Sexualizing Intimacy

Has anyone looked into this in relation to their therapist? I have read that people who experienced emotional neglect in childhood end up having their first feelings of closeness during a sexual experience. So, they were unable to experience intimacy in a non-sexual way. I wonder if this ties into those of us with ET.

Wow, that makes me so sad! I wonder if that's what's happening to me.

To me that makes sense and why its all so confusing.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

Are there some resources you can suggest that describe what you're talking about?

I googled "sexualizing intimacy" and a forum of some type came up. A girl wrote what I said above. I don't have a source to quote.

It just makes sense to me. All of my intimate relationships have been sexual. I don't think I knew you could have an intimate relationship without the sexual part. I remember my ex-T. describing our relationship as intimate and I told her I view intimacy as sexual. I never thought about why I do but I never had a parental relationship that was intimate in any way. My mom was not emotional with me and didn't touch me much - I don't remember hugs or holding hands.

I'll be bringing this up with my T. to see what they say. I don't think it explains my ET completely. I think part of it is I'm getting what I didn't as a child and my reaction is as if I'm an infant. But, I also think mentally I might be contributing because of never having an non-sexual intimate relationship. I have close friends but the therapeutic relationship is so different.

I have ET with my therapist but it seems to come from opposite life experience. I have had very few sexual relationships and any intimacy I have had has been for the most part nonsexual. I wonder if I'm desperate to link intimacy with something sexual because I've had so little of it.

I've never had intimacy that hasn't been sexual, so I think that's why things with T1 are so messed up. I sexualize everything, and apparently he does too, judging from what he's told me and stuff I've looked up online. What's even worse is now I've discovered how to use sex to get things that I want, or to influence how men might feel about me. It's not necessarily a good thing, but it works. Men are complete dopes.

I have never felt intimacy except for T. It makes straightforward sense to me.

I never looked at it that way. And I absolutely believe in my case, it's absolutely the case. Wow. That's so sad. I want to read more about that now.

#Life is a beautiful lie#

Interesting thought. I always tried to have intimacy with out sex, because of my Catholic upbringing. In the 70's and 80's...not too many in the US were buying into no sex before marriage. I had ET for my female therapist which threw me for a loop, but because I was able to speak with her easily, it resolved itself quickly. As an adult in therapy it was much easier to deal with ET than the mother/child aspect of therapy. "I'm an adult,. How can I have infant/child needs? That was not acceptable, because I would have to come to accept and grieve that my mom failed me as a child, which caused me to stumble as an adult. I could not give up the perfect mother (the image of), and the belief that if I could change, be perfect then she would love me and give me what I needed. My mom really was Carol Brady (The Brady Bunch). I was just a wayward and ungrateful child. That was the hardest part of therapy for me. Accepting that mom could never, back then or now, give me what I needed. I had to learn to get it from others, and in different ways. For some mothers, it is not in them, and I had to come to grips with that. My mother can't even allow me to touch her. It made it easier, because my therapist had been in the same boat, and her sharing her life, and allowing me to ask any questions I needed helped me move forward. For this, I am grateful.

ETA: I had touch and holding in my therapy

I grew up in an environment filled with emotional neglect. With intimacy came sex because that was the "norm". If you ask anyone if they have been intimate with someone they will think you are talking about sex. Lately I have been on a quest to form intimate "platonic" friendships. The jury is still out on this one. It's supposed to be possible to have close and intimate friends without sex. I'm male and prefer female friends. Don't know why. It probably has something to do with unmet emotional needs from my mother. My wife is similar. I don't get empathy from her. She not mean, she just lacks the sensitivity to care about the feelings of another person. So I found ways to engage in meaningful online relationships while keeping the boundaries of marriage intact.

Oddly enough, I had to drop a relationship with a young Chinese Christian woman. We shared a lot of friendship type stuff, but no matter how hard I tried to keep it out of the conversation, sex eventually cropped up. She got upset and refused to talk about sex and that pretty much ended the relationship for me. So I would say if you can't talk about sex and romantic love then there is not too much intimacy there.

But I'm still learning. Outside of Eros love, romantic love, there are the 3 other loves. Storge, Philia, and Agape. I'm really trying hard to learn how to love in more appropriate ways. It seems like no matter how hard I try, the Eros, romantic love, tends to take over and drive the relationship. They call that thinking with the little head instead of the big head. The good news is I'm making progress. I just finished a book titled "Boundaries" and it really opened my eyes to so many ways I have been overstepping boundaries when forming caring, mutually beneficial relationships.

This makes sense to me. I experienced abandonment quite young (my dad left and took my 2 older brothers, 6 and 9 years older, to live 2000 miles away, after which point I only saw them once a year for 1-2 weeks). When my mom began dating again, I never felt like the priority, and we have never been close. There's a lot more to that story but full of potential triggers so I'll leave it. My whole family feels like strangers. The closest I have been to other people has been when I have been sleeping with them, men or women, and I can usually only feel close to 1 person at a time.
I feel freaked out that I am starting to feel attached to T and so not only experiencing paternal transference, but erotic transference has crept into the picture as well. It makes me really uncomfortable.

There is definitely something to it. I haven't thought about it before but it makes sense. Though to me it's just one aspect of the problem many people have around intimacy. I think, there is a lot of confusion about how to define intimacy in the first place and, therefore, everyone defines it differently which leads to a lot of hurt feelings in relationships due to a mismatch of the definitions. I started contemplating on this subject in one of my posts Therapy Consumer Guide | Intimacy in Therapy: Reality or Dangerous Illusion? but it's just the beginning of the exploration. It's an enormous subject to tackle in one post or article because it's like a rabbit hole where one aspect is linked to another and the more you dig into it the more uncovered territory you discover..

When i think of intimacy, I think of an emotional closeness and love.

wow, this makes complete sense. I wonder if this is an integrated element of ET.