Hi everyone!  Today i want to cover the topic of intimacy, something vital to each of our lives, and a topic that is a big part of love addiction and codependency.

A lot of us have found that in relationships, we have lost ourselves, and a big struggle is trying to rebuild our behavior patterns in relationships so that we can have healthy relationships where that doesn’t happen.  We have also found that the people we choose to be intimate with are unavailable to us emotionally, or maybe we have even found someone to be intimate with, but we push them away and sabotage our relationships.  Intimacy can be scary!

Growing up, intimacy was not modeled for us properly.  Many of us are working on issues like love addiction and codependency because we grew up in a dysfunctional home of some kind, but the good news is we don’t have to keep those lessons we learned.  We can learn a new way to interact with intimacy in our lives, one that is rewarding and allows real connections to be created.

What we’ve seen so far has been nerve-wracking: watching our parents stumble through similar relationships to us told us that intimacy wasn’t worth it, or that being super intimate with someone was the only way to live life.  But there is a balance, one that we didn’t see.  Instead, we either latch onto someone, holding on for dear life, trying to be the perfect person for them, or we shove someone away, telling ourselves that we don’t care about the relationship because they are too this or too that.  We don’t have to do that!

When we start setting boundaries for ourselves in terms of intimacy, we can see the way healthy intimacy can work in relationships.  We don’t have to sleep with someone we just met because that is how we’ve always done it, and we don’t have to share our entire life with someone in one night.  We can make boundaries with ourselves to take intimacy in relationships one step at a time, rather than taking the full plunge, or not entering the contest at all.

As humans, we crave social interactions and intimacy.  It is such an important part of who we are and what it means to be human, but we can try to let people into our lives even though we are scared.  We can take it at our own pace, and nobody else’s.  The more you practice healthy intimacy, the more positive results you will see, and you will be encouraged to create more positive, healthy relationships.

Sherry Gaba, LCSW, Radio Host, Certified Transformation Coach and author of  the award winning book, The Law of Sobriety:Attracting Positive Energy for a Powerful Recovery and Ecourse www.wakeuprecovery.com. www.sherrygaba.com sherry@sgabatherapy.com