When you want to feel closer, it can be confusing to love someone, spend your life with them, and still feel emotionally alone. Intimacy is more than proximity or affection—it’s the experience of feeling known, understood, and emotionally connected while still being yourself. Sometimes the desire for closeness is there, but something keeps getting in the way.

Our capacity for intimacy develops through relationships. The experiences we've had with closeness, vulnerability, trust, rejection, and dependence can shape how comfortable we feel allowing another person to truly know us. You might keep parts of yourself private, struggle to express what you need, withdraw when emotions become intense, or become overly focused on maintaining closeness. These patterns often make sense when we understand where they came from, even when they now leave us feeling disconnected.

Real intimacy requires some vulnerability. It means allowing another person to see parts of you that you can't completely control—your needs, fears, desires, uncertainty, and imperfections. For many people, this creates an internal tension: I want to be close to you, but being truly known feels risky. Therapy provides a place to understand this tension rather than simply pushing yourself to “open up.” Together, we can explore what happens when you move toward closeness, what makes you pull away, and what you have learned to expect from other people.

My approach is relational and psychodynamic, which means we're interested not only in what happens in your relationships but in the deeper patterns underneath them. As you understand these patterns, intimacy can become less about performing, pleasing, pursuing, or protecting yourself and more about being present with another person. The goal isn't simply to have more connection. It's to develop relationships in which you can be more fully yourself—and allow someone else to meet you there.

Adam Piddington MA, LMHC