Hello there everybody. Today's discussion is going to
be on intimacy. A lot of you know that I'm an
intimacy coach and this means that I teach people how to
navigate intimacy not only in their romantic relationships,
but especially in their intrapersonal relationships,
which means your relationship with yourself.
And in turn, how this effects all the relationships
surrounding news, the relationships around yourself.
Today I want us to talk about intimacy, what it really is,
what it entails, what it looks like so that when you see it,
maybe you can recognize it. And how to curate your own
meaning for yourself so that you're able to share it with the
people around you and in turn, experience and enjoy it for
yourself and in your other relationships.
When someone mentions intimacy, especially in my area code, I'm
from Nairobi, Kenya. Or maybe it's also wild over
phenomenon. When you mention intimacy, we
tend to think about sex, a sexual relationship.
That's what people think about. But today I want to separate
intimacy from sex so that you can see what intimacy really
means and what it looks like. Intimacy for me is a feeling of
trust and closeness and connection.
This is when you're able to exist, whether it is within
yourself or within other relationships, and create a
feeling of trust and closeness. So whatever helps you create
this feeling, brings about intimacy, helps you get
intimate. Intimacy can definitely be
cultivated and taught because even for me, I think I've been
avoidant for a very long time. Like my attachment style has
been very avoidant Kitambo, which means a long time ago I
used to be very anxious. I used to, you know, be clingy.
And I never had a lot of independence when it came to
relationships. But as I got hurt over and over
and over, I flipped the coin and I turned to the other side where
now I mean, also when I was being anxious, it stemmed from
me being hurt and neglected. But now me becoming very
avoidant was a response of OK, nobody's going to stay.
Nobody's going to love me the way I want to be loved.
So I'm shutting everyone out because everyone always
disappoints me and hurts my feelings.
I'm never letting this world down and I'm never letting
anyone come close enough to me to hurt me.
That was the beginning of my avoidance in my relationships.
I say this to bring about that intimacy can definitely be
cultivated and it can be taught because for me to learn to
enjoy, I had to teach myself and then learn to recognize it in
other people. My avoidance tendencies were
always causing me to run away from anything that requires me
to be very vulnerable. And for you to exist in life,
you require a level of vulnerability, whether it's with
yourself or with the people, people around you.
You have to show yourself your real face at some point so that
you're able to understand yourself and even love yourself
better. Without this, I don't think it's
it's possible for you to love yourself fully, like at 100%.
So This is why it's important for you to understand why
building a very secure attachment style helps you love
yourself more. By the way, this podcast is not
majorly about relationships with other people.
Yes, it is a consequence of loving yourself, but my main
message always starts from self. It's about you, it's about
yourself. It's about loving yourself
really, really well so that this can translate into all the other
relationships in your life. And a good way that I was able
to teach myself to recognize intimacy or to accept intimacy
or to even know that I wanted trust and connection and
closeness with myself and with other people.
First of all, I was surrounding myself with givers, people who
truly, truly loved me and saw me for who I was.
Being around them helped me start breaking down my wall.
This wall of mine is not all the way down, but I can say I've
made tremendous growth and huge improvements for the people
who've been in my life long. They know.
They know what I'm talking about South, surrounding myself with
people who really, really, truly loved me.
It was like a light bulb moment. It was like, oh wow, if ABC can
love me this this way, if they can love me like this, if they
can truly show me I don't need to be avoidant or anxious when
it comes to vulnerability and just being myself.
This means that I can show up for myself like that.
And being around these people taught me how to love myself, to
see myself. And then over time, it just
translated in the way that I'm able to love other people.
Well, I'm still working on it, but I can definitely say I've
come a long way. I still have friends who
complain that I'm a hard not to crack like my colleague Jaguaro
on the dialogue, the Jaguar show on YouTube.
We Co host, we host on the show together and he's always
complaining about we did an episode on friendship and this
is a very vulnerable conversation because in the
conversation I asked him do you consider me a friend?
And he said no. We've known each other for like
a couple years and of course by virtue of working together we
hung around each other a lot. And he's someone I consider a
friend. I will I will explain why I
consider him a friend in a bit. But I told him yes, I do
consider your friend. And he said no, I don't consider
your friend. This is because our definitions
of friendships are not the same. But he explained to me why he
doesn't consider me a friend. It's because of my avoidance.
He said I'm such a hard nut to crack.
He never knows anything about me, he never knows anything
about my life. He doesn't know what I have
going on, what I'm thinking, what I'm doing.
And for him to consider someone a friend, that's a very integral
part of like life. And it makes sense to me.
It makes sense why he would say he doesn't consider me a friend.
But for me, my reason for considering considering him a
friend is because I don't even hang around people I don't
trust, like even work wise, like with a colleague, if all we're
doing is walk, I'm going to come and walk and I'm going to leave
and go do other things, put my energy in the people and the
things that I trust and feel very close to.
I'm not very I don't open up very easily.
You might say, Oh my God, but you tell us everything on the
podcast. Well, yes, I trust this channel
to speak my mind because I don't really care for, you know,
outsiders onions telling me, Oh, I had this about you.
I had, but it really matters to me the people that I, I'm
surrounded with, like in very close proximity especially, I
care about the opinions of me. I care about like for example,
my mother or even my best friend.
I care if they have something to say.
Like if they told me, you know, this is what you did or this is
how you look like. I really care about their
opinions, not just criticism, opinions in general.
Me being around Jaggero and me telling him all these things I
tell him and all the time we hung out and all that, you know,
we open up to each other. I open up to him.
I think me in from my opinion, I see it as the fact that I'm even
able to be around you already that qualifies you as my friend.
Because I don't hang around many people.
I don't hang around people at all.
I'm always by myself or with my very close Sacco.
If I'm not with my mom, I'm in my house.
And you could say, yeah, we hung around each other because we're
colleagues. But well, it's true.
I don't know if there were other, if we weren't colleagues,
if we'd be hanging around each other like the way we do.
But my point is when I was answering that question, I truly
feel like he's someone I can talk to, someone I can go to
fulfill something, but the feeling is not mutual.
That's not something he feels about me.
And I completely understood what he was meaning or what he was
trying to say. People have different
definitions of friendship and intimacy for themselves and this
is very much allowed. So he said I'm I had not to
crack. But in in my defense, it's just
a trauma response. I truly believe it's a trauma
response from me being able to recognize patterns, like I'm
able to see the trajectory of my relationship with other people
even before tufiq embalina dranga uyuta, chakangala Shana.
So I completely understand. But with this circle of mind
that I've curated for myself, there's so much consideration,
gifting, thoughtfulness, forgiveness, kindness.
And it is from them that I've been able to learn, like from
the people around me that I've been able to learn.
And slowly I'm starting to come out of my shell and I'm starting
to boom and just be open. So hopefully in a while, Jaguar
will be able to to consider me a friend.
Not that it's a requirement, it's just, I think it's, it's a
safe space to create for someone that you're working with or
you're hanging around with so much and you know, you're doing
something together. It's like the projects we do are
our babies. And I would love for us to be
able to, you know, create with love and send love and good
energies out there so that even when you're watching us or when
you're consuming anything that we're doing, you're able to see,
Oh my goodness, these people really, really give a fuck about
not just what they're doing, but each other.
So I thought about discussing intimacy, like I said, because a
lot of people think intimacy just comes about from sex.
And this Changi has a lot in why people have a lot of random
reckless sex because there's a feeling they're chasing that
they think this feeling of closeness and trust, they think
they will get it from sex. They fail to realize that you
have to cultivate the intimacy even before you reach mombosa
sex like before at a kukuena specia kusama I am horny or I
wanna bang. It has to, you have to have
created a safe space of closeness and, and intimacy.
And the reason I brought this topic up is because I won't say
when, but there's a time I was with someone I really, really
like. We were hanging out.
We were watching Netflix and just, you know, eating snacks
and hanging out. We didn't have sex.
Our decision not to have sex was very intentional.
I mean, we could have if we wanted to.
We did want to. It was like me, we had
intentionally decided not to because of the state of our
emotional health. I mean, we were reconnecting
after a long time physically. Rather, both he and I did not
want our reunion to come from a place of I'm horny and This is
why you're here. I mean, that is part of us
hanging out with each other, but that was not the main reason why
we're hanging out with each other.
So it was very important for him to show me like, hey, I didn't
bring you here to sleep with you.
I brought you here because I I actually value your time and I
value your friendship and I really care about you.
And I discussed this in one episode on also dialogues of
Jacquero. And in the comments guys were
saying how can you hang out with someone you like so much?
I almost said you're in love with.
Maybe I'm in love with him, but how can you hang out with
someone like that And you know, you don't touch each other.
You don't even try to have sex. The reason is consent and
respect. The reason is there is so much
beyond sex. There is so much friendship and
intimacy and that's exactly what we wanted.
We wanted to be close to each other, to trust each other
again, not just to bang and then leave that place.
Feeling like I was used or him feeling like, oh, I don't know
how men normally feel after sex. Maybe they feel relief like oh,
Fuchs, I got that I'm just assuming, but that's not the
feeling we were chasing. And for him to be cognizant and
even, you know, hold back because let me tell you, Mimi, I
was ready if if he said let's do this, I was gonna do it.
But for him to be able to hold back and in turn me to follow
his lead and understand that he doesn't want to make me feel
those feelings of I've been used or because let's face it, if the
sex is not consensual or if it was not discussed beforehand, at
least for me, I normally feel like I've been hoodwinked, like
this was not the plan, this is not what we discussed, this is
not what I wanted or intended. So when it happens, even if I do
it consensually, I always leave the situation feeling like wait,
wait, wait, wait, hold up, Is that what I really, really
wanted? So just being able to hang out
with each other and feel close and talk and share and laugh and
share snacks and watch something together, create memories.
That's such an amazing way of cultivating intimacy.
And this means a lot to me because let's be frank, most of
the times as a woman, when you're hanging out with a man,
sex is always at the back of the head, at the back or at the
front. It's always being taught about.
It's always the thought is always in the vicinity.
So I truly appreciate when I'm able to hang out with someone
and that's not their agenda. Any they're not, that's not what
they're trying. Any they're not hungry and
reckless and just trying to get in my pants.
They actually care about my emotions.
They care about my comfort, about consent and about how I
feel about the whole situation. Of course, we we touched a bit
and we kissed and we were cuddling and there was some, you
know, just talking, laughing and sharing food.
It I walked out, I walked out of that situation feeling even more
in love. The respect that I had for him,
it skyrocketed. The love and the admiration that
I had for him is skyrocketed because he showed me he has
self-discipline. Well, someone might argue that
Oh yeah, anyone can can pretend so that to give you that feeling
of security. Well, whether he was pretending
or not, the fact that he even cared to respect me enough to
just make sure that the creating a feeling of trust and closeness
minus the sex, just that that's enough for me to feel respected
and honored and like my body was being very much respected.
I speak very, very highly of this person because of who he is
as a person. This is not a gimmick, or at
least I don't think it's a gimmick.
But the safety that I gathered from that and the comfort and
the reassurance, it just gave me so much confidence and
excitement for life. I left that place feeling like,
you know, that feeling of falling in love.
I felt like I'm falling in love over and over again.
But here's the catch. Not even with him, but with
myself, in the way he respected me.
He honored the the promises that we'd made.
It made me fall in love with myself.
And the next day, actually for the next week after that, his
smell was still in the air somewhere in my, in my, I don't
know if it's in my hair or in my, I don't know where.
But smelling like him just proved to me that intimacy
lingers beyond words. His care, his softness with me,
him being gentle, him caring, it lingers.
That's just one example. I give another example of my
female friends while I'm with my girlfriends.
My girlfriends are very intentional with the way we love
each other, the way we celebrate each other, the way we treat
each other. Just from my mother.
As I'm sitting there recording this, I'm looking at some
shopping my mum has done for me. And it's not that she's a tea, a
tea, we have everything so she can do shopping for me all the
time. But it's just such a loving
gesture. It's a gesture that comes from,
it's not something that I don't, I don't know how to explain it.
I mean, the love it just you can see it comes from the heart.
It comes from someone wanting to do something good for you.
And so they do it because they want to.
And this simple act, it's not simple and you can say, oh,
she's your mother, she should do it for you.
But I don't take it for granted because this act of selflessness
and love that comes from the heart, it lingers.
It has it has left me feeling so grateful and like I'm more in
love and not just in love with my mom, but more in love with
myself because I'm able to think, oh wow, I'm so deserving
of all these good feelings. I'm so deserving of all these
nice things that people do for me.
And it's because I also do these nice things for people.
I also also show up for people in, if not in the same way, in
the ways that they would like for me to show up for them.
So this is just like a comic debt.
It's just repayment of the way I show up in the world.
The world is showing up for me in the same way with my female
friends. We go out to nice restaurants,
we eat nice food, we send each other flowers, we cook for each
other, take care of each other while we're sick.
This is what intimacy is, this feeling of closeness and trust.
You know how we treat each other.
It's so easy for me to go and cry to my friend and tell her
this is what I need or this is what I'm going through.
Why? Because we've already cultivated
such a safe space for love. And you see, these feelings are
without sexual intimacy, they're without sex.
These feelings are not stemming from ATV fucked each other,
they're stemming from I care about you.
And so I'm going to do something nice for you so that you feel
loved and cared for. It goes a long way when someone
makes you feel very secure and it have us so much respect and
admiration. Intimacy breaks down walls and
helps you face and confront all your fears.
It never just it's never just about like wanting sex more of
feeling very cared for and very, very loved.
So today I'd like for you to workout of this discussion,
thinking about what intimacy means for you and how you can
create intimacy for yourself within yourself.
What are some of the things you do for yourself that help you
feel more comfortable and more able to be vulnerable and just
able to love yourself and fall in love with yourself more?
Because before expecting it from other people, I know I said
other people have helped me do it, but it becomes your sole
responsibility to ensure that you're able to enjoy being
intimate with yourself. Some of the ways that I do this
for myself is that I treat myself really, really well.
I care for myself. I wash myself, I clean myself, I
cook for myself, I feed myself, I pay my bills on time, I walk
for myself, I take care of myself.
I love myself so much and it reflects.
It shows in the way I am, in the way I take care of myself.