Instead, in relationships we may act out in some irrational way involving shouting, sulking or breaking things. “It [feels] easier to do that in the hopes that the other person will say, ‘Oh, I get it, you want me to love you right now.’ But it doesn’t work, does it? Because you’re an adult, and it’s not acceptable,” she says.

Shutting down emotionally, going silent or acting out and shouting are all mechanisms we use in adulthood to convey emotions when we’re not sure how to connect with others and ask for what we actually need. Similarly, we might be defensive if our partner asks us for something because we might not feel worthy or capable of giving it to them. Our communication has to work both ways to build healthy, regulated emotional intimacy and it starts with being unafraid to say how we really feel and feeling able to listen to our partners and confident to try to give them what they need from us.

How to maintain emotional intimacy
Set your intention
You both have to want to work on your intimacy, and setting a goal or intention can help you to do this. For instance, you may want to feel like you can trust your partner more, you may want them to feel like they can confide in you or you may wish to feel more supported by them when you are struggling with something. Setting this intention before you have conversations about your relationship can help with getting you to where you want to be.

Listen to each other
Listening is a great skill and it isn’t simply waiting for your turn to talk. Instead of focusing on everything you disagree with or taking everything your partner says personally, try to actively listen to everything they have to say and consider it all before you reply. Mentally process what they are saying and try to define what they are asking for from you. This can be challenging, especially in the beginning, but listening to one another calmly and actively is the first step to being truly emotionally intimate. Your partner will feel much more able to trust you if you can listen to them without interrupting, getting defensive or losing your temper and the same applies when they are listening to you.

Use ‘I’ statements
When communicating with a partner, use “I” statements instead of “you” statements. Such as: “I feel like X when X happens” as opposed to “You made me feel like X”. Noor explains this is about “being accountable for your own feelings and not making them about the other person.” She adds, “Simply recognising that somebody doesn’t make you mad. They might invite you to feel mad, but it’s an invitation that you can refuse. It’s really taking ownership of what’s going on for you and [communicating that] rather than acting it out. So rather than escalating the situation, say, ‘I feel really crazy angry right now’. Just that difference massively changes whether or not your partner can hear you.”

Use empathy as a superpower
Being able to relate to one another’s feelings is a core pillar of emotional intimacy. Understanding how your partner may be feeling and inviting them to relate to how you are feeling builds deeper intimacy and ultimately makes it easier to care for one another, even during challenging times where you might not be acting like yourselves.

Empathy is an incredible tool and a strength in every relationship, whether that’s your romantic partnerships, your family dynamics, friendships or even at work. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and trying to experience the world from their perspective can help you understand them better, feel closer to them and earn their trust. It can also help to de-escalate stressful situations and potential conflicts.

When words fail you, use tools
If talking about your feelings is too much at any point, you can turn to helpful relationship tools that will help you to organise your thoughts and structure your approach to intimacy. Couple’s counselling and therapy can be a great way to connect with your partner because a trained professional will be able to guide your conversations and help you uncover the issues that are making communication difficult.

You can also try relationship apps that give you daily prompts and games to play, which takes the serious edge off having these conversations and can help you to be vulnerable in a way that feels more fun for you both. There are also physical games you can play, like couple’s card games and question games. Activities like these will help you to connect, laugh together and get to know each other better, without the feeling that you’re both “doing work”.

Story by Emilie Lavinia:Cosmopolitan

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Voices: Sorry, women – you’re probably going to have to teach your man how to be a ‘good boyfriend’

I remember the moment so clearly, it’s practically burnt into my brain. It’s seven years ago, and I’m having dinner with a group of friends. All of us are sharing stories about the men we’re dating. One is frustrated because her boyfriend keeps leaving the toilet seat up. Another is angry because her partner spends too much time playing video games. And one is concerned that her boyfriend might be a fascist. Then, the only one among us in a long-term relationship leans forward and whispers: “Don’t worry, girls. You just need to train them.”

All of us turned to her in an instant as she began to explain. It transpired that the therapised, emotionally intelligent, tidy, considerate partner she’d had for three years had not been like that at all when she met him. No, no. He was but a mere boy – an untrained puppy in desperate need of some direction. And he got it in droves.

To some readers – especially male ones – this might sound offensive. Condescending. Patronising. Misandrist, even. But almost every straight woman I know has had at least one experience with a man where they felt like they left him better off than when they arrived. Maybe they encouraged him to go to therapy. Maybe they taught him to be more emotionally available, or to finally learn how to cook. Whatever it is, the point is that they passed on myriad essential tools, out of the goodness of their own hearts, to help build and better the men they were with.

I was reminded of that dinner while reading a recent viral article in The Cut, “The Case for Marrying an Older Man”, in which writer Grazie Sophia Christie presents her decision to marry a man 10 years her senior as an intentional calculation that has liberated her from the shackles of femininity. But that’s a whole other article. The point is that, in the depths of her piece, Christie highlights just how skilled men are at “taking”, as she puts it, from their female partners.

“There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath,” she writes. “A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colours, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach [them].”

The injustice of all this is, as Christie says, that these men absorb this education and then bring it into their next relationship, passing it off as their own for their next girlfriend. What do we get in return?

It might not sound romantic, but in every relationship there is some sort of transaction at play. One person is always taking something from the other – and ideally, this dynamic is reciprocated. But it isn’t always. It certainly hasn’t been in most of the heterosexual relationships my friends and I have entered into.

Don’t get me wrong: the men I’ve been with have taught me plenty of things. Like how to spend an entire day surviving without really ever having to lift a finger. Or how to string someone along for months on end while secretly sleeping with someone else. And self-sabotage is a skill, too, you know.

In all seriousness, beyond a cool new song or genre of cinema, I’m not entirely sure that there has necessarily been any learning that has benefited me in any tangible way. You learn something from every relationship, sure – but not necessarily from every partner.

Christie’s tactic for overcoming this social injustice is to marry up (in terms of both age and finances). But I’m not sure that’s the best solution. Firstly, age is no guarantee of emotional or domestic maturity. And neither is wealth – the richest people I know tend also to be the least self-sufficient. Maybe the best practice is to take an “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach and choose partners who’ve already been “trained” by the women who came before you. Just be sure to take a moment to thank them; they worked hard for that.

Opinion by Olivia Petter : The Independent:

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Psychologist reveals the five signs you’re a people pleaser

Psychologist reveals the five signs you’re a people pleaser

People pleasing means never saying no & going out of your way to help others
Fixing other people’s problems & apologizing too much are two signs
Most people enjoy being helpful and pleasing others.

Yet for a small but significant proportion, selfless behavior is taken to the extreme – risking serious mental health problems.
Psychologists have coined the phenomenon people pleasing, which is said to descibe those who never say no and always go out of their way for others at the expense of their own mental wellbeing.

According to studies, the roughly 14 per cent of people who engage in this behavior are more likely to develop serious mental health issues like anxiety, stress and depression.

One high-profile people pleaser is Hollywood superstar Jennifer Lawrence who, in 2021, admitted she’d been ‘people-pleasing’ for the majority of her life.
‘Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me,’ she told Vanity Fair.

‘And then I felt like I reached a point where people were not pleased just by my existence. So that kind of shook me out of thinking that work or your career can bring any kind of peace to your soul.’

But how do you know if you’re a perpetual people pleaser, or just a kind person?

Dr Juli Fraga, a San Francisco-based psychologist, has revealed the five signs of chronic people-pleasing that you should watch out for.

The first clue is often an underlying feeling of being out of control, she says.

When people perceive us in a way we don’t like and can’t control – for instance after a relationship break-up – there is a temptation to over-compensate in other areas of life, to ensure people like us.

Dr Juli Fraga said, behavior-wise, the first red-flag is over-apologizing, especially for things that aren’t your fault.

‘For instance, one of my former patients said he apologized every time he asked his boss a question,’ she told the Washington Post.

‘Because he “didn’t want to make them mad.”’

Another is taking responsibility for another person’s sadness, anger, or disappointment.

The people pleaser will assume they did something to cause the negative emotion, and attempt to fix it – even if it comes at their own expense.

The next sign is agreeing when you don’t, in order to avoid tension.

Dr Fraga said: ‘Years ago, I worked with a patient who championed her father’s political views, even though she couldn’t stand them.’

Then there’s being a ‘yes’ person when you want to say no.

Perhaps you take on a larger workload you can’t handle, or agree to pay for things you can’t afford.

I’m a reformed people pleaser – here’s how I changed my ways

London-based comedian Ania Magliano, 22, put too much effort into pleasing others and has now changed her ways including by changing the way she writes emails to saying no to things she doesn’t want to do.

The final sign is lulling yourself into the false belief that your feelings and needs don’t matter as much as other people’s.

Dr Fraga said: ‘Often, you hold a false belief that expressing [feelings] will be a burden, or cause someone to abandon you.’

A people pleaser often sets their own needs to the side for the benefit of others. For instance, running hours of errands for someone else or covering for a co-worker during the work day, leaving little time for moments of calm or a nutritious lunch.

Psychologists have long debated the root cause of people pleasing, but it is thought to be associated with a personality trait known as sociotropy – an unusually strong desire for social approval and acceptance.

People with this trait rely heavily on the quality of their relationships with other people to inform their own sense of self-worth and wellbeing.

Those with sociotropic traits are more likely to hold harmful self-beliefs like ‘I am unlovable’ and ‘I am helpless’, according to a 2018 study.

The behavior can also result from aggressive parenting, said Dr Fraga.

‘I once worked with a patient whose father shamed him whenever he expressed sadness. “If you want to cry, I’ll give you something to cry about,” he was told.

‘On other occasions, his dad said, “I’m not in the mood to hear any of your stupid whining.” As a result, my patient worked hard to be “good” by doing what he was told. “If people like you, they leave you alone,” he told me.’

This is a trauma response known as ‘fawning’, or pleasing others to avoid conflict and establish a sense of security.

Dr Fraga advises patients to work on self-compassion and being as forgiving of themselves as they are of other people.

She said: ‘Start by asking yourself: “What is one thing that will help me feel soothed?” It could be taking a walk or drinking a cup of tea. Or it might be calling a friend or spending time with your beloved pet.’

She also encourages people to practice saying no and setting a boundary.

5 SIGNS YOU’RE A PEOPLE PLEASE

San Francisco-based psychologist has revealed how to tell if you’re a people pleaser – and at risk of stress, depression and anxiety
An underlying feeling of a loss of control
Saying sorry for things that aren’t your fault
Assuming you’re the cause of another person’s bad mood
Agreeing with opinions, despite holding the opposite view
Acting as if other people’s needs matter more than your own

Story by Cassidy Morrison Senior Health Reporter For Dailymail.Com