Love, Intimacy and Relationship
by Vasumati Hancock and Craig Tunnell

To love and be loved fully in return is one of our deepest and most essential needs, yet so many of us suffer and struggle to find this in our lives. So much energy is spent on trying to figure it all out; how to love and yet not lose your own individuality, how to have long term commitment and yet keep the flame of passion alive in those relationships. How to make sense of the walls and numbness that seems to develop over time with a partner, to balance the needs of children, career and self whilst keeping intimacy vital and fresh.

Yet at the deepest core of our being the longing for love, intimacy and sexual union vibrates whether we know it or not. Sometimes we find refuge from this hurricane in our spiritual paths or in nature, but most of us grapple with this most human of needs for most of this incarnation.

In many of our relationships we are faced with our own issues and unresolved childhood patterns that we bring with us to our adult partnerships. Often this carry over has been called co dependency, so in this article we wish to describe this and explore it in more detail.
 
First of all we will try and define the term co dependency and then we can see all the depths and complexities that arise from that, especially in terms of intimate relationships.

The term co dependency describes a condition in which our lack of love and self esteem create an inability to have true love, intimacy and a deep connected sexuality in our lives. As co dependents we either try to find another person to fill our feelings of emptiness, or we simply avoid intimate relationships altogether, opting for relationships that are casual, lacking depth, perhaps even living in isolation.

When we first really get together with someone, our core dependency patterns might not surface right away. Often we have a grace period at first, called the honeymoon, where we experience high levels of nurturing and intense passion and our hormones are running on the maximum setting. This can be a wonderful and intoxicating time  and here it seems that literally nothing can go wrong.

However we are soon shocked from our ‘paradise’ for as we start to feel safer we relax our guard and then many of the issues and needs that we thought that we had left behind in childhood start to surface again. It seems that relationships sooner or later bring a myriad of issues to the surface that we have neither the skills nor inner space to navigate through or resolve.

The strange thing is that the deeper intimacy goes the more we are emotionally triggered. And while we are all prepared for loves bliss and ecstasy, few of us are prepared for loves shadow.
 
What are these shadows, you may ask.
Quite simply we have buried in our unconscious two main fears. It is quite possible that the roots of these two fears lie in our family of origin.  They are called the fears of abandonment and engulfment, and these fears or wounds are played out over and over again in the course of our adult relationships.