~ Shakespeare
A client sexting multiple partners, sometimes meeting them for casual sex, told me that he felt compelled to get a response, a reaction, some form of recognition or connection, in order to feel relevant, like he was alive. He never let his ex-girlfriends go for very long because he feared disconnection from them and, ultimately, feared disappearing.
By keeping in touch, periodically waking up the connections to old and new girlfriends, he confessed an immediate sense of gratification but, he said, it left him with a feeling of profound emptiness.
Multiplying the number of (sexual or other) encounters with others, we may have the illusion of being more personally relevant, of existing more tangibly in their eyes and in our own. But because we do this superficially, along the shallow horizontal axis, we are inevitably left with a deep unmet hunger to be known. We lack intimacy (from the Latin intimatus: to be made known)
The only way to fill this hunger is by rotating right so to speak, so that we fill up with deeper, more meaningful connections. Rising up by going deeper. Anchored in intimacy.
