I never really thought about what I discussed in therapy as "intimacy;" the connotation of the word just doesn't sit right with me, but that's just semantic preference.

I did feel exposed and vulnerable in therapy because, after all, therapy was about being vulnerable enough to expose my fears and problems and needs to that objective other person in the room.

I shared what was relevant to what I was in therapy for which was not absolutely everything in my life, but is was the most personal things in my life which is why it was so exposing. It takes a lot of trust that the other person will listen and acknowledge and validate my experience. Fortunately, my therapists did just that, without judgment or shock.

I knew that I wanted to get to a place where I could move on, where my past wasn't running my present, and where my depression and anxiety weren't handicapping my life. With those goals in mind, I knew I had to be willing to expose those things about myself relevant to that history and my thinking and emotions about how things were going. That often meant I had to push past my comfort zone, but no one said working on these things was going to be easy.

Right now my husband is recovering from knee replacement surgery. He's going through the process of having to push just a bit past what feels comfortable in order to progress physically -- often in another kind of therapy, physical therapy. If he stays in his comfort zone, that knee is not going to work; in fact, he will risk the muscles atrophying and scar tissue building up, causing the knee to basically freeze. Therapy work is kind of like that for me. I was already that frozen knee, and in therapy I had to push just a bit past my comfort zone a bit at a time in order to make progress, and that meant being willing to have enough vulnerability to purposefully expose myself to that other person in the room.

I guess I don't use the word "intimacy" because intimacy connotes pleasure and love and comfort to me -- I have intimacy in my personal relationships with my husband and children, family and friends. Therapy was hard and painful work for me.