Last week, in a session with my therapist as we prepared for an EMDR intensive in a few weeks, I found myself glossing over an important part of my story. It’s a part that not everyone deserves to hear, but one that might be pertinent to the healing work I’m doing with her.
At the time, I didn’t think much of it.
“Surely that one part of the story won’t impact the greater issue we’re working on,” I thought to myself.
It wasn’t until later, after the session, that something began to stir. I realized I had moved past that detail almost automatically. And then a different question surfaced:
What if that one detail I feel so scared to share is actually the part that unlocks a deeper level of healing inside of me?
Sometimes the thing that matters most is the thing we barely even notice ourselves leaving out.
I didn’t sign up for this EMDR intensive to do a half-hearted version of healing. In fact, quite the opposite. I’ve tried a lot of healing modalities for this particular challenge. All of them have helped, and yet the challenge persists.
In some ways, this work feels like standing at a threshold. If this doesn’t lead to a shift, then perhaps the invitation is to live with the challenge, to lean fully into acceptance, with the quiet trust that if God placed it here, it may be meant to be here.
And still, I find myself wondering about vulnerability and intimacy.
Not vulnerability as oversharing or emotional exposure for its own sake, but vulnerability as the act of turning toward something tender and telling the truth about it. And not intimacy as something that happens between people first, but intimacy as the capacity to let someone get close to what’s actually true, including myself.
There are times when withholding is wise and protective. Protective withholding is conscious and discerning. It holds safety as sacred. Avoidant withholding, on the other hand, happens quietly, driven by fear rather than choice.
What struck me most is that I didn’t know which one I was doing in the moment. I only noticed it afterward.
If there’s something we’re leaving out, a detail we’re scared to share, a truth that feels too dangerous to speak, the work isn’t to force ourselves to say it.
The work is first to pause.
To notice the withholding.
To sit with why withholding feels safest.
To allow it room to breathe inside of us.
And then, from that awareness, to decide if and how we choose to share.
This is where vulnerability begins.
And when vulnerability is met with safety, internally or externally, intimacy becomes possible.
Not intimacy as performance. Not intimacy as being seen by everyone. But intimacy as closeness with what is real.
Intimacy, first with yourself.
Into me, I see.
When we pause long enough to truly see into ourselves, we create a safe space to hold what’s there: the hurt, the brokenness, the pain, the grief, the envy, the shadow. Nothing needs to be fixed in that moment. Nothing needs to be explained. That alone is enough.
I’ve been sitting with something Peter Levine said:
“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”
Perhaps intimacy begins when we slow down enough to notice what we’ve been quietly protecting, with ourselves, with another, and with God.
And when to trust ourselves to decide, in our own time, what is ready to be shared.