Field of Intimacy | Psychology Today

?Intimacy is a field, much like an energy field in physics: You are in one state before you enter, but once inside, reality changes?both for the better and for the worse.? Many avoid the power of this field; and some can?t live without it. Physics has its space-time continuum. Falling in love places you in a feeling-time continuum that blends the past and the present with the future.?

It?s potent?and it draws its source from a magical experience in time.?

Just as great rivers have their sources, so too does intimacy. To sense intimacy?s power and its field, turn your attention to life?s original intimate relationship in early childhood. This is where many answers to the pleasure and the anguish of love can be found.

Adult Love & Infant Love: Love, as adults, is the love of adults?and the love of an infant for his or her mother is just that.? However, our early memories are influential. When we fall in love, we dip back into our early memories in order to use them as a vehicle for adult experience. This is important, because each of us has a personal history of being loved (or not) and held (or not); of being cuddled (or not) and supported (or not). Trust, intimacy, vulnerability and all that goes into adult love has its roots in these first moments of parent-child love. We cannot escape our past. Nor should we really want to.

Do you withdraw too easily? Do you anger without warning or put walls up?? Do you fear losing? ? Having a lover means that vulnerability is re-awakened?hopefully for the good. ??

Does your lover, husband or wife have trouble with closeness, sex or rage? Do they worry too much??Do certain words and situations trigger intense hurt or anger?

Yes, the past is being triggered by the present.?

Intimacy is past, present and future all rolled into one experience.? So, the pains and pleasures of the past affect those of the present and future. Here, the work of Margaret Mahler?can help us. Mahler?s work was the study of our first collective love affair; and by extension, she gave us insight about love in the adult species.

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Awareness

Have you ever really noticed that love and hate are emotions?but you feel them in your body as well??

The felt sensation of love and hate dip into our preverbal memories: All human beings are filled with memories, with most of the important ones lying beneath verbal memory or language, or even imagery. They are memories that are tactile, olfactory and kinesthetic rather than verbal or visual. Feelings of infancy (and intimacy) are emotional, but they are also physical.

Imagine yourself as an infant.?

You are tired and someone comes in to settle you down. You are wet and someone changes you; and you feel relief. You are hungry and someone feeds you until you are satiated. Her breast is soft and warm and her milk is delicious. Here we have a positive complex of memories?warm breast/satisfying milk/and available when needed.?

You feel full, warm, held and safe.

Now imagine yourself as an infant, troubled and alone.?

Imagine a situation with no consistent reassuring breast.?

Irritation, anger, withdrawal?fear: these are some of the feelings you may have. And this is what you remember in your deepest memories: a warm breast that?s unavailable/and delicious milk that?s withheld. It?s a negative jumble of memories. You feel alone, worried, hungry and unsafe.

Early memories of safety or non-safety, of being tended to or being abandoned, are deep inside all of us. ?

Falling in love evokes the trust you originally experienced when young:? This is why abandonment theory?is so important for all relationships and not just for infants and toddlers. For some, no matter how much you love, abandonment haunts you, because?down in the soul of the self?you may have had an early trauma of abandonment that?s not easily undone. ?

Here?s the rub and the opportunity: We can get re-traumatized in this field of intimacy, or we can be healed. It is through our later life experiences, whether with lovers, parenting our own children - or through good therapy - that we can dip into those early experiences and actually heal them anew.??

This field of intimacy?where past?informs the present?empowers intimate relationships with the power for psychic change. It?s nature?s opportunity for healing.

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Symbiosis

Margaret Mahler described a child?s first nine to eighteen months as a symbiotic period:? This is when the child has a porous boundary with her mother. ?

Note that the newborn?s eyes are fixated at 18 inches, exactly the length between a child nursing on the breast and the eyes of her adoring mother.?That forever dwelling of mother?s eyes into child?s eyes, soul to soul, is as special as anything in this world.?It?s a complete absorption of the mother in the child.?

But imagine the child.? She is tiny. The mother is enormous. She is helpless. The mother is providing. She is vulnerable. The mother is all powerful. This is oneness and it?s just delightful. She swims in her mother?s aura, in her mother?s field of intimacy. This symbiosis lives inside us. And, when we fall in love, we have a taste of it. It?s paradise. ??

Imagine the sexual moment in which both adult partners have a blessed satisfaction. There is more here than just pleasure. They have been unified. And then, afterward, holding each other, spooning, they feel one with each other, almost as if in infancy - but now, in an adult state. It?s this symbiosis that people yearn for and about which they write poetry

So they lov'd as love in twain

Had the essence but in one;

Two distinct, divisions none...?

-William Shakespeare

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Exploring

The child stands up.?

Vertical locomotion is a wondrous experience in the maturation of a toddler:?She is no longer dependent on the earth; on her knees and hands. She is no longer destined to see the bottom of doors and drawers and refrigerators. She can now stand up and open the refrigerator, open doors and maneuver through the world with delight. ??

Her hands are free up to explore ? and she?s into everything! ?

Observe a child who has just learned to walk - between twelve months and eighteen months; she?s exploring the world in what Margaret Mahler calls?practicing. The world truly is her oyster and its pure enjoyment. ?

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