The Search for Intimacy

In my practice, I always sense that concerns about intimacy and connection can masquerade in sexual garb. Infidelity. Sexual addiction. Pornography. Homosexuality, lesbianism. Something about sex makes one feel some type of connection, an anti-thesis to the wounding, lack, or loss of vital relationship.

While speaking to Noel, he shared how compulsively he'd go into sex with multiple women and even men in times of internal distress. He said he feels so dirty whenever he does so yet he finds himself out of control doing what he doesn't want to do. It's been his "fix" since youth when his father and mother separated and abandoned him.

It's not uncommon to those who have suffered psychological, emotional, or even physical abandonment or abuse to find sources of relief. Many individuals, deprived of proper amounts of intimacy or connection to "significant others" find themselves pervasively occupied with sexual thoughts. A study of men and women wounded by the trauma of abandonment documents increased sexual content in their thoughts and behaviors.

The French term for "orgasm" is "la petite niort." It means "little death." It signifies an orgasmic loss of self, which eliminates the pain of separateness. The high seems to be on the feeling or experience of the lonely "I" vanishing into the merged "we" of the sexual act.

Perhaps this explains a root of this type of psychological disorder.