Pia Mellody - The Intimacy Factor: The Ground Rules for Overcoming the Obstacles to Truth, Respect, and Lasting Love

Appendix:
Feeling Reduction Workshop

I wish to acknowledge the following people who have helped me on this journey.

The many people who have been willing to do the healing work that is necessary in the recovery process.

Larry Freundlich, who so expertly has given words to my thoughts in the production of this book.

Bob and Maurine Fulton, who demonstrate in their lives and in their therapy that intimacy can be both possible and comfortable.

Terry Real and Belinda Berman, with whom I have worked for many years and who have helped me to develop.

Mona Sides Smith and Monique Laughlin, two fine therapists who have worked with me to prove the effectiveness of my ideas.

My essential reason for writing The Intimacy Factor is to acknowledge the role of spirituality in intimate relationships. By spirituality I mean the acknowledgment of and trust in a power greater than the self. Under the proper conditions, spirituality restores to us to a sense of the inalienable inherent worth with which we were born and with which we lost contact through trauma and adaptation.

Once recovering persons acknowledge the truth of who they are and feel love for themselves in the face of that truth, they are prepared to recognize it in others. They now have a personal spiritual template that guides their vision to perceive other spiritual realities in the world, the most important of which is other people, whom they now recognize as having, like themselves, inherent worth. It changes the way they treat people and the way they are treated in return. This ultimately is what makes intimate relationships possible, and it makes them work.

The recognition of this truth finally makes intimacy possible; we are reattached to the beneficent processes of life that were ours at birth. That is when the amazing discovery of the spiritual path is felt. That is when the presence of a Higher Power becomes a personal reality. For me, this relationship with a Higher Power is the most important fact of my life.

My first awareness of a spiritual connection came long before I had begun to study the mechanisms of childhood abuse and the process of healing from it. Gods presence in my life came to me through revelation, and I consider it a miracle, because it came unbidden. Indeed, when I had this experience of God, I was an emotional wreck and unable to care for myself, much less have a relationship worthy of the name.

Why or how revelation occurs is beyond human understanding. It is not the subject of this bookit could not be. But in saving my life, the Higher Power set me on a path of self-analysis and study of other sufferers that taught me how to guide people to the healing moment. Finally, I learned how to create for others the conditions under which self-understanding, true relationships, intimacy, and spirituality are possible. Truth about self and respect for the truth of others are the portals through which true intimacy and spirituality enter. No intimate relationship is possible without them, and spirituality is a gift of relationship.

At the center of this discovery is the concept of boundaries that create the experience of truth and respect. The system of boundaries that I teach enables each of us to maintain our inherent worth in the face of all outside pressures, rarely allowing the opinions or emotions of others to erode our belief in our inherent worth. Secure in our own self-worth, we do not feel so threatened, diminished, or shamed by others. We do not have to make defensive or offensive adaptations to maintain our dignity. It is in such a state that true relationships are possible. For most of us, achieving this state is one of the most delicate and often painful achievements of adulthood. Most of us find our greatest pain and disappointment in relationships that we cannot make work.

When we are in a relationship, we are called on to give body, thoughts, and emotions to our partners and to accept body, thoughts, and emotions from them. Learning how to do this is a prerequisite for intimacy and the spirituality to which it gives birth. To do it badly causes misery. To do it well honors the best part of our humanity and puts us in psychological balance, which results in a sense of connectedness with lifes goodness.

When we are in the experience of the truth of self, we know that the self has inherent worth. As we are in relationshipwhether by listening or touching or feeling emotionswe must be willing to face the truth of the other person and be able to love, or at minimum respect, the others own inherent worth, apart from the way he or she behaves. That is spiritual. It starts with our partners, children, friends, lovers, and adversaries and reaches outwards toward God. Since relating to our fellow humans goes on almost every moment of our lives, the practice of healthy relationships not only puts us on a spiritual path; it keeps us there.

They say that the spiritual path is straight and narrow, but I used to wonder about that. I used to think that the spiritual path was about being good. It was hard to be good because there were only a few ways of being good. I have since learned the opposite. The spiritual path is straight and narrow because all it takes is moving into a lie to make you absolutely step off of it. I made this discovery when I was trying to teach people to be intimate with one another in their relationships. It was in that effort that I formulated my theory of boundaries.

By recovering from the psychological damage that keeps us from intimacy, we learn to experience renewed self-esteem, personal power, and faith, which give us the ability to have intimate relationships in the first place. This book will identify those ghosts of the past and, by throwing the light of truth upon them, clear the path toward intimacy in relationships. It will teach the psychological techniques by which intimacy is maintained on behalf of the self, the ones we love, and the ones we want to love us. The most important lesson of this book is teaching people how to love and be loved.

Achieving intimacy is like tuning in a radio station. At first there is a lot of buzzing and indistinguishable noise; then you find the signal and can hear clearly. If you continue turning the dial, however, you lose the signal. Through the years I found two things that clearly tune in the radio station: one is truth and the other one is love. When we tell ourselves the truth instead of lies, we are automatically tuning in Higher Power energy. In choosing truth, we choose to be loving to self and others; then the radio station is absolutely, perfectly clear.

Love is a continuum that ranges all the way from respect to very warm regard, the latter of which most people call love. For many years I mistakenly thought that if I loved someone, all I needed to do was to continually have a deep sense of warmth for him. Although that deep sense of warmth is basic, there are also other degrees of love that have to do with the condition of the relationship. As we experience the truth of another person, that person may be difficulthuman. We might naturally feel fear, pain, and shamenot exactly pleasant. I had the idea that if I felt these unpleasant emotions, I was not loving the other person. And early on actually I wasnt, but as I recovered I began to feel something healthy in its place. I learned to recognize another ingredient, and that was respect. If I could consciously hold on to my awareness of the others inherent worth, while that person was being difficult and I was feeling angry, he would feel respect coming from me, and I would feel respect coming back from him.