Intimacy Heals Denial
Have you seen others blinded by their own clever denial mechanisms? Well, guess who else refuses to be present enough for intimacy.
If your psychological defense strategy has one particular expertise it is to hold you in denial about what is really going on for you. Your inner structure refuses to permit you to discover what you are in denial about. Conflicts and potentials just sit in you, blocked off for years, perhaps a whole lifetime. Have you seen others blinded by their own clever denial mechanisms? Well, guess who else refuses to be here.
On the one hand, denial hides considerations that might threaten your survival strategy’s original gameplan, a set of techniques that has already proven itself to be effective, as evidenced by the fact that you have survived.
On the other hand, perhaps your priorities have changed since you installed the fortress of denial mechanisms around your Being. Security’s deceptions are eventually revealed. Perhaps security is not so high on your list anymore.
You will one day die and no amount of insurance or timidity will prevent it. Perhaps it becomes a more interesting proposition to abandon mere survival in favor of finding what it might be to truly live. But if you actually do something differently — even a tiny behavior change — you encounter abrupt and forceful counter forces within you.
Without a major interrupt routine, you will likely be kept safely in denial for the rest of your life. Look around at your friends, neighbors, and relatives… Haunting, isn’t it?
What may be inspiring you to read further is the nagging discovery that denial hurts. The thing protected by denial does not thrive well under conditions of solitary confinement.
What hurts more? Insecurity? Or denial?
You will either think about this question for a moment and then forget about it. Or the question will sink in and eat at you from the inside for as long as it takes to move you into new actions. One of the new actions might be to try the following experiment.
EXPERIMENT
Find your way out of denial’s solitary confinement. You can find your way out of denial’s solitary confinement through communicating with someone else.
Communication creates intimacy.
Intimacy heals denial.
You will find your way out of solitary confinement by communicating with someone who is near to you now, already in your life. They wait there as a precious key for opening the door to your prison cell.
Whenever you decide to you can use that key. The experiment is, go and talk to them. But do not talk to them in the usual way. Do not talk to them from intellect to intellect, or from mind to mind, with reasons, questions, arguments, problems, or issues. Intellectual communication is a distortion that creates pseudo intimacy. Intellectual intimacy is better than nothing, but not by much. It is enough to live on, but just barely.
Mind to mind communication misses eighty-percent of life. This is because you have five bodies (physical, intellectual, emotional, energetic, and archetypal) and each of them desire intimacy for full health and well-being. You may not know how to communicate in a way that promotes five-body intimacies. This may be new to you. If you already know that you do not know how to communicate wholly, then you can relax and try some new things in your communications. Not already knowing how is the way!
Choose a person. It does not matter so much what kind of relationship you already have with this person, or what kind you would like to have. It simply needs to be a person willing to do this experiment with you. Plan to spend an hour and a half together in a place where you can speak privately. There may be some tears.
When you meet, share with them these instructions. Human beings have five bodies – a physical body with organs that have sensations, a mental body with a mind that has thoughts, an emotional body with a heart that has feelings, an energetic body with a being that has presence, and an archetypal body with a service that has extraordinary missions. You will be communicating in a way that uses the energy and intelligence of all five bodies rather simultaneously.
Here is what may have happened to you before. You were relating somewhere along a spectrum of awareness and responsibility. In various parts of your five bodies you had considerations, about yourself, about how you feel, about the other person, about how it is for them, about what is happening right now, about what just happened, about what might happen next, about what you want, and so on. Perhaps you tried communicating about these considerations, but your communications failed in some way, or the communication was too painful, or too intense for you or the other person to endure. So you stopped communicating.
You stopped communicating about considerations that arose in while relating. As soon as you stop intimately communicating, the intimacy vanishes. Once no intimate communication is happening for a while, it cannot happen anymore. Once intimate communication ends, the affinity between you dies. Once affinity dies, what’s the point? So you withdrew back into solitary confinement and there you stayed until now, until this moment, this moment where you have another chance.
Your new chance comes from having new clarity. The clarity is this: your personal survival strategy ‘Box’ creates denial. Denial holds you in solitary confinement. Intimacy heals the solitary confinement of denial through communication. With this new clarity you can start again with a new experiment. Use all five bodies to communicate right now with this new person about the considerations that arise for you while relating with this person.
Communicate about everything. Communicate all of your considerations. Start with your fears — we all have the same fears. You can learn to consciously experience and express your fears! This will take you hours and days to share. These will be hours and days of intimacy. It is so simple.
Then go to your sadnesses — in sorrows we are one. This will take you more hours and days. Be a little fanatical. Go a little overboard. Pick one person and do regularly scheduled café communication sessions. Make the vow that while relating with this person you will not let even one consideration arise without communicating about it. Do not let one consideration exist without it being shared.
Please make sure that your communication is responsible. Communicate about you, about how it is for you, about what is going on for you, not about the other person at all. Use “I” statements, “I feel scared…,” “I really want to…,” “I noticed that…,” “I was wondering what it was that…” Do not use “you” statements.
You cannot change the other person. Stop trying even by insinuation. Changing them is not your job. Their considerations are none of your business. You only listen. You have no answers for them. It is not about them. It is about you sharing.
Be careful not act as if you are a victim. Relating is not about having a problem! Relating is about sharing your feelings and your considerations about what is arising for you while relating with another person.
Communicating with all five bodies creates intimacy in all five bodies.
This experiment is to find your way out of solitary confinement. You got yourself in there by withholding your considerations. You can find your way out of there by communicating your considerations.
And here is the miracle: denial floats to the surface and is revealed as a consideration while relating. Through communicating about the considerations of relating, the considerations are no longer in denial and you are no longer in solitary confinement. Through speaking the truth, you are no longer lonely.
