Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (18 page)

Understanding emotional gridlock allows you and your partner to co-evolve and leap-frog together toward personal growth. Resolving sexual desire problems stretches your Four Points of Balance.

A high level of differentiation—your Four Points of Balance—controls the depth of your desire, intimacy, sexuality, and love.

I
f there’s an area of marriage as misunderstood as sexual desire, it has to be intimacy. Emotional intimacy plays an amazing role in stabilizing love relationships. However, intimacy creates stability in long-term relationships in ways you never imagined. How this works will seem as striking as anything you’ve read thus far.

Intimacy is a complex system, just like sexual desire. It is another drive-wheel of marriage’s people-growing machinery. Intimacy and sexual desire push you to develop a more solid flexible self. The strengthened Four Points of Balance you gain by properly handling intimacy problems creates long-term stability and lasting sexual desire in love relationships.

Couples who seek my help have no knowledge of this miracle. For instance, Sharon and Thomas had no notion that their frustration, angst, and heartache were elements that would help them build a stronger relationship with greater intimacy. All they saw was a growing gulf between them that could end their marriage.

Sharon and Thomas illustrate how you can be the high desire partner for one thing and the low desire partner for something else. Sharon was the HDP for intimacy and the LDP for sex. Thomas was the LDP for intimacy and the HDP for sex.

Sharon complained Thomas never talked to her about their relationship. He never shared his feelings or asked her about hers. She felt he never listened to her and wasn’t supportive about troubles at her job. She didn’t feel seen or heard by Thomas. Sharon said she often felt invisible.

Thomas said he was okay with talking, but Sharon was always trying to get into his head. She always wanted to know what he was thinking and feeling. Besides, Thomas felt Sharon had no business acting like some Intimacy Queen because she never wanted to have sex. He summed up the situation this way: “Here’s what it boils down to, Doctor. Sharon doesn’t want to screw, and I don’t want to talk.”

“You don’t want Sharon in your head, and she doesn’t want you in her body?”

Thomas smiled. “That’s right.”

I turned to Sharon. “Are you familiar with Thomas’s wife? Do you happen to know if and why she doesn’t want sex?”

Sharon was equally emphatic. “I don’t feel seen. I don’t feel heard. I feel like I don’t exist for him. Why would I want to have sex with him?!”

“You mean you don’t feel like you exist
within
him?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.” Sharon stopped and thought about the difference. She immediately mapped out that I knew what she was saying, and calmed down. “I’m
not
in his mind. He never thinks about me—even when he’s with me. His mind is always somewhere else. Sometimes I think he does that on purpose. I feel like he doesn’t accept me. I’m unimportant to him. It’s like I don’t exist.”

Thomas snarled, “You’re hung up about sex.”

Sharon flared, “You have problems with intimacy.”

After a moment I asked Sharon, “Do you think Thomas shows good judgment or bad judgment in not listening to you?”

“
Bad
judgment.” Her response was instantaneous and emphatic.

“Then why would you take your husband’s bad judgment personally?”

“I … don’t know … I just feel like I don’t exist for him.”

“Are you going to cease to exist every time Thomas has bad judgment? He has a bad day, and poof, you disappear?”

Sharon frowned. “… I never looked at it that way … I don’t know … I want him to understand me. I need to know I’m important to him.”

Thomas spoke up. “I get defensive when I hear Sharon talk about me never thinking about her, “I’m
always
thinking about her: Is what I’m doing going to make Sharon mad? Or will she be mad at what I’m not doing? Am I going to come up short again?” He was embarrassed revealing that he often worried about how Sharon felt about him.

“How come you never share this with me? I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“I feel like I’m not allowed to have a private thought. Everything I’m feeling and thinking I’m supposed to report to you.”

As in many couples, Sharon pressured Thomas for intimacy because she needed a positive reflected sense of self, and talking with Thomas about her feelings gave it to her. It calmed her anxieties and insecurities. Sharon said she wanted intimacy, but she really wanted validation, empathy, and acceptance. She regulated her anxiety through Thomas.

In this way, actually, Sharon was much like Thomas. Thomas got his positive reflected sense of self from Sharon through sex. He pressured Sharon for sex the same way she pressured him to share his feelings. Thomas said he wanted to be physically intimate and make love to his wife, but what he really wanted was tension release and reassurance he was desirable and a good lover.

Sharon talked a lot about the importance of “being emotionally open.” But what she really wanted was to feel good about herself by mapping Thomas’s mind. Her insecurities took over when he wouldn’t share his thoughts. Sometimes she worried about what he was hiding from her. She was infuriated that he wanted to keep her out. She didn’t like seeing
herself as someone who needed to be fended off. That’s what she saw when she looked at herself through his eyes.

When Sharon and Thomas talked about their feelings, she was more willing to have sex. Her reflected sense of self felt understood, accepted, and validated. Sharon called this “feeling taken in” (in the positive sense). When she felt this, she had more sexual desire. Sharon wasn’t unique this way. This is one way intimacy can impact your sexual desire.

It wasn’t surprising Sharon was more sexually receptive if they were intimate before they started. Nor that Thomas fought Sharon from probing his mind. They were a typical couple, gridlocked over intimacy and sex. To resolve their situation they needed a new picture of intimacy and how it operates.

When I started studying emotional gridlock in the 1980s, I had to coin two other terms:
other-validated intimacy
and
self-validated intimacy
. I needed these terms, together with
emotional gridlock
, to describe what I saw clients going through. Other-validated intimacy and self-validated intimacy are not (just) theoretical constructs. They are two kinds of intimacy, two parts of one amazing process.

Like most people, you probably focus on
other
-validated intimacy. My exhaustive review of professional literature on intimacy revealed that therapists invariably focus on other-validated intimacy, too.
⁹⁸
Other-validated intimacy is our first experience of intimacy as children. Other-validated intimacy involves one partner disclosing feelings, perceptions, doubts, fears, and inner truths, and the other partner (a) accepting, validating, and empathizing, and/or (b) disclosing in kind. Other-validated intimacy hinges on reciprocity. The listener is supposed to reciprocate by self-disclosing or just validating, both of which shore up the speaker’s reflected sense of self. When you think of intimacy, this is what you probably envision.

When people say they want deep and profound intimacy, they usually envision a bottomless pool of unconditional positive regard, trust, security and acceptance—in other words, other-validated intimacy. When Sharon complained of lack of intimacy with Thomas, other-validated intimacy was what she wanted. She wanted to talk about her feelings, and Thomas was supposed to reciprocate by validating her and making disclosures of his own.

Sharon openly stated that she wanted “emotional support.” But what she really wanted was an emotional fusion of selfhood using borrowed functioning. Other-validated intimacy appeals to your reflected sense of self. But as you’ll see, self-validated intimacy hinges on having a solid flexible self.

The distinction between other-validated intimacy and self-validated intimacy aligns with how your brain is organized. Different cells are involved in making basic distinctions between “self” and “other” in the most archaic parts of your brain.
⁹⁹
Research indicates mapping out other people’s mind involves different locations in different brain lobes (with some overlap) than mapping your own. These differences in sensory processing and complex cognition further suggest that mapping someone by developing a model of her mind involves different cognitive processes than imagining yourself in her place (“simulation”).
¹⁰⁰

The “self-oriented” and “other-oriented” parts of your brain involved in mind-mapping others and yourself also play a critical role in intimacy. You take in how much your partner is truly confronting and disclosing himself, as well as the level of your own self-confrontation and self-disclosure. Both dramatically impact how intense intimacy feels. Other-validated intimacy can’t exist without mapping your partner’s mind and assessing his actual empathy, validation, and acceptance of you. Likewise, self-validated intimacy couldn’t exist if you couldn’t map your own mental states.

Here’s a hard thing to get straight in your mind:
Being intimate with your partner doesn’t mean you get the response you want
. Granted, we all
want to be accepted, and we don’t want to feel rejected. We all want to feel safe and secure. But relationships that rely on other-validated intimacy go downhill when either partner has a bad day. Marriage is an interdependent relationship; its resilience lies in both partners’ abilities to function independently. If marriage over the millennia relied on other-validated intimacy, fortitude would not be a dominant human characteristic.

Intimacy is an interpersonal process, involving confronting yourself and disclosing yourself in your partner’s presence.
Intimacy involves mapping your own mind in front of your partner, and letting your partner map your mind, too
. Sometimes your partner accepts and validates you, and sometimes she doesn’t.

Unfortunately, intimacy is often not like mother’s milk. Intimacy can be hard to digest and leave you choking and gasping. In moments when you are open, revealed, and exposed, your partner might offer you empathy, validation, acceptance, and support—or look bored, make a hostile remark, or say nothing at all.

When your partner doesn’t accept or validate you,
but you can validate and calm yourself
you experience
self
-validated intimacy. Self-validated intimacy generally emerges later in life, often as a matter of necessity. It is the bedrock of love relationships.
¹⁰¹

Self-validated intimacy hinges on your Four Points of Balance. It requires Grounded Responding and Meaningful Endurance when your partner doesn’t accept what you say, openly criticizes you, or doesn’t pay attention to you. Other-validated intimacy revolves around your reflected sense of self.

Dating couples and newlyweds thrive on other-validated intimacy. Most people seek intimacy for a sense of closeness, togetherness,
we
ness. Sharon wanted to feel oneness with Thomas, with no boundaries between them.

Unfortunately, long-term relationships require
self
-validated intimacy. Marriage operates in ways that stretch you. That’s why intimacy
often doesn’t feel good. Intimacy is not designed to make you feel one particular way; it’s designed to make you grow. This happens in a variety of ways.

First off, other-validated intimacy—the intimacy that supports your reflected sense of self—is definitely time-limited in marriage. This is caused by the process of elimination. Eventually you have to talk about things you know your partner won’t like. He or she won’t validate you when you bring up topics that make him or her anxious or angry. At this inevitable point, other-validated intimacy stops, and emotional gridlock sets in.