Emotional Self-Intimacy: What It Is And How To Foster It

hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here on this channel lately we've been talking about the concept of intimacy so what intimate connections are what it means to be intimate with another human being and today we're going to talk about what I believe is the biggest block for most people when it comes to forming those truly deep intimate connections with other people which is that we lack self-intimacy so what is self-intimacy the definition of this is actually pretty simple I Define it the exact same

way that I Define interpersonal intimacy just turn towards the self so in the video that I released last week where we talked about intimacy with other people I defined intimacy as the act of being present with another person in their undefended state and today we're going to talk about self-intimacy as the act of being present with yourself in your own undefended State many of us from the time we were very young far before we had a choice in the matter learn to distort our own emotional and intellectual experiences to give ourselves a view of ourselves

that was adaptive for us at a certain point in time but that doesn't really reflect the entirety of what we think and feel and so this video is going to be about how to get to the core and learn to be present with yourself in those places where you have historically hidden yourself from knowing yourself because from a young age there may have been parts of your personality or your natural inclinations that were threatening to your ability to connect with other people and this is a topic that many of the greats in the psychology space

have tackled time and time again as this field goes on the ways in which we abandon or disconnect from ourselves in order to stay in connection with other people and the Bold thesis of this video is that the way to stay in the most deep and pervasive connection possible with another person is to First learn to stay in that type of connection with yourself and then invite other people into that while allowing the same type of presence and acceptance for what they bring to you so in the last video I used the authentic relating model

of the three levels of conversation to go over some of the ways that we might think about building intimacy that don't really get us all the way there so as a quick recap that model suggests that the three levels of conversation are the informational level where we're talking about facts and things that are happening that are kind of objective and then the personal level where we're talking about what we feel and think about those objective facts and then there's the relational level and in my last video I made the argument that this is where we

really Foster true intimacy with another person which is sharing with them what our experience in the present moment is like as well as receiving with true deep undefended curiosity what it is like to be them in the present moment which is often a lot easier than it sounds because our natural inclination is to distort even our own experience of the present moment so that we Don don't kind of bump into any sharp edges in our inner experience and today we're going to talk about how this same model can apply to our self-relationship so there are

the things that we know to be kind of objective facts about ourselves right this is how we know ourselves on the informational level I am X years old I have family members who have these names I live in this city I work this job I have these Hobbies or these communities that I'm a part of right these are all facts things that we know about ourselves to be true that anyone could observe us living and clearly see are true and then there is the personal level and this is the level that I believe most of

us are most comfortable knowing ourselves on this is a level where I would argue that our ego stories live and I want to be clear when I use that phrase that when I say ego stories I don't necessarily mean that as a negative thing ego stories is just the term I'm going to use in this video to define the ways in which we think about ourselves that could be things like a sense of superiority over other people but it could just be things like I am a good friend I am an intelligent curious person I

have this type of Personality or I enjoy this type of work or these types of events or these types of people right we all have these kind of broad brush Strokes that we use to define ourselves because it is an absolute need to have some sort of consistent narrative about who we are everyone has this it's a good thing to have without it we would be kind of lost in adrift and it would be a lot harder to make decisions day to day as well as overall however where true intimacy with ourselves gets formed is

when we drop it down One More Level because the authentic relating model is an interpersonal model I'm going to change this one a bit and I would say when we're looking at the self-relationship I would change the word relational to the word experiential so the deepest way that I can possibly know myself is to be present with myself on a moment-to-moment basis and develop a consistent awareness of what it is like to be me in every moment so if I'm feeling something in a moment that I don't understand can I stay present with that can

I stay present with it even if the feeling is threatening to the idea that I have about myself on a personal level can I stay with that feeling can I stay with that authentic experience of the moment even if it's threatening to me on an interpersonal level what if I'm feeling angry in a situation where I believe a nice person like me wouldn't be angry about this or wouldn't feel upset about this can I stay with the feeling of sadness and disappointment when the story I have about something is I'm really excited about this thing

and it's gonna go well how present am I able to stay with myself in the moments where my direct felt experience conflicts with the story that I have about myself on a personal level or the story that I have about something outside of me this is so much easier said than done because normally when our felt experience conflicts with the story that we have about something most of us are prone to automatically without even taking the time to think about it distorting either our experience so telling ourselves I must not really be feeling this I

must just be wrong about what I'm feeling or experiencing or trying to change the external experience so that our internal experience will change as well and in the process losing sight of a lot of valuable information that we can only really understand through accepting and staying present with both the situation we're in exactly as it is and our felt experience of that situation exactly as it is so when it comes to understanding and really knowing ourselves I like to think of it as a science experiment so I had this professor when I was doing my

master of science degree who used to say once you have a really good hypothesis one that you can really sink your teeth into your main goal should become finding evidence to prove your hypothesis wrong right this is how we stay honest in adhering to the scientific method we don't just look for evidence that confirms our points of view we look for evidence that disconfirms it and the interesting thing that I started learning was that the process of looking for counter evidence in any area of life doesn't only serve to prove or disprove a certain hypothesis

often where it's most useful is it adds incredible depth and Nuance to the hypotheses that we form so maybe your overall hypothesis is correct however you learn a whole bunch about in which contexts it is correct or incorrect and the same is true when we apply that same sort of scrutiny to the way that we experience ourselves I am a kind person might be true in 95 of context and it might be untrue in five percent and those five percent of contacts might actually be the times where it's more important to be firm than it

is to be kind to be self-protective than it is to be kind to be assertive than it is to be kind however if I'm trying to make one broad stroke cover every area of my life I'm going to miss a lot of nuance in the process about in which context I show up in which ways so the process of developing really deep embodied self-intimacy is the process of learning to be present enough with our moment-to-moment experience of ourselves to find counter evidence for these hypotheses we have about ourselves or about other people and the way

we exist in relation to them and be willing to both challenge our hypotheses because the way that we're showing up or the way that we're existing in the world is highly likely to change over time as well as find Nuance within those hypotheses maybe I'm an intelligent and curious person and there are areas where I feel very closed off where I don't want to learn more where I actively resist taking in new information and in those cases what's going on what can I learn about my resistance in that situation and maybe what it's protecting me

from the more we're able to get curious about what's happening for us moment to moment and incorporate New pieces of nuanced information about ourselves the better we get to know ourselves and the more we're able to be really precise about where things do and don't apply so in a nutshell what the process of building self-intimacy is is the process of lessening our resistance to our own inner experience and this requires us to do a deep dive into how it is that we usually do that how is it possible that we tend to avoid these unpleasant

uncomfortable emotions that we don't want to feel so I think of this as the process of finding your own hiding places the places where over the course of your life you have hidden your authentic experience from yourself somewhere inside of yourself there is a line in the song Happiness by Taylor Swift where she's talking about a relationship and she goes I showed you all my hiding spots and I remember listening to that and like getting chill bills thinking about what a beautiful metaphor that is for intimacy and in this case in this process we're going

to be learning to show ourselves all of our own hiding spots where do we usually go when we have an emotion or an experience that we don't want to show the rest of the world and that we don't even want to show ourselves where do we hide that inside of ourselves and the first thing we want to get really comfortable with doing is just noticing the moments in which we feel desperate to change State as well as what we're inclined to do in order to change our state so what do I mean by that I

mean let's say you're having a moment where you are feeling a very strong very overwhelming feeling that you do not want to feel what is your tendency to do to get rid of that feeling some of us try to dissociate from it we might reach to overeating or drinking or doing some sort of compulsive behavior that we know is going to change the way we're experiencing our own physiology right this thing is happening I don't want to feel the way I feel about it happening so I'm going to try to change the way I feel

so that I can tolerate it and fit myself inside of it other people might immediately move to try to change the external situation so that they don't have to encounter the uncomfortable feeling that the current situation brings up in them so let's say my partner isn't texting me back quickly enough so I'm going to lash out and insult their character and try to get them to change their behavior so that I don't have to be present with that feeling of sadness and rejection and the goal here is just to be present and notice when we

are wanting to do this when we are badly wanting to change the experience we are having and pay particular attention to when you're experiencing a feeling that is recurring you might notice the more that you're staying on the page with yourself and staying present with yourself that there are patterns of certain emotions that you instantly want to disconnect from maybe it's anger maybe it's grief maybe it's abandonment maybe it's rejection maybe it's embarrassment and humiliation this is the process of finding your own hiding places when you feel these things that you systematically do not want

to feel do not want to experience do not want to look at where do you go to avoid them do you turn to a substance do you turn to manipulation where do you go to hide those feelings inside of but I want to be clear here we're not playing a game of hide and seek this isn't about finding your coping mechanism pointing at it going you're bad come out of hiding this is a game of sardines so when I was a kid at sardines was my favorite game it's essentially exactly like hide and seek but

when someone finds you they hide with you and then the next person comes and when they find the two of you they hide with you as well and this happens until everybody has found the original person who went to hide and they're all sitting in the hiding place together and I thought of this game the other day and was like that is a beautiful metaphor for intimacy someone is hiding they're trying to Shield themselves from the world in some way and someone comes and finds them and sits with them and gets to know their hiding

place and gets familiar with it instead of judging it or trying to bring them out of it and so this is the process of finding the parts of yourself that you normally hide and instead of trying to change those parts or yell at them or tell them they're wrong just sitting inside of that Hiding Place with them and going why are you here in very tangible terms if I'm angry and I notice a pattern of overeating or drinking or shutting down and hiding from the world when I'm angry instead of yelling at myself and telling

myself to stop all those things what if I sat down with the part of myself well doing that activity that was choosing to do it and just asked it some questions hey what would you be feeling right now if you weren't feeling this relief because you just picked up a chocolate bar or a beer what would you be doing right now what would you be feeling if you were continuing to engage with this situation instead of withdrawing and sitting in your room and there's nothing wrong with the fact that this is what you're doing I'm

just curious what is it that you're avoiding and can I hear a little bit more about that and then the next time it happens once again what is it you're avoiding and can I hear a little bit more about that is there more is there more is there more I have found over the course of my life that the longer you sit with a really deep really pervasive problem and the more you really get to know it in a non-judgmental way the more the solutions that you actually need begin to naturally Blossom out of that

when we try to strong-arm our own behaviors and just get ourselves to stop doing what we don't want to do or stop feeling what we don't want to feel most of the time we just create a rebound effect where we abstain from certain feelings or certain behaviors for a little bit of time and then it just comes back two times as strong later but this process of just being willing to get to know our own problems our own avoidance tactics our own desperation in a really deep embodied patient way is the process of building a

sense of intimacy and trust with ourselves think about the people you don't trust to help you with your problems so I used to be the absolute worst person in the world when it came to taking advice and to be honest I'm still not great at it but the reason I was so terrible at taking advice was because I would not let people in on the full range of my problem I would tell them the surface level I would tell them the tip of the iceberg then people would start trying to give me advice and I

would just be like these people are stupid and don't know anything and the truth was they didn't know anything because I had not given them the entire range of the problem and then a couple of weeks ago I went to this workshop and we were doing this exercise where you're just explaining to someone else a challenge or a struggle you're going through and all they do is sit there and listen and ask you the odd open-ended follow-up question so all they are doing is gathering information on your problem and then more information and then more

information and then at the end of the exercise the instructor encouraged us to check in with ourselves and ask whether we wanted advice from the other person about the problem or not and if we did to just ask them hey do you have any advice for me and as soon as she said that I was like well I'm not going to ask for advice I hate advice I never want advice and then I really looked at the other person and went they know a lot about this problem I've really really been honest with them about

all of these different components and I think that actually knowing all of that they might have valuable advice to give and I was so surprised to find that the answer in my body to do you want advice was yes and I think that a lot of the time this is a problem we face within ourselves we don't gather enough information about our own problems before we shame ourselves for the way that we're approaching them before we get mad at ourselves for the coping mechanisms we're using to move through them before we really deeply understand what

it is that is leading us to have these problems or to be in these particular states in the first place we just see a part of ourselves that doesn't match up with the story we like to tell about ourselves so maybe I like to tell myself I'm super motivated all the time and then one week I'm feeling down I'm feeling dysregulated and instead of being present with myself and figuring out why that is I want to stick to that story of I am super productive all the time so I force myself to behave in a

way that is inauthentic and going against my energy and to shove my natural feelings aside in order to get work done and stay motivated and keep that particular idea of myself alive when in reality I'm creating this pattern of suffering for myself because I'm denying the actual root of the problem that I have not been present enough with myself to figure out what was it that threw me off this week what was it that was making me feel dejected and unmotivated and down and depressed and if I don't know that it's highly likely to crop

up again and again and again until I find a way to get curious about the problem so in the video about interpersonal intimacy we talk about relational curiosity as the key to fostering interpersonal intimacy and with self-intimacy the key here is experiential curiosity that sense of what is going on for me right now and even if I don't like it even if it conflicts with the story I have about myself or the hypothesis about who I am that I'm constantly trying to prove right how can I nonetheless be curious and sit with that experience and

ask questions to that experience and trust that my body in this moment knows something that is important for me to know even if I don't like it and don't want it to be true and to trust that there is a wisdom to my body to my emotions and to the things that they pick up on that if integrated is going to bring me to a place where overall I function in a better more capable way even if it means I don't feel good all of the time a lot of us are very quick to detach

from any feeling we have that is not the feeling we want to have I want to feel happy and excited about this relationship so if my partner does something that I don't like that I feel uncomfortable about I might be really quick to go how do I just spin this in my mind so it's a positive not a negative thing and so I don't have to bring it up and so I don't have to risk the potential for a conflict or a rupture to occur but maybe in reality that conflict or that rupture has to

occur maybe it would be much healthier for the relationship in the long run for us to see each other in that way and for them to understand what I do and don't need and want and like and vice versa maybe I've been working towards a certain end goal for a while and I arrive there and expect to feel phenomenal and instead I feel kind of empty and disappointed and almost like this letdown of energy that I wasn't expecting so what do I do do I fake the happiness do I tell myself I'm insane and I

must be happy or do I listen to that feeling and do I learn something maybe I learned that it's actually the progress and the moving towards goals that I enjoy and that the end point actually isn't the point that feels exciting to me in which case I can integrate that information and I can learn to set up my life in such a way that I'm consistently working towards something I feel exciting without the expectation that arriving there is going to be the part that is phenomenal and I can learn to appreciate what I authentically do

appreciate which is the process so overall this entire process requires us to get really in touch with our authentic yeses and no's so the parts of our experience that feel like a full-bodied yes I want this and the parts of our experience that feel like a full-bodied no this is a boundary or a limit for me a strong yes is the energy of being turned on sexually or emotionally physically being present engaged curious about where we are and what's going on around us in an undefended way we're not scared of what we're going to find

we are are genuinely curious about what's going to happen if we pursue a given path the energy of no often comes up for us in the form of anger grief resentment disgust even shame in healthy Doses and this is our body telling us this is not for me there's something about this I don't like I need to set a boundary around and once that boundary gets set I can step more fully back into my Yes Energy because I know where the healthy limits around that energy exist and I think that for a lot of us

where we start feeling kind of dead inside is when we are not aware of where our nose lie and so the parts of ourselves that normally come online that get excited and turned on by the experience of being alive stop trusting ourselves because we don't know where the end of that experience will be knowing our boundaries is crucial to trusting ourselves to experience happiness excitement and joy if we don't have one we're just gonna get scared and not allow ourselves to have the other right there is a humongous wealth of things we can learn about

ourselves when we are willing to stay present with ourselves through those very difficult and uncomfortable moments and that's why the process of self-intimacy is a never-ending process just like the process of forming intimacy with another person because if you are out in the world living your life having new experiences you are going to be feeling new things all of the time and those new things are always going to be struggling to find a place within the ecosystem of who you are and that ecosystem is always going to be shifting and changing and growing and so

you are never going to be done the process of getting to know yourself and getting to foster a sense of deep non-judgmental undefended intimacy with yourself but the cool thing is that once you learn to go to those places inside of yourself that you've always been afraid of that you've always hid yourself from you've always kind of had this felt sense of I will die if I look at that thing and once you learn that you can look at that thing and you can survive it you can keep breathing through it the way you live

your entire life is now subject to change because when we live our lives chronically trying to avoid unpleasant emotions it cuts us off from an immeasurable range of experiences that we might otherwise have there is an absolute superpower in being able to process pain rejection loneliness disappointment embarrassment this whole gamut of emotions that we have historically thought we would die if we allowed ourselves to feel if we can get deeply in touch with all of those and teach ourselves how to survive and remain resilient in the face of them we are now cut off from

trying almost nothing in our lives right we can take so many more emotional risks we can take more practical risks we can take more physical risks because we know that we have the self-trust we need to be our own parent through whatever happens as a result so we no longer have to chronically try to control our environments and avoid the feelings we don't know how to feel because we have taught ourselves how to stay on our own team even if the worst happens so situations that include the possibility for the worst to happen no longer

feel like the scariest thing in the world and also the fun part about this is that the more we make room for the full spectrum of who we are the more comfortable we feel doing the same for other people because we aren't afraid that they're going to say something or they're going to notice something about us that is going to trigger this sense of shame or disgust or grief that we don't know what to do with we do know what to do with those feelings so we can be more open undefended and unguarded in the

company of people who we trust and that allows us to have deeper more intimate relationships and having deep intimate relationships are actually incredibly important for fostering a sense of authentic self-intimacy because none of us have the Monopoly on understanding ourselves we need input and feedback and perspectives from other people we need 360 degree views of ourselves in order to understand where our blind spots are and what work we need to do next and again this is going to be a lifelong never-ending process but it can be a deeply rewarding and fulfilling process so the fact

that it goes on forever is not necessarily a negative thing the only way to ensure that you have a mostly negative time for the rest of your life is to have very strong things inside of yourself that you are terrified of looking at or recognizing and having to live your whole life avoiding people situations connections that might in any way force you to look at those parts of yourself because when you are doing that when you are living your life in avoidance mode you are cutting yourself off from your life force the part of yourself

that knows who you are what you want out of the world what your Cravings are what your desires are what your interests and passions are all of that stuff comes from going into those places in ourselves and being willing to see the whole of who we are and continuously adding Nuance to that so what this is the process of developing self and other intimacy is the process of becoming more and more alive inside of our own lives we need our yeses and our no's to understand who we are what we want what we have to

offer the world as well as what impact we are having on other people through those offerings and how we can integrate that into a more holistic and embodied sense of ourselves so the process of developing self-intimacy is the process of practicing experiential curiosity staying on the page with ourselves through discomfort through fear through even the toughest emotions like shame and self-disgust and refusing to avert our gaze from ourselves and instead sitting in that hiding place getting to know it and getting really curious and eventually we might just find that those parts of ourselves that have

been hidden forever start getting curious themselves about the world outside of their hiding place that's the part where Life starts getting really interesting alright that is all I have to say for today on the topic of fostering self-intimacy as always let me know in the comments it's coming up for you guys what you're thinking feeling experiencing as you watch this I love you I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon [Music] thank you