I am a big believer that intimacy with your children has the power to change their lives and yours.
I have been deliberately building my capacity to create (businesses, art, physical movement) and the most counter-intuitive part of my journey has been how a lack of intimacy with my parents limited my capacity to accomplish.
Without intimacy, I didn't have the environment I needed to grow into my full potential. And without intimacy, your children won't either.
Why is that?
It's because we need safety to take the risks that lead to growth. Wherever it's not safe at home, children cannot grow. And while many homes, mine included, made it safe to take risks in education, arts, and sports, many aren't safe to take risks emotionally.
You make emotions safe or unsafe.
Your children depend on you for everything. When you react emotionally, you become undependable and their world becomes unsafe. You teach them their emotions lead to a lack of safety. They learn to suppress feelings to maintain safety. And this impacts the rest of their life, because our emotions influence our experience of everything.
When I was 28 I started an eight-year-journey to become capable of intimacy. I spent hundreds of hours, felt my way through great pain, and spent more than $50,000 to heal the wounds from my childhood. Since then, and for the first time, I found the capacity to found Fawn Friends, lost 20 lbs (I was obese as a child), and established meaningfully intimate relationships for the first time. Healing my intimacy wound helped me make the right friends, spend my time in the right ways, and improve myself in ways I otherwise never would have.
I wouldn’t take back a single minute of my life, but not everyone has to go through what I did to experience the level of capacity I now have. It would have come to me so much earlier in life had I experienced true intimacy growing up. Few people do, which is why I write about it so often and why I think you should prioritize it above all else.
When children can be vulnerable with you, they become invulnerable to the world.
It’s a paradox. Through vulnerability comes invulnerability. This makes a safe home, physically and emotionally, the greatest gift you can give your child. It gives them the gift of experiencing the world from a place of independent strength.
When did you last lose your peace? Something happened that brought out anger, sadness, guilt, fear, or irritation, and you lost control for a minute, an hour, or a day. You got lost in the feelings. You are vulnerable to that stimulus.
If your parents reacted emotionally to your anger, sadness, or grief, they did not teach you it is OK to feel those feelings. They did not gift you the invulnerability I encourage you to gift your children. And unless you make it safe for them to express how they feel, you won't either.
Children have to learn to be vulnerable so they can accept what is true. Their anger is true. Their sadness is true. Their excitement, joy, love, is true. When you react to your children’s emotions, they learn it’s not safe to experience what’s true, learning to reject truth to maintain safety. That makes them vulnerable to truth—a vulnerable existence, generally. They become vulnerable in the same way you were last time you lost your peace.
When children are safe to share their life with you, you both experience intimacy
What you’ve got to do is simple: be someone your kids can bring anything to without fearing your reaction.
Simple, but not easy. Kids are the most triggering forces on the planet. They evoke maximum emotion. If you fear your anger, their anger will infuriate you. If you fear your sadness, their sadness will invoke terror in your heart. See how the cycle repeats between generations? Your unhealed wounds invoke emotion in you that cause your children to develop the same. Your parents’ unhealed wounds had the same impact on you. And their parents’ on them.
This is an ancient problem.
It’s why I’m building Fawn. To break this centuries-long cycle. Fawn/Willow models safe listening to help parents and kids learn to do the same. Through conversation with Willow, families build intimacy. It is the first time in history we can help millions of families with one effort.
Let’s summarize 👇
5 specific reasons why you should prioritize intimacy above all else:
Reason #1: intimacy happens when it is safe for your child to share their life with you. That in itself it worth prioritizing.
Reason #2: children learn to process feelings in moments of vulnerability, if you’re not safe they won’t learn to process their feelings.
Reason #3: when a child (or adult) learns to process their emotions they become invulnerable to life’s hardship (not that life won’t hurt, but that they maintain control when it does).
Reason #4: children can’t grow if they aren’t safe. If you don’t make it safe for them to process emotions with you, you'll have to hope they figure it out for themselves as an adult (like you probably have to).
Reason #5: If you don't break this cycle, it will probably continue on in your family for centuries.
If you start prioritizing intimacy let me know—I'd love to connect with you (and answer any questions you have getting started!).
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p.s.
Huge Favor
Do you know a mom or dad working to be the best parent they can? If so, please take 1 minute to forward them this email with a note telling them you notice the effort they put in. That 1-minute today will change their life, and their kids' lives forever.
And, you'd be doing me a huge favor. I'm on a mission to reach as many parents as I can, to show them that their child's emotional health is a primary predictor of their happiness and success as adults. So, if you share this email with one or two parents, you'd be making a big difference in helping me with that mission.
Thank you! 🙏
Peter