Getting Naked

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Trust, Intimacy, and Getting Naked

Many of us find ourselves living in a world where it is easier to find and use a nude bathing spot than to find trust and intimacy in our relationships. Thus, while we have learned to strip down the layers of clothing we hide behind, many of us have few skills for stripping away the layers that separate us from our family, friends or partners, to apply appropriate levels of trust and achieve greater levels of intimacy.

What is Trust?

Understanding trust is somewhat similar to understanding cats in that one’s individual experiences of both cats and trust, shape our concepts. However, all forms of trust, like all cats, have certain similarities which allow us to generate definitions so that we have a working basis for communication about these concepts.  Therefore, our first step is to settle upon a working definition of what we mean by trust so that we can apply this to our understanding of intimacy and nakedness.

Thus, trust, in this exercise, is defined as the suspension of selected defenses and the adoption of a position previously considered as one of vulnerability in order to achieve specific goals and regulated by the specific conditions at the time.

Every living thing develops and exhibits appropriate defensive behavior in order to ensure its survival. These defenses may be as simple as crawling into a shell or as elaborate as the Great Wall of China which is the only man made monument to defensiveness that can actually be seen from space.

In individuals, these defensive constructions consistent are with their personal assessment of two things; the danger they assess to be posed by others and their assessment of own vulnerability in response to that danger. Thus, when people grow shells or build walls, the height and thickness of these are indications of the perceived threat level and their own feelings of vulnerability.

The problems with these walls is not that they don’t work, but rather that they work too well. This happens in two ways. First, the walls insulate the individual from new information which might moderate their assessment of the threat. For example, the Chinese continued building their wall for centuries never stopping to reassess the reality of the threat level. Second, the walls give the individual little scope to exercise their own strengths in handling ‘skirmishes’ and thus, provide no opportunity for the individual to gain confidence in their own ability to handle any attack from outside. Consequently, the individual maintains or even increases their fear level and responds by increasing their ‘walls’.