Intimacy Starvation

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By Stephen Proskauer MD | April 19, 2008

Reflecting on our culture, perhaps it is lack of true intimacy that lies at the root of our blindness and excess. Maybe we are trying to compensate for absence of deep contact, with ourselves and with others, by spending more, working longer hours, playing harder, obsessing about our bodies, abusing the environment out of short-sighted convenience or greed, living lives of restless dissatisfaction. What do other cultures have that most Americans with all their abundance seem to lack? In poor villages, people who have little else take precious time just to be with each other. In European towns, folks just hang out at the pub or the café chatting for hours instead of scrambling for the next raise by putting in overtime at work or racing the kids around to ballet lessons and soccer meets. It isn’t that such activities have no value, but the imbalance between inward intimacy and outward activity leaves many of us stressed out and unsatisfied. What is it that keeps us strapped to the endless wheel of compensatory overactivity? In my view, it’s fear, fear of our true feelings and of our awesome potential as aware beings. When we suddenly encounter another at a profound level, gazing into their eyes, seeing their soul with our own reflected back to us, we realize an essence far more vast than the small self. Tears flow and the ecstatic anguish of that moment blows open the heart. Suppressed grief and pain surfaces in the eternal moment to be released. This experience can be overwhelming beyond words. Granted, such moments are rare even for those who take the time to be present with another being, but if we don’t take the time to cultivate aware presence with ourselves and others, it may never happen in our lives. One such moment can transform us and fulfill us beyond anything that comes to us through a lifetime of conventional activity and achievement. Yet, in that single moment all the familiar landmarks of the self disappear, leaving an awesome vastness, a void that disorients us and terrifies the small self. Without knowing what we fear, we shrink back from deep intimacy, protected within the cocoon of a normal life, distracted from what is missing by an endless round of activity. All we know is that something is missing. Unlike shamanic and Eastern cultures, we have no framework for understanding or accepting ecstatic experiences that transform the self. If such a thing were to happen, many of us (or our friends and families) would be terrified we were going crazy and we’d have to put a stop to it any way possible. I sometimes see people like this in my integrative psychiatric practice, patients who have had profound transformational experiences and have been misdiagnosed as psychotic by mainstream mental health professionals. They have often had their spiritual development stalled and their emotional lives paralyzed with numbing medications. Meanwhile, the majority go on suffering lives of aching isolation and incompleteness, racing after a fulfillment that never comes out of a materialistic and spiritually bankrupt lifestyle. My forthcoming workshop on 5/24/08, Creating a New Earth Now, uses Eckhart Tolle’s approach to cultivate the kind of presence and intimacy that addresses this pervasive problem. For details, see below or check the sidebar under Workshops.