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Relationships
Challenges of Emotional Intimacy
Four levels of messiness.
Posted July 16, 2024 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer
Only 10% of the hundreds of couples I’ve treated in Couples Counseling were willing and able to develop emotional intimacy. Most people find it to be too messy. One operational definition of emotional intimacy might be the unity created by two committed and unique individuals. The messy challenge is to honor your individuality while attending to the couple's unity. Let’s look at four levels of messiness and how to clean them up.
The First Mess—This is the mess of too much unity. Either one or both people are sacrificing their individuality. One indication that this is occurring is that there are no complaints, problems, or conflicts, all in the name of “Aren’t we so compatible and happy?” But someone’s individuality is being betrayed. The driving emotional energy is typically someone’s abandonment fear.
The Clean- up
1) Someone needs to feel the loss of self and complain.
2) That person can become more honest by searching for and identifying what they truly love, desire, believe, and value.
3) The person getting closer to themselves can reassure the partner that the goal is to access more of themselves and bring more to the relationship.
4) The partner must be clear about their fear and express that non-blamefully. Getting professional support for this tender shift in the relationship may be helpful. Learning to welcome one another’s uniqueness will take practice.
The Second Mess—Too much individuality. In the extreme, both people are pretty content to honor their individual needs, beliefs, work, and values. They can also declare, “How happy we are in a relationship without real problems.” Yes, problem-free and unity-free. The driving emotional energy is typically the fear of being consumed by the other.
The Clean-up
1) Be honest about the loss of unity and learn to desire being accompanied by the other emotionally, physically, and intellectually.
2) Learn to make requests that meet emotional needs. Such requests include being heard, held, encouraged, valued, chosen, and understood.
3) Learn to receive requests by saying “Yes,” “No,” or “I want to negotiate,” and make no assessments or criticisms of requests.
4) Be honest about feeling consumed or experiencing the loss of personal space, and employ boundaries that support your individual interests without walling off your partner.
The Third Mess—Communication breakdowns. Conversations collapse primarily because people don't know the problem and who has it. The key is to eliminate blame. That can be done by defining the problem as someone’s unmet need. The person with the problem is often the person starting a conversation or the person feeling angry, hurt, or upset.
The Clean-up
1) Practice problem ownership. If you have an unmet need, describe it with the emotions it created. Make a request in behavioral terms, i.e., not “I want you to be more sensitive,” but rather, “I want you to hug me more.”
2) Put it all together, “I heard you tell me you were free to have dinner with our friends Jim and Marie. And on the dinner day, you say you’re going to work. I feel angry and dismissed. Unless there’s an emergency at work, I request that you honor our plans.”
3) The response might sound like, “Yes, I’m willing to do that, and emergencies don’t arise too often.”
The Fourth Mess—Betrayal. An old definition of betrayal is "to mislead or deceive." We will inevitably feel misled or deceived by our partners in a committed relationship. Betrayal doesn’t have to have the magnitude of a ten-year affair. Betrayal shows up in four nuanced ways. You will betray your partner, you will betray yourself, your partner will betray you, and your partner will betray him or herself. Each of you betraying yourselves shows up as you make choices incongruent with your values, beliefs, and desires. Sometimes, it happens as a negotiated outcome, and sometimes, the need to please can have you compromising what’s truly important to you. There are many possible acts of misleading the other person: “I thought you were fine raising the children Episcopalian!” “Didn’t you say you never wanted to live in a big city?” “I thought for sure that we were both committed to our personal growth,” and “I was under the impression that money would never have utmost importance in your life.”
The Clean up
1) Accept that a good relationship will not be immune to betrayal.
2) If you’re the victim, be clear about how the betrayal makes you feel and interrupt any self-righteousness that has you allegedly above being a perpetrator of betrayal.
3) As a victim, decide what you need to heal the violation of trust. Also, check to see if the current betrayal has activated the emotional energy of an earlier betrayal. If it has, you may need therapeutic support.
4) If you’re the perpetrator, make amends, which is an apology and a commitment not to reproduce the betrayal. Also, decide whether or not you betrayed yourself, maybe one of your values, by betraying your partner. Check if you may have reproduced a family legacy of perpetrating this kind of betrayal.
5) If healing the impact of the betrayal seems unmanageable, seek professional help.
Clean-ups are not about reaching a pristine, sanitized relationship. They are an opportunity to learn and remain an apprentice of emotional intimacy. If you’re not at some new edge of growth related to emotional intimacy, you’re not being intimate.
To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
