Intimacy, Relationship or Regulation

For most of my life I believed I was searching for intimacy. I told myself I wanted closeness, connection and love. I thought that when I felt drawn to a woman, when my body softened around her, when something in me finally settled, that this was intimacy revealing itself. What I couldn’t see then was that my body was responding to regulation, not relationship.

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There was always an ache underneath things. Quiet, persistent, at times easy to outrun but impossible to erase. Alongside it lived fear, not of women themselves, but of closeness and contact. Of being touched and met too directly. I spent years trying to understand how those two could exist together, a deep longing for warmth and a reflexive tightening when it appeared.

That contradiction didn’t begin in adulthood, it began at my birth.

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My first experience of touch was not soothing. It was abrupt and overwhelming. My nervous system learned two lessons at once, contact was essential, and contact was dangerous. That double imprint settled deep in the body, long before I had words to name it. From then on, my personality split, reaching for closeness while bracing against it.

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I didn’t just look for regulation in women. I looked for it everywhere. Work became a regulator. Movement, money, places, routines, achievement, even silence and isolation. Anything that eased the internal tension for a moment was recruited. The external world became a toolkit for keeping myself together. If something worked, even briefly, I leaned on it.

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So I filled my life with false regulators. The people who steadied me, possessions that grounded me. Environments that made me feel safe and an income that soothed fear. None of it was wrong, because it kept me functional. The trouble was, it also kept me dependent. The moment any of my regulators wobbled, my anxiety would surged, and then a new search began again.

When I was close to a woman, the effect was strongest. My breathing slowed, my chest relaxed and the background tension I’d lived with for as long as I could remember eased. My mind quieted and my gut slowly softened, The relief was deep and convincing and so I mistakenly thought it was intimacy. Blinded by my body that doesn’t announce the difference.

I wasn’t consciously using anyone. I genuinely believed I was opening my heart. But without knowing it, I was asking women to carry something that never belonged to them. They became anchors, places where my system could finally rest. And because contact had once overwhelmed me, I hovered between needing it and fearing it, moving close, then pulling away, longing and bracing at the same time.

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Looking back, I can see how this must have felt on the other side. I think many women can sense when they are being leaned on as a regulator. They may feel needed in a way that is heavy rather than mutual. They may feel responsible for another person’s steadiness without being able to name why. It doesn’t always show up as something obviously wrong. It can arrive as pressure, confusion, fatigue, or a quiet loss of desire. Without language for it, that strain often gets interpreted as relational failure, incompatibility or emotional distance.

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From my side, I didn’t know I was doing it. From theirs, they may have felt it without knowing how to name it. And so something unspoken sat between us, shaping the relationship without either of us choosing it.

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Slowly moving through these unconscious regulators was what finally exposed the root of it all. As each external support fell away, I was brought back to the original one. The regulator I had been circling my entire life without knowing it. My mother’s body at birth. The place where regulation was meant to be received and integrated, but unfortunately through nobody’s fault, wasn’t.

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That realisation didn’t arrive as an idea. Like all my realisations, they come through personal experience and arrived through sensation. The original ache and the original fear, felt together without distraction. For the first time, I wasn’t trying to replace them with someone or something else.

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Sitting with that changed everything. The urgency towards life softened and the need to constantly manage it from the outside loosened its grip. Contact stopped needing to save me and what I once thought was Intimacy stopped having to be my medicine.

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What remains now appears quieter, seems slower and feels more honest. When closeness comes, it feels like meeting, not relief. There is warmth without desperation, touch without the body bracing and connection without the demand to hold it together.

I don’t see this as a failure or a flaw. It was a confusion rooted in the depths of my body. But now I’ve seen it, life no longer has to be used to regulate what was never meant to be outsourced.

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And for the first time ever, intimacy now has the potential to become real.

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To explore this work more deeply, visit SPIRITUAL TEACHING & MENTORSHIP >>  and return to the Articles hub for more resources.

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