All right Charlene, tell me how couples regain intimacy?
That’s a good question. I think before going into the how to, it’s important to define what intimacy is for couples. A lot of times when I talked to couples, when they start talking about intimacy, one of the first things that they attached to that word is sex. Sex is only one part of intimacy. Some of the different types of intimacies that I talked about with my couples are affection, spiritual intimacy, intellectual intimacy, social intimacy, physical, and not physical in the sense of touch, but physical in the sense of playing tennis together or bike riding together or gardening together. Really the how to depends on what part is broken, because sometimes I get couples that are best friends and go out all the time and have that part of their intimate life solid for lack of a better word.
They don’t have a spiritual connection or they don’t have an intellectual connection. Really we have to focus what the deficit is in the couple, add on to their strengths and then work on some of the deficits. Intimacy, there was a therapist that once said that it was into me see. It’s really about both couples having the ability to be vulnerable enough, to allow the other person to really see into them and to be trusting and to have the connection that they’re yearning for, but sometimes they don’t really know how to get to. Different types of ways of building intimacy that I do with my couples is I’ll have them pick an exercise and work on it for a week. The wife will pick intellectual and the husband will pick physical, and every day they work on a physical connection or an intellectual connection.
Part of it, a lot of couples sometimes they will just feel forced. At the beginning, it kind of is, because it doesn’t come naturally. I think once people get into that habit of doing it, then they do develop natural language around it.