Love is not a feeling alone, and intimacy is never just physical. When two people come into relationship - emotionally, sexually, or relationally - they bring far more than attraction or desire. They bring nervous systems shaped by early attachment, bodies that have learned how safe closeness feels, histories of rupture and repair, inherited patterns of relating, and unconscious expectations about power, tenderness, abandonment, and belonging. This is why intimacy can feel so enlivening, and also so destabilising.

From a psychological and nervous system perspective, intimacy is one of the most powerful activators we experience. It brings us face to face with parts of ourselves that cannot be accessed through thinking alone: longing, fear, surrender, control, shame, desire, and vulnerability. What is often called “chemistry” is frequently the nervous system recognising something familiar - not always safe, but compelling. Without awareness, these forces can play out unconsciously, creating cycles of pursuit and withdrawal, intensity and collapse, dominance and disappearance.

Depth psychology reminds us that what we repress does not vanish; it seeks expression. Desire is one of the places where this becomes most visible. Attraction often carries shadow material - the parts of ourselves we were not allowed to be, or learned to hide in order to stay connected. When intimacy is acted out without awareness, shadow dynamics can be mistaken for passion, and intensity can be confused with depth. When intimacy is held consciously, those same dynamics can become a pathway to integration rather than repetition.

In my work, love and intimacy are approached as alchemical processes - not because they are mystical, but because they transform us when they are met with awareness. Alchemy is the meeting of opposites: strength and softness, autonomy and closeness, desire and safety, light and shadow. When these opposites are allowed to coexist rather than compete, relationship becomes a place of growth rather than reenactment.

This is where nervous system regulation becomes essential. Intimacy requires the capacity to stay present when sensation, emotion, and vulnerability rise. Many people have learned to manage closeness through strategies such as control, dissociation, performance, or emotional withdrawal - not because they are broken, but because those strategies once kept them safe. In relationship, these adaptations can limit connection unless they are understood and gently renegotiated.

My work with individuals and couples supports this process at multiple levels. Through therapeutic exploration, we bring unconscious patterns into awareness - attachment styles, relational wounds, and inherited beliefs about love. Through nervous system work, we support the body to tolerate closeness without overwhelm or shutdown. Through mindscaping and imagery, we work with the symbolic and emotional layers of experience that words alone cannot reach. Through a functional understanding of stress, hormones, and biology, we recognise that intimacy is also shaped by physiology, not just psychology.

Love deepens when people no longer have to split parts of themselves in order to stay connected. When desire does not require self-abandonment. When vulnerability does not lead to collapse. When strength does not harden into control. In these moments, intimacy becomes less about proving or taking, and more about meeting - meeting oneself, and meeting another, with honesty and presence.

This Element of Love is not about striving for an ideal relationship. It is about understanding how intimacy actually works in real human systems, and creating the conditions in which connection can be both alive and safe. When shadow is integrated rather than acted out, love becomes less dramatic but more sustaining. When the nervous system feels secure, passion does not disappear - it becomes inhabitable.

Love, in this sense, is not something we fall into. It is something we learn to hold.

I am here to help…