Authentic Intimacy

Men, like yourself, are severely crippled when it comes to an understanding, expressing, and enjoying intimacy.  This lack of understanding is one of the primary reasons pornography is so rampant.  Men are seeking to fill intimacy voids in their life.  Healing of the sexual emotions is intricately connected to healing the whole man – mind, body, emotions, and spirit.

A Man’s Heart Longs for Authentic Intimacy  

When your life is void of healthy intimacy, it creates a sexual craving.  This craving is a counterfeit intimacy – resulting in a misdirected sex drive.  This drive is insatiable!  Instead of bringing fulfillment to your heart and mind, this counterfeit intimacy ends in just another orgasm.  All of which are fleeting and leave you feeling very frustrated.

Healthy intimacy is meant to be both expressed and received emotionally, intellectually, socially, spiritually, and physically within all your relationships.  This is true for both men and women.

Without healthy intimacy, pursuing sexual gratification is like pouring water into a bucket with holes.  It will never satisfy your heart.

Although you deeply desire healthy, intimate relationships, just knowing this doesn’t make achieving them a quick and easy process.  There are deep-rooted barriers that will hinder and undermine your effort to develop healthy intimacy.  These barriers are your faults, your fears, your failure, and your intimacy ignorance.  We’ll cover these barriers in greater detail in upcoming blogs.  In this five-part series, I’ll help you understand what healthy intimacy is, how healthy intimacy is both expressed and received.

 So what is healthy intimacy?

Great question, because if you don’t know what healthy intimacy is, how do you know when you’ve got it?  Furthermore, if you don’t know what healthy intimacy is how you can nurture and grow it?  Frustrating isn’t it?

So let me help you to redefine and discover what healthy intimacy is.  The following five facets comprise healthy intimacy:

• Closeness
• Privacy
• Affection
• Acceptance
• Openness

You cannot experience or express healthy intimacy if all five of these facets are not present.  They are inseparable; each one depends upon the other.  All of these must be active and alive to experience healthy intimacy.  These interconnected characteristics are pivotal to understanding what healthy intimacy is.  Each draws confidence and strength from each other.

Redefining healthy relational intimacy is desperately needed in today’s culture.  I’ll go into greater detail about how closeness, privacy, affection, acceptance, and openness restore and transform intimacy in any relationship.  Look for this in my next blog.

I hope today’s blog has encouraged you.  Make sure you sign up to receive blogs posted every Tuesday and Thursday. TransformingFamilies.org resources are designed to guide you through the restoration process of developing your heart, mind, and strength, enabling you to become the man God created you to be.

I also provide one-on-one coaching, if you want to improve your relationships, let’s connect through e-mail at ‘rturner@transformingfamilies.org’.  My hope for you is that through these blogs, references, and resources, God will transform you from being bruised or broken to an abundantly blessed man.