Talking About Intimacy and Connection

Open Minds Group Jan 2022 - Talking about intimacy and connection

“it’s been hard for me to find a space where people understand my point of view”

Is it easy or hard for you to be emotionally close to others? This was one of the questions we were thinking about at our first Open Minds Group of 2022.

We wanted to think more deeply about how we relate to the people in our lives and to learn from each other about what has helped us find healthy ways to be close to other people where we won’t be shamed or feel unsafe.

Being LGBTQ+ doesn’t automatically mean that we have had hard childhoods or problems with being close to others, but it probably increases the chances of us being shamed in situations where we showed our authentic selves to people who didn’t want to accept or celebrate our honesty.

This can happen lots of times as we’re growing up and because children are raised to trust the views of the adults around them, we can take their views as the truth and carry it with us into our adult lives.

Sometimes we only become aware of how we feel about being close to others when we are put in situations where someone is asking us to be close to them. If these kinds of situations make you feel scared or if you try to avoid them, this might be a sign that you need to do some work to understand what’s going on a bit more.

When you add in the complications of what it means to be a man or a woman and the way that other people might react to your skin colour or heritage, you can see how things can get messy quite quickly.

The important thing to remember that these things affect most of us. It’s likely that your parents, your friends, and your partners will all have hang-ups from their childhoods that could get in the way of their adult relationships.  Not everyone has the privilege, resources, or ability to think about them and that’s just the way it is. Sometimes we’re not ready because it’s too hard and that’s ok too.

Learning how to have healthy intimate connections with others, where we don’t worry about their reactions to what we’re saying, takes practice. We hope that our groups are one place where people can start this practice.

We try hard not to let our sexualities, Panjabi or South Asian heritage, or our assigned or chosen gender get in the way of our attempts to have conversations with each other.

We hope that by allowing you to be heard and seen without feeling shame or judgement, that you will be able to take this feeling into your day to day lives and to make your own spaces where you can continue to build good quality intimate connections with others. By sharing these spaces with you, we also hope to be able to take these ideas into our own lives too.

With warm wishes,

The Open Minds Project ­

We meet on the last Wednesday of each month and if you want to join us at an Open Minds Meeting, please visit the Events page on our website.

The Open Minds Project