A Psychotherapy for Emotional Intimacy?
Regarding the word “intimacy,” let’s separate the word from its commonly assumed sexual meaning and focus on its usage in the phrase “emotional intimacy.” What is emotional intimacy anyway? I am referring to the ability to form and sustain a healthy loving relationship. Let’s assume that when a person “falls in love,” the actual choice involved in doing so is either non-existent or a bit beyond consciousness. Look at the implied meaning of the phrase, “fall” in love. So the fundamental question at hand is how we are going to relate to the person we have fallen in love with? Given the fact that the type of relationship you create (or recreate if you are unconsciously repeating the same mistakes over and over again) is going to determine the health and sustainability of the love you are feeling.
Most people if and when you ask them how good they are at forming an emotionally intimate love relationship, will probably tell you something akin to “no sweat,” “piece of cake.” The facts of the matter are unfortunately a bit more dire. With a relentless 50ish percent divorce rate (which goes higher when divorced people marry multiple times) reminding us that at least half the people who get married have acknowledged or unacknowledged problems with emotional intimacy. Well, it’s not the sort of thing we teach our children, at least not by instruction. The teaching comes more in form of example. In many cases, we both witness and suffer the absence of emotional intimacy in family or origin relationships growing up. Mostly because the people who are supposed to nurture the love they are giving us are instead falling victim to replicating their own inadequate relationship experiences with emotional intimacy again now with their children.
What ends up happening is a growing percentage of men and women reach middle-age with a less than adequate ability to form and sustain an emotionally intimate love relationship. Sure they fall in love, if they are open to the experience. It’s what they do after the chemistry hits that determines the health and longevity of the emotion Mother Nature (and earlier experiences in life) has cooked up for them. For too many middle-aged people, love life disappointments liter their love lives because, instead of an ability to be emotionally intimate, they’ve unconsciously learned to relate in love in unhealthy ways.
As an interpersonal psychoanalyst, interested in the healthy and unhealthy interpersonal relatedness of adults, I am professionally preoccupied with how I might be of service to those middle-aged adults who are recreating unhealthy love life experiences with little or no awareness as to why. The urgency of this need for treatment is regularly confirmed by the amount of suffering that occurs when love lives remain unhealthy over time. The hard part is navigating the defensiveness and home-grown efforts to remedy the situation which only make things worse. For example, keeping an emotional distance in love relationships to avoid getting hurt. How about, generating conflict as a way to avoid the emotional vulnerability involved in being in love. And of course there is always the complete avoidance of love relationships in order to feel safe, thinly disguising the underlying resignation about ever finding a healthy live relationship. Last but not least, is the creative but guaranteed misery that occurs when we try to change the person we are in love with, whether they like it or not. Such as enterprise is never successful, simply because only the individual herself or himself has the ability to change.
So where does this leave us as mental health professionals interested in helping those individuals struggling with unhealthy love lives? Imagine a psychotherapy focused primarily upon developing an individual’s ability to be emotionally intimate. What would such a psychotherapy look like, feel like? What is the proper training for a mental health professional interested in such a practice? And of course, what are the pitfalls, the problems with this kind of practice?
First and foremost, would be the therapist’s ability to form and sustain an emotionally intimate love relationship. If the psychotherapist’s ability in this regard is limited or distorted by inadequate personal experience, that’s something that would require fixing. The fixing is necessary to avoid the various problems that can occur when a therapist is not aware of his or her own personal hangups and how they can be imported into the psychotherapy of another person. Have you ever heard the old adage, “Never see a shrink who wasn’t shrunk.”
Moving on from there, the psychotherapeutic relationship would need to be re-interpreted as an emotionally intimate relationship. Opportunities to re-experience limitations in emotional intimacy in the therapeutic relationship, while making emotional corrections by co-creating a conscious, healthy, emotionally intimate interpersonal relationship experience, would be common occurrences in such a psychotherapy.
I can still remember my first training analyst, years ago, who was a classical Freudian, reacting with one emphatic word when she heard of my interest in becoming an interpersonal psychoanalyst interested in using intimate interactions with my patients to conduct a psychoanalysis: “INTIMACY!?” I believe we still have a ways to go….
Comments welcome. Share your experience.
Dr. Thomas Jordan, clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst, author of Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life. Love Life Consultations 212-875-0154 or drtomjordan@lovelifelearningcenter.com.
