The Key Ingredient To Fostering Intimacy (That Most Of Us Miss)

hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today on this channel we are talking about a term that I am really excited to be talking about intimacy is kind of The Guiding word in my relational life right now for the majority of my life I avoided intimacy like the plague it was probably the single scariest thing I could imagine having with another human being and after years of doing a lot of work in the attachment space I am finally at a point where having emotional

intimacy with the people I'm close to feels really exciting and like a goal that I want to be pursuing pretty much full time in my relational life lately so in this video I want to talk about some stuff that's come up for me on route to developing more intimate connections and some patterns I've started noticing around what seems to keep people away from intimacy even in situations where it's what they claim to want or in situations where it's genuinely what they do want so before we dive into all of that I first want to go

over the way that I personally Define intimacy so I Define intimacy as the act of being present with another person in their undefended state and allowing that person to be present with you in your undefended state so what this translates to is being known in so much as it's possible to be known by another human being so when you are interacting with them you're not hiding anything you're not trying to give them a certain impression about you that is not true you are allowing them to see you as you are in both your good and

your ugly parts and vice versa so I want to put that out there as the operational definition of intimacy for this video since that is the way that I personally Define it now I think there is a single tool that can allow us to get really quickly to the heart of intimacy in most interactions however it is a heavily underutilized tool in the society we live in and we're going to talk about why but before we get there I want to talk about what happens that keeps most of us out of intimacy see or stuck

in the realm of intimacy even when we want to have those deeper connections and to do that I'm going to refer to a model that's commonly used in the practice of authentic relating authentic relating has this model that they call the three levels of conversation so level one is the informational level we're just talking about kind of objective facts things that are happening we're not putting much of ourselves into the conversation at this level so even if you're talking about something that is related to you you're not really telling the other person any part of

your subjective experience of that thing they might ask you what did you do today and you can tell them I went to work I came home I made soup for dinner and I went to sleep right that's all informational even if it's personal information level two of relating is the personal level so this is when we start sharing some of our subjective feelings or emotions or thoughts about the information so what did you do today and how did you feel about it is a more personal question than what did you do today well I went

to work today and I was a little frustrated about this one project I'm working on it with my co-worker Brian and we don't always see eye to eye so that can be a little bit stressful and then I came home and I made soup for dinner I was checking out this new recipe from this one website that I really like and I think the person who runs the website is really good at meats and vegetables but not so great at soups so I wasn't super happy with the outcome but I was pretty happy that I

got to go to bed early tonight because I've been pretty exhausted for a while and it felt nice to have a night where I could finally catch up on sleep now we're on the personal level right you're actually understanding more of my own subjective feelings and thoughts about what's going on for me as I go through the day and for a lot of people this is about as deep as we ever go with our relationships I would almost start argue that most people live their entire lives not ever really taking it Beyond this level in

their interactions with even the people they're really close to but the third level the one where intimacy really starts to develop is the relational level on the relational level we are talking about what it's like to be having the direct experience that we are having in the moment we're having it what is it like to be me telling you about my day today yeah sitting here telling you about my day I noticed that my heartbeat starts to speed up when I think about my relationship with my co-worker Brian and I'm noticing myself feeling worried that

you're going to judge me and think that maybe I'm not contributing enough to that relationship or it's my fault that we're in conflict and I'm also kind of trying to find some ways to impress you I want you to think I'm a good cook I want you to think I have my life together I want you to think that I'm responsible and I'm distracting myself a little bit with those thoughts and sharing that with you now I feel a bit embarrassed and I'm noticing myself not wanting to make clear eye contact with you all of

that stuff all of the what is happening for me right now in this moment in relation to you is the real intimate stuff that's the stuff we normally never share most of us get pretty comfortable sharing our thoughts and feelings once we first filtered them quite a bit and found socially acceptable ways to share them but very few of us let people in on what's actually happening for us in the moment including how our experience of being with another person is having an impact on that present moment experience however this level the relational level of

conversation is where we build true intimacy because we start to understand not just who the person is and what goes through their mind but also what their real moment-to-moment experience of being alive and being alive in our presence is like for them and that's about as aligned as we can possibly be with another person in any given moment understanding what it's like to be them at that moment through their subjective lens that's a really deep form of seeing and being seen by someone and it's also a really really vulnerable way to be seen by someone

and because of that as well as for some other reasons we're going to get into a lot of us shy very naturally away from staying on that relational level especially when the stakes start getting high so when it comes to that relational form of relating this is something that personally I've practiced a lot in workshops between authentic relating radical honesty certain meditation practices I've done and in most not all but most of those cases the stakes have not been too high at least initially because when I first entered those environments in all cases I was

in a room full of people I didn't know who had no prior conceptions of me and so the truth about what it felt like for me to be with them when I would share with them was usually just something along the lines of oh my heart is beating quickly I'm noticing that I'm uncomfortable with people looking at me right now but because they were people who initially I didn't have a close pre-existing relationship with it didn't feel that vulnerable yet where it gets more vulnerable is let's say you're talking to to your partner and you're

in a conflict or you're talking to a family member and you're at a tense moment most of us will instantly and quickly Veer far away from the relational and even avoid a lot of the personal and what we'll do instead is try to stay on the informational level but a lot of the time what we're trying to do unconsciously is take the personal and relational and make it informational so if I'm in a partnership and I'm having a fight with my partner and I tell them you don't care about me that's an attempt at an

informational statement right I'm not in that statement I'm telling them something that I think is a fact about them but what am I subtly trying to weave into that probably something along the lines of I feel really neglected or lonely in our relationship lately and sharing that with you right now I feel terrified my heart is beating my hands are sweaty I have this story in my head that you're gonna think I'm too much that I'm overwhelming you and that you're going to abandon me relational present moment right it's really hard to say those two

things it's a lot easier to say you don't care about me like it's a fact and for most people the kind of Norm around conflict in our society is to keep things on the informational level so then we try to start loading up our informational statements with our personal subjective feelings and claiming that we're being objective and that's where things get really really murky and hard to resolve most relational problems can only really be solved at the relational level or at the least at the personal level but the problem the reason why so many people

have trouble dropping down to that relational level is because it requires a certain tool that is really difficult for a lot of us to access and this tool is the one that more so than anything else will allow us to quickly and effectively build intimacy with another person if we can learn to trust ourselves to use it and that tool is curiosity specifically curiosity that stems from a relatively undefended psychological space in ourselves this sounds simple it is one of the single hardest things a human being can do is to sit with another person and

be truly curious about the full range of their experience and open to whatever that brings up for us now a lot of us are very curious on the informational level maybe we're highly intellectual maybe curious is a word that we have been associating with ourselves from birth right maybe we're always Gathering facts trying to learn new things maybe even with other people we ask them hundreds of informational questions anytime we're in their presence and maybe we're also very interpersonally curious maybe we're used to asking people questions about what they think and feel about different things

and again that might be a trait that we've associated with ourselves for a very long time however to be relationally curious is a very rare thing and the reason it's rare to be relationally curious is because it means that if we are delving into someone's true moment-to-moment experience and that moment-to-moment experience for them includes their full unfiltered perceptions of us and what it's like to be with us in a given moment there's a really high potential there for something to arise that's going to feel painful what if there's something they don't like about us what

if there's a judgment they're making about us what if there's a fantasy we have about the way the other person thinks about us that it's going to turn out is untrue if we get their true unfiltered thoughts what if there's a fantasy we have about the other person and how we want them to be inside of our own minds that's going to get busted if they tell us what it's actually like to be them true relational curiosity is the absolute power tool of building intimacy however fostering relational curiosity requires us to be capable of a

being in an undefended state with another being present with another in their undefended state having the discernment to know when it's relatively safe to be in such a state with another person and having the self-protective skills to know how to take care of ourselves and tend to our own wounds if something painful comes up as a result of being in that state as well as how to draw boundaries if we go into that state with someone and it turns out maybe they weren't the safest person for us to do that with after all so what

seems simple and what might be simple on the informational and personal level is actually a very complex skill on the relational level and I believe this is why a lot of people do not have deep fulfilling intimate relationships because that level of curiosity and vulnerability and ability to tend to our wounds when something painful happens when we are vulnerable like that with someone so not having an attachment to the way that somebody is perceiving US requires high level emotional maturity very high level because you can try this and be Reckless at it sometimes what we

think is relational is actually just a projection and it requires a certain amount of emotional maturity to be able to stay with someone on the relational level and truly own our experience so if I'm sitting with you and I'm thinking a nasty thought about you and my first instinct is to tell you that nasty thought I'm having about you instead of pausing and going where is that coming from in me right what is my experience and why is my brain coming up with that thought and is there a more true more vulnerable experience I could

share in this moment that's actually about me and not the other and how do I get in touch with that those are the skills of safely operating this emotional power tool right I could probably talk for like 50 hours about that but for now I'm going to move on to why a lot of us don't have that sense of curiosity why it's so difficult for a lot of us to get into this state of curiosity on a relational level my budding hypothesis about this is that we live in a culture where a lot of connecting

has become about impressing each other we live in a social media infused world and I think that for a lot of people there is this sense of if I'm on a first date with someone I'm not just competing with like the three other people in town who are my age and single and out on the market I'm competing with everybody out there who has an Instagram account everybody out there who this person I'm sitting across from could possibly come into contact with and in the digital age that is a massive amount of people so what

happens we go into this kind of threatened State and when we're in a threatened State we're not in a state of curiosity right curiosity comes from being calm and relaxed and open and when we are in our minds going oh my God how do I make sure that they know that I am better than that person they follow on Instagram that I make as much money as that other person they make go on a date with that I'm a better conversationalist than their last three Tinder dates that I would make a good future partner or

that I would not make a good future partner and I hope they don't get too attached when we are in that state of defense and of trying to impress someone all we are really thinking about is our own self-image right what do I want to make known about me in this interaction how do I want them to perceive me and when we're in that threat State it's really hard to stay open and curious about the other because our attention is going to where our survival system thinks it needs to go which is on us and

how to present ourselves and I want to make it very clear I think this is a large scale social issue I think a lot of people are running around calling everybody a narcissist and at a certain point we just have to go I think we have a cultural problem here I think that the state of the world is leading many of us to be in a constant threat state where we are trying to impress people instead of be present with them however that presence and that curiosity is the very thing that allows us to Foster

relationships that actually feel meaningful and that last but if we are constantly trying to manage our own images in other people's minds which are culture heavily endorses at this point in history we're going to start developing internal fears about the emotions and the thoughts and the feelings we have that we judge to be shameful the fear of feeling shame can close us off to a lot of genuine deep authentic interactions that we could have with other people and so indirectly it keeps us away from intimacy I was reading a thread on Twitter today where someone

was saying why don't men ask more questions on dates and there is a whole bunch of discourse about this and I want to be clear I don't think that's it's a problem that's exclusive to men I think that on average there are differences in the way we socialize men and women that might mean this problem's a little bit more explicit to one gender than another but I think the problem runs deeper than that I think a lot of people are scared to get to that more intimate level with people because they're afraid of what they

might find out about themselves if they go there what if I find out something that hurts me and if I don't know how to process emotional pain and emotional hurt I'm going to try to avoid the whole situation and again we also don't live in a culture that teaches people to be present with pain and emotional hurt and so that's another tool that needs to get developed if we want to stay deeply relationally curious about people accepting that intentionally or unintentionally we will probably at some point in the intimacy process pump up against something that

hurts or that feels uncomfortable or that we don't want to look at and if we want true intimacy with another human being we're going to have to learn how to process feelings of discomfort and shame and hurt sometimes that's going to mean drawing a boundary with another person other times it's going to mean just facing the things in ourselves that we are really afraid to face and trusting ourselves to be able to take care of ourselves in that process but the problem is if we are avoiding all topics of intimate conversation that could bump us

up against something we feel ashamed about inside of ourselves we're going to end up avoiding a lot a lot of relational information and all of that stuff all of that present in the moment experience that when we are in relationship we end up keeping to ourselves and our partners or our family members or our friends end up keeping to themselves that's the stuff that eventually makes you feel really lonely inside of close relationships right like there's a whole world of experiences and emotions that I'm having in relation to this other and they have no idea

and maybe I have no idea of the whole world of experiences that they're having in relation to me and so getting to that level where we can use our discernment to figure out who is it reasonably safe for me to be in that undefended state with and then when I'm there how do I truly stay present with another person how do I truly tolerate the difficult emotions that might come up all of this is a process and in future videos we're going to talk about how to start working this process so that we can get

into the basement of our own psyches and figure out how to deal with what comes up when we're down there so that we can start inviting other safe people who we trust into the basement with us and then it doesn't feel as lonely down there and then we actually have real authentic intimate connections with people and the first step in this process is developing self-intimacy so figuring out which parts of ourselves we're afraid to look at that we keep hidden from ourselves that we have shoved away in a drawer in the basement and thrown away

the key to right self-intimacy has to proceed interpersonal intimacy and so later this week we're going to talk about what self-intimacy looks like and how you can begin developing it so that you understand what's in that basement that you eventually can share with someone else as well as what's on the top floor that's flooded with sunlight right the entire psychological house has to come into play and for some people one part is going to be easier than the others some people have all of their shame and deepest darkest secrets in their basement other people like

to lead with the basement and what they're actually a little bit ashamed of is the fact that they have like three sun rooms in the back that they don't really tell anybody about because maybe those people have a fear that if people knew I were resourced and could keep myself okay they would abandon me so whatever it is that we're afraid of other people learning about us is exactly directly what we need to confront in order to develop intimacy again with the trust that the people were doing this with will be able to treat us

tenderly in that process and vice versa and this eventually requires us eradicating to a reasonable extent the fear of spontaneous feelings this is again something we're going to talk about at length in a future video one of the main differences between those who air more secure on the attachment spectrum and those who are more insecure is that those who have secure Tendencies are not particularly afraid of feeling things spontaneously and this allows for a lot more curiosity in most interactions because if I go into an interaction knowing if my feelings get hurt I still have

a relatively stable sense of self-esteem I have other people who love me I know how to self-soothe myself through difficult emotions so I can go in with a lot of curiosity and if it turns out someone says something hurtful to me or I find out something I don't like I trust myself to be able to deal with that feeling of pain of my pride being wounded did whatever it is and recover from it in a relatively resilient way securely attached people tend to be the most psychologically resilient people because there's no specific range of emotions

that they are hiding from themselves when you are insecurely attached or when you have toxic shame or when you have unresolved trauma in some form spontaneous feelings are terrifying more often than not which is why a lot of the time you see a lot of kind of rigid behavior from people across the insecure attachment Spectrum whether it is those on the anxious side of the spectrum trying to control other people's responses to them or try to get other people to feel a certain way about them or perceive them a certain way or those on the

avoidant side of the spectrum getting really rigid in their behaviors and in their routines and the things that they do to self-regulate both of those things are ways of avoiding spontaneous feelings avoiding the feeling of hurt avoiding the feeling of rejection avoiding the feeling of Shame if you don't know how to integrate those emotions when they show up you're going to spend a lot of your life frantically trying to avoid ever encountering them and that's going to keep you away from fostering true intimacy with another human being but where we get to that really good

stuff is when we're able to exist in a space of undefended relational curiosity with another person when much of the time when we're relating with them we can talk openly about what it's like to be ourselves in this exact moment the question how are you doing takes on a completely different form when you drop it from the informational to the relational level it might drop it from I'm feeling okay A little tired today to who I have been in a kind of dissociated state all day and I don't know why and as I'm talking to

you I'm having a hard time honestly staying completely present with you I'm really somewhere else in my mind and body right now and that opens the door for the other person to be curious with you about you right intimacy requires it to work both ways so I can receive what it's like for you to be you and also I can tell you what it's like for me to be me and that's how we end up building those really deep really honest connections and the more we can practice this over the course of our lives with

the people we're close to the more we grow those connections into incredibly powerful tools that we can use to understand not just ourselves and not just the other but humanity and the nature of Being Human at large every person's direct experience of being alive is a gold mine of information about The Human Condition that so few of us ever access in a direct way because we're all just afraid of being honest but the more honest we all get the more we also realize it's not all that different for each of us a lot of us

are having very surprisingly similar experiences of Being Human we just don't know it because we're too focused on the impression management and so few of us have ever really learned how to relate on that deeper level but it's a wonderful tool to start building and we're going to talk a lot more about how to do it all right that is all I have to say for today on intimacy what tends to keep us away from it as well as what it takes to really drop down to that level where we're able to connect on a

very direct human to human level with another person if you have any questions comments thoughts experiences you want to share please leave them in the comments section of this video as always I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and your inner children and I will see you back here again really soon thank you