Intimacy (What's That)

 Some may read that and say, "oooh! He said the "I" word". The more I think about this topic, the more that is how I feel about intimacy. It scares me. I have to wonder why and it all boils down to trust. I have a hard time trusting that my feelings are safe with another person. Therefore, I keep myself closed to even the one closest to me. I have fooled myself in the past few months since my wife and I remarried that I am achieving the intimacy level I have been looking to have with her. Sadly that is not the case. I am not even close to where I need to be with her, but am getting there.

I asked her the other day in preperation for this blog the following question, "Hey just so I don't get a bunch porn sites popping up when I put intimacy in the search engine, what would I type in to find out more about it?" Then she asks me a question in what sounded like a foreign language, "what type of intimacy are you looking to write about, emotional intimacy or sexual intimacy?" Baffled, I said, "I....didn't know there was a difference." She smiles in her thats cute sort of way and says, "of course you don't know", and begins to explain it to me. Which threw my whole outline for the subject out the window. However, it was very beneficial for me. The discussions that followed proved to be helpful in affirming I don't know the first thing about it. So I did some research and prayed about it.

In my prayers and discussions God revealed to me that achieving emotional intimacy with my wife is no different than prayer to Him. In my private moments with God I can be open, tearful, I can discuss my anxiety and fears, anger and frustrations, defeats and victories, proud moments and not so proud actions I may have taken that day. In doing so I am telling God who I am and how I feel about things. I trust Him (or as it was helped drawn out of me by my counselor, Do I even really trust Him?). With my wife I worry about telling her I am feeling a certain way without her getting hurt, my sexual issues may arise and I may worry about her feeling like I am not doing as good as I should be right now, I don't have to tell her exactly what is going on with me sexually but I do have to tell her I am struggling. I must share  the internal with her and quit showing an external mask of being ok. Which in turn creates a distance and I can't be fully present in my own home, with my own wife.

We as sexual addicts in particular are a very untrusting group of individuals. I know intimacy issues are not just for the addicted sexually folks, that a lot of people have intimacy issues for some reason or another. However, for us we tend to shut people out when it comes to be vulneable because lets be honest, if we were to expose ourselves and in an intimate exchange of communication we would have a harder time finding reason to act out. You can't run from something you put directly on the table. Therefore, from one addict to another, we tend to sabotage our own relationships for the sake of the addictive behavior. Conciously or subconciously at times we can not be exposed. We also have a very hard time thinking our way into positive living, which includes trust and vulnerability with our signifigant other because that is foreign country to us.

Now I will try to make my next point without rambling on and hopefully tie it up to the rest of the writing up till now. I began to inquire about what the link was between intimacy issues and sexual addiction. I found in some of my readings and recalling some stories in meetings that it is masturbation and fantasy life, which is a major block in emotional and sexual intimacy. Now keep in mind as I discuss this that I am having an issue with masturbation, which medically proven studies have shown have an adverse effect on memory. I sometimes forget conversations, days that I have had and very important points my wife has given me about who she is. Many conversations she has said, "don't you remember me saying.....?" No not really. Or it comes back after she says it. That in and of itself is an intimacy issue because she is being vulnerable and open with me, but my mind doesn't retain the information, which hurts her feelings, which in turn creates arguments, which makes me worry about having them, which keeps me closed, which creates an intimate block. Now with that being said, lets tie it up even closer, starting masturbation at an early age leads us to depend on ourselves for comfort. We end up using masturbation for sadness, anger, lonlieness, boredom, anxiety, financial troubles, tiredness, sexual release, hunger believe it or not. Basically anything we are feeling that we don't like feeling masturbation helps elieviate those issues. So we truly become more intimate with ourselves because it is ok to be vulnerable with ourselves because we get the support we need through masturbation. Therefore, we can't be as intimate with our spouse or even our God because we worry about him being disappointed in us. This is a proven problem in the world of a sex addict and as long as we are most intimate with ourselves we can't achieve the level of intimacy we need spiritually, emotionally or sexually.

I am by no means an expert on this issue (obviously). I am also not saying if we didn't masturbate or act out we would become instantly intimate. The question posed before us is this, what is it that keeps up closed off to being vulnerable sexually and emotionally to our signifigant others? It can be so many things to so many different people. However, in my journey on the road to a recovery lifestyle I am getting better at being more intimate with my wife and I use recovery tools and most importantly prayer to help me. You know what your intimacy issues are for the most part anyway, if not all of them. The question then becomes, do we want it? If so seek it, pray about it.

In conclusion, I will share a moment of my remarriage to my wife. We had at our ceremony what is called a cord ceremony. Three strands of Gold for God, purple for the man, and white representing the purity in the marriage of the woman. Our Pastor described this as a marriage trinity with God being the center of the marriage and the man and the woman loving eachother and God in an intimate way. It represented equality, closeness, and fairness. They were basically intimacy vows. I am not there yet but am working towards it.

Father in Heaven, we have spent years closed off and building walls around ourselves and not our relationships, that our protection has been for ourselves and not of our relationships, that our trust has been very warped by years of skeptisism, shame, remorse, regret, and feelings of inadequacy. We ask that you help us be us with the ones closest to us. Also Father that our relationship with you be more of what it should be like, rather than what we feel we are not entitled to with you. We pray for the healing of relationships and the rebuilding of trust both from us and too us. That our intimacy be what you designed it to be in our relationship to our loved ones. Father we pray this in the Precious name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

My prayers are with you. Jason.