Week 8: Intimacy, erecting sheltering walls

Thank you, Jack, for your advice and your suggestions in your post. They help to understand and to look at special points.

Changes: A story: I had a young dog. In my garden lied half a ball, filled with water (rain). My dog liked this new object. He ran to the object and touched it. Water came out of the ball and he ran away. Then again he came to the ball….. I think: there was too much new for him. — The same with me: too much new seems threatening for me. (A little bit like culture shock.) Arthur and Christopher, you are therapists, you know about the difficulties to change personality, the familiar patterns of life.

Why erecting sheltering walls? With me there is a ambivalence with intimacy. I long for and I am afraid of intensive intimacy. Sometimes I can relax, when I feel intimacy (most with well known or ‘little’ objects) and on the other hand, when I come nearer and nearer, I’m anxious to be ‘eaten’ through the ‘object’, the wild animal. I fear to get lost, to become the object, to be not able to distinguish between ‘objects’. The I fears something like death. I suppose, that ‘real’ intimacy is a matter of existential change. There will be no place for personality, for my loved I. (It seems to me like the encounter – or melting? – with god, the lovely and dark sides, the wrathful and blessed sides of deities.)

And experiences with intimacy? There are nearly unapproachable realms. For exemple, when I was a baby, my unity with my mother, realms of light and shadows. Or with sexuality. How would I experience it, when there would be Intimacy without drive and craving? Would I also build a wall? And there seem to be a little bit intimacy with a ‘field’ when I’m together with other people  and sometimes suddenly my mood changes.

There is the difficulty to ‘grasp’ the ‘wall’. Ambivalence: experiences with relaxation and joyfulness, when I go in the direction of Intimacy, e.g. with our exercises and ‘fear of death’. ‘Who’ experiences what? The human embodyment – the ‘I’ ? 

Peter