Recoding Intimacy: From Confession to Unconditional Love

Many of us carry a deep, often unconscious conditioning around intimacy and vulnerability. There’s a feeling that even the slightest opening to someone else can feel like a threat to the protective strategies in place lying just underneath the surface.

These express in so many subtle ways it can be hard to even detect. But you can feel them in the tightening of your chest when asked how you are, or the rumble in your gut when you need to share something difficult, a flutter in your heart when someone needs to “talk to you about something”.

There’s a fight or flight reaction in relationships that can come from so many lifetimes of experiencing persecution, punishment and wounding from any level of vulnerable expression or intimate exposure.

In one of my recent processes, I reconnected with a soul aspect of mine named Beth, who had lived life as a nun. In her world, vulnerability was constantly tied to judgment. Even the simple act of being asked how she was became loaded because in her time, it meant being prepared to confess “sins.” Most of the time, those “sins” were simply feelings that were deemed unacceptable. Sadness, desire, longing, anger. The confessional became not a space of release but of constant shame, self-judgement and the pressure to be perfect in order to earn God’s love.

What I realized through Beth is how this conditioning still lingers. Even now, when there’s an invitation to open up in conversation, she can feel like she’s bracing for exposure and needing to confess something wrong. And when the shame feels too much there’s a push away or avoidance. Usually even toward people who have done nothing to deserve it. That’s how the persecution trauma can show up and bleed through into any moment of our daily lives. It can project a need for protection against something as simple as connecting with another human.

But what has been most tender for me in this process is realizing that the Divine I connect with now is not the same punishing false god of Beth’s time. The Divine does not demand perfection or confession in order to love me. The Divine simply loves endlessly, unconditionally, without any need for me to try to be enough. That is the recoding that Beth, and the parts of me impacted by her, are receiving now.

And these strategies that lie within us are usually there for very good reason and have been needed when it truly wasn’t safe to be vulnerable. They aren’t unreasonable or dark or wrong, they’ve simply kept us safe when we needed them the most. But there comes a time when we are safe enough that they aren’t needed anymore and when the trauma is felt through enough, the swords can drop and the hearts can open.

I also feel this isn’t just my healing, but something many of us are moving through. We are recoding our relationship to intimacy, not just with each other, but with the Divine itself. We are getting to know these parts in our shadow so that can been seen and known back into love. To help them move from punishing to lovingly embracing all that they are. From hiding to tenderly opening.

Maybe you can feel this for yourself, too. In the moments you hold back, the way your body tenses at being seen, or the subtle fear that if you share your true feelings, they will be “too much.” What if those are the very places where the Divine wants to meet you most? Not to judge, but to remind you that you are already, and always have been, enough?

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Raianna Shai is a Divine Self Embodiment Facilitator in 1:1 sessions with women. Visit https://www.divineselfembodiment.com for more information about space-holding sessions and free 45-min intro calls, group calls, videos, community, etc.