Intimacy Coaching & Best Techniques To be Intimate with Your Partner
Intimacy Coaching & Best Techniques To be Intimate with Your Partner
If you’re striving to feel free and more connected with your partner, you should consider intimacy coaching. Although we all know that intimacy is key in every relationship. Understanding what intimacy actually is and how to achieve it is not as easy as it seems. The reason for that is our past experiences where we’ve gotten hurt emotionally and/or physically. This led to fear of being intimate with another person and is a consequential issue for the majority of couples.
What does an intimacy coach do?
An intimacy coach is a person who will eliminate this intimacy blockage for you and help you feel safer and more connected to your lover or partner. By developing a sense of safety in their clients, intimacy coaches are replacing those unpleasant experiences by creating new. Positive ones.
Being guided by an expert, a person will develop a greater sense of closeness, become more aware of their own emotions. As well as of other people’s emotions. All of this leads
to healing attachment wounds which are not allowing people to connect on a deeper level with each other.
Understanding your fear of intimacy
You don’t have to be aware of your intimacy triggers before going into the session with your intimacy coach, yet realizing what is causing your fear is the first step to healing. As we are born with the need to connect and share with others. Something must happen in order to disconnect ourselves from that need. In reality, that need to connect and share never disappears, we just disconnect from it because something or someone hurt us before.
Because of the fear of intimacy, you will feel afraid when thinking of starting a new relationship or expressing your feelings during a discussion with your best friend, for instance.
However, where there is fear, there is an opportunity for healing. More importantly, you don’t have to go down that road alone. An intimacy coach will turn it into an explorative experience rather than painful, ensuring you feel safe and nurtured during the process.
Intimacy Risk Factors
Our first intimate interaction is with our family. Often, these families are not healthy and safe environments for children to learn about intimacy. Some of the most common examples are:
- Blurred boundaries and roles in the family: Everything might seem perfect at first glance, yet some family members won’t fulfil their role responsibility.
- Emotional and/or physical neglect: Parents who are not there for their children – emotionally or physically – are teaching them they can’t rely on others.
- Parent loss: A feeling of abandonment will appear where a parent has been lost through death, divorce or any other event.
- Parent illness: Having an ill parent can lead to intimacy issues as the child takes on the role of the parent and cares for others in the family, sometimes including the ill parent as well.
Unfortunately, there are many more risk factors such as verbal, physical or sexual abuse, parent substance use or any other type of addiction, yet regardless of the cause, each person can learn how to be intimate with their significant other.
How to cope with intimacy issues?
There are several crucial steps on the path of restoring intimacy with intimacy coaching. It’s worth saying that intimacy issues can only be solved once the person starts connecting again with their intimacy. Once you understand what caused you pain and disconnection from others, you will be able to change your patterns and feel safer during interactions.
To feel connected with others, here are the techniques that will create positive sensations and experiences and finally heal the intimacy issue a person has:
Embrace the uncertainty
What if someone tells you that the most beautiful aspect of life is that you actually can’t plan or predict anything? The walls you have built in your childhood have been protecting you as a child, yet they don’t serve you anymore. You have created the illusion that you are safer when you are not engaging with others when in reality. That illusion is taking something incredibly valuable from you. With an intimacy coach, you will practice courage, and it will become easier to invest in new relationships without feeling like you are risking your wellbeing.
Accept yourself first
Under the fear of intimacy lies the fear of not being worthy of a connection with someone. If you’re afraid to express your feelings to your partner, you are probably not allowing yourself fully to feel them. It’s not easy to become comfortable with all your emotions. Yet it will be harder if you expect from others something you are not able to give yourself first.
Congratulate yourself when you make that step towards others instead of focusing on the outcome. For instance, inviting someone to go for a walk will be less terrifying once you celebrate the achievement of solely inviting someone instead of waiting for their response. After all, once your focus changes, you will no longer care that much about the outcome.
Write a letter to yourself from the past
You have probably heard this technique quite a few times, yet have you ever tried it? It’s incredibly powerful to take a walk into your past and talk to yourself as if you were two friends sitting on the school bench sharing secrets. What would you say to that little kid? Maybe it will be to speak up more when the opportunity presents. To accept every birthday party invitation although there’s not enough money in the house to buy a present or to write all those fiction stories down and practice its creativity?
Determine what you want
In reality, it’s not so much what you want, it’s what you DON’T want. Maybe the feeling of anxiety comes because all your friends are married and you can’t find the person you wish to share your life with? Before blaming it all on yourself, ask yourself if this is something you want. Sometimes, we will try to be what we think we should be instead of doing things that truly make us happy. Keep in mind that the only person that always deserves your unconditional intimacy is you.
Practice patience
This is maybe the hardest technique of them all, yet it’s also the most important one. If you don’t practice patience, it will be difficult to progress. Putting too many expectations on yourself when you’re coping with something so vulnerable as your intimacy can only make things worse for you. Be patient. It will take some time and that’s perfectly fine. You have spent various years in unhealthy environments which led to fear of intimacy. So expecting this fear to disappear quickly is simply not rational.
Quick intimacy tips for couples
Let’s be clear, fear of intimacy can only be cured if someone like an intimacy coach has helped you understand what caused your fear and provide you with the tools to connect with others and feel good during it. However, there are several things that you can start practicing with your partner daily if you’re both looking to resolve your intimacy issues:
- Hold hands more often.
- Be more emotionally aware and vulnerable during sex.
- Initiate sex differently.
- Plan out your time together.
- Every month, try out an activity that’s new for both of you.
- Talk about your relationship – share ideas, dreams, fears, etc.
- Focus more on seduction instead of sex.
A step to intimacy…
Don’t stop just by reading this article. You are worth every connection you wish to make in your life. You have every right to share your feelings with someone who will appreciate it and feel honoured you trust them so much. The more you start practicing being open to new people and experiences. This fear will slowly disappear and you will start enjoying connecting and sharing with those important to you.
Life Coaching and Therapy (LCAT) is a relationship coaching and sex therapy practice that transforms our clients lives through our flexible, multi-technique approach and pleasure-skills training provided by systemically-trained and licensed therapists!
Our team of compassionate, licensed therapists and certified sex therapists help Millennials and Baby Boomers alike who visit us for a variety of relationship, intimacy and sex problems.
LCAT provides on-site appointments, as well as video chat and text therapy programs.
Learn more about how LCAT can help improve your life at What We Do.