Robert Augustus Masters - Emotional Intimacy: A Comprehensive Guide for Connecting with the Power of Your Emotions

A Comprehensive Guide

for Connecting with the Power

of Your Emotions

ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS, PhD

For Diane, my wife, ever-deeper beloved, and cojourneyer
to the far reaches of relational and emotional intimacy,
meeting me as Ive never been met before, holding
my all with a love Id not imagined possible

To be intimate with all that we areincluding our every emotion
is to fully embody and awaken to who and what we truly are.

TO BE ALIVE IS TO feel, and to feel is to experience emotion. Whether our emotions are overwhelming or subtle, fiery or chilling, dark or light, they are always present, finding expression in an extraordinary number of ways. Our emotions are ever-moving wonders, bringing together physiology, feeling, cognition, and conditioning, allowing us to connect and communicate in more ways than we can imagine. The more deeply we know our emotions, the deeper and more fulfilling our lives will be.

However anatomically complex our emotions are, they are simple in their felt immediacy, providing us with the opportunity to participate more fully and more consciously in them so that we might make use of them as wisely as possible. For all too many of us, emotions remain a largely untapped source of strength, freedom, and connection. They are so much a part of us that we tend to take them for granted, losing touch with their sheer mystery and with the marvelously varied ways they transmit our inner workings, facially and otherwise.

How well do you know your emotions? To what degree are you at home with them? How do you view themare they more ally or foe? Do you distance yourself from them, or get lost in them? Do you keep them tightly reined, or do you let yourself get carried away by them? Or do you cultivate intimacy with them, however dark or unpleasant or disturbing they may be?

Whatever we are doing with our emotions will not be clear until we know them well. We simply wont be close enough to them to see what directions we may be channeling them into. For example, we might not recognize that hostility is not something that simply arises in us, but it is something that we are doing with our anger. The more intimate we are with our angerwhich is far more about being close to it than about controlling it!the more easily we can see the choices we are making with it.

The capacity for emotional intimacya greatly undervalued capacityis essential not only to truly fulfilling relationships, but to having an uncommonly vital life in which awareness, passion, love, action, and integrity function as one. What I mean by emotional intimacy is twofold: (1) becoming intimate with our emotions, including their arising, expression, historical roots, and relational functioning; and (2) becoming intimate in our relationships with significant others through how we express and share our emotions.

To be intimate with our emotions is no small undertaking; doing so requires far more than simply being able to openly express and talk about them.

Being intimate with our fear, for example, means getting close enough to it to see it clearlyand in detailin its mental, psychological, and physical dimensions, but not so close that we fuse with our fear or get lost in it. So we remain slightly separated from our fear even as we openly feel and closely connect with it, maintaining just enough distance to keep it in focus.

To take this example further, cultivating intimacy with our fear doesnt necessarily lessen it, but it does put us in a position where we are neither identified with it nor disconnected from it. We see our fear for what it is, we sense its location and coursings in our body, we recognize its impact on our thinking processes, we become more aware of our history with it, we register its degree and quality of contractedness. As such, we become increasingly capable of working with it and skillfully sharing it. As we become more intimate with our fear, we lessen our fear of it and eventually adopt a nonproblematic orientation toward it.

The more intimate we are with our emotions, the more adept well be in both containing and expressing them, so that their presence serves rather than hinders us and those with whom were in contact. In this sense, there are no unwholesome or negative emotionsonly unwholesome or negative things we do with them. Emotional intimacy allows us to make the best possible use of all our emotionsand it enhances relationship.

Without emotional intimacy, relationships founder on the reefs of emotional discord or flatnessno matter how heated the sex, no matter how much we hold in commonleaving us marooned from the interpersonal closeness for which we yearn. If we are parents, our children will pay the price of our lack of emotional intimacy, learning to normalize emotional reactivity and disconnection. All too easily, we may simply act out our unresolved wounds and mishandled needs through our emotional expression or lack thereof, while remaining unaware of what we are doing! Such re-acting keeps our relationships in the shallows, cut off from the emotional depth and resonance needed for genuine intimacy. When we wake up to this and begin doing what it takes to develop and deepen emotional intimacy, our relationships start to become less of a battlefield or flatland and more of a sanctuary. They become more vital, more nourishing, more authentic.

Emotional illiteracy infects many relationships, regardless of how effectively it might be camouflagedor compensated forby rational discourse, material success, erotic intensity, or spiritual practice. Despite the obvious presence of emotion in everyone, as well as the plain-to-see emotional difficulties or challenges many of us have, emotional education has yet to take a significant place in the majority of our schools. It simply does not appear to be a priority for those in charge of educational policy. This, of course, is not just a failing of our school system, but of our culture. Intellectual intelligence tends to get the lions share of attention, with moral and emotional intelligence getting far too little focus, and many relationships reflect this.

Modeling a healthy relationship to our emotions is one of the biggest gifts we can give our children. Many of us grew up suffering the consequences of our parents unresolved emotional wounds, and we developed an understandably problematic orientation toward our emotions. For example, we may have learned to associate the expression of anger with danger or the loss of love, and so have a reaction to anger that works against relational well-beingunless weve worked through this. We have an obligation not to pass on our emotional wounding to our children, or at least to minimize such transmission. This means doing our very best to face and work through that old hurt, as perhaps optimally done through high-quality psychotherapy.

How we treat our children is closely akin to how we treat the child within us. If were uncomfortable with our emotions, especially those that are particularly vulnerable, well very likely be uncomfortable with our childrens emotions, especially when they are fully expressed. If we were shamed for crying when we were young, the odds are that well find ourselves shaming our children for crying at least some of the time, despite our intentions to do otherwiseunless weve worked through this dynamic in us to the point where we no longer shame ourselves (via the finger-pointing of our inner critic) for our more vulnerable emotions and their open expression.