Intimacy and 100% Responsibility

When We Can’t Respond . . . The Disappearance of Self

We can't really respond to ourselves, let alone anyone else, if we’re not fully here.

There’s a quiet grief many of us carry — the ache of not really being here. Not fully. We show up in our relationships, say the right things, even offer affection and care. But something essential is missing. It's hard to identify what it could be becasue life looks pretty good for us. So what if we are over-weight or don't have sex with our partners. We've got our Netflix to keep us warm, or we're working 80-hours a week.

I'm suggesting that what might be missing for many people is a sense of contact. A feeling of ground. An inner ease or fulfillment, contentment or completion that feels coherent and alive. We look for that sense of connection with objects or experiences located outside ourselves; we hope for it from others, especially our partners, hoping they will pull us into completeness . . . into existence. But intimacy doesn’t work that way.

We can’t connect with anyone else, if we can’t be in realtionship with ourselves. Being in relationship with ourselves includes developing the capacity to be aware of and responsilbe for what we are experiencing and how we are existing.

This is the starting point for understanding 100% Responsibility — not as a heavy burden or an isolating behavioral standard, but as self-awareness and the ability to respond to one’s own experience with presence and curiosity.

The root of the word responsibility is not obligation — it is the capacity to meet what is happening, internally and externally, with coherence and care.

But for many of us, that capacity was never fully developed. As infants and young children we adapted to survive, and in so doing we learned to turn our attention outward . . . to respond to needs and expectations of caretakers while denying our sensory knowing and emotional needs.

Long before we had language or memory, we were learning how to be in the world. If our cries were met with warmth, we began to associate sensation with safety. If our needs were responded to with attunement, we began to sense that we mattered. But if our signals were ignored, shamed, misattuned, or punished — we learned something else entirely.

We learned to hide.

We learned to fragment.

We learned to become what was needed in order to ensure belonging and survival — and that meant abandoning the parts of us that were inconvenient, vulnerable, or “too much.”

These early adaptive strategies don’t disappear with age. They become the scaffolding of our adult identities and personalities. The smiling pleaser. The rational fixer. The fierce avoider. The perpetual caretaker. The armored controller. These roles helped us survive emotionally unmanageable circumstances — but they cost us something essential: Presence.

When we adapt by disappearing, we lose access to the very self that would allow us to respond to life. Instead, we react— automatically, defensively, and often unconsciously. Not because we’re immature or irresponsible, but because we are still living inside a survival blueprint that was formed before we had a choice.

Reaction vs. Response

This distinction is essential to understanding 100% Responsibility.

• Reaction is unconscious. It’s fast, protective, and often disproportionate. It arises when old pain gets triggered . . . what I call The Unbearable . . . that unprocessed reservoir of early aloneness, shame, rage, and longing that was too much to feel in the nervous systems of young children.

  
  

• Response, by contrast, emerges from embodiment, awareness and curiosity. It’s the capacity to feel what’s happening, to perceive the experience . . . The Unbearable . . . without becoming it. It’s the inner pause that allows for clarity. It’s the ability to sense, name, and hold our own sensations, feelings, needs, and impulses . . . before acting them out on others.

  
  

To respond, we must have a self. A center. A felt sense of “me” grounded in the body, in time and space. This is not a cognitive idea of self. It is sensory. Known in the bones. It is intimately related to time, rhythm, breath. It’s what makes it possible to witness our experience, rather than be swept away by it.

When we can’t find this ground of self, our relationships suffer. We unconsciously expect our partners to hold what we can’t bear. We confuse merging with connection. When they react to our pull for their parenting, we lash out or collapse. We project old unmet needs onto current dynamics, demanding repair for wounds our partners never created. They do aggravate and amplify our old wounds but they are not the cause of our suffering. In these moments, we are not relating . . . we are surviving.

Without 100% Responsibility, connection becomes unstable. We react instead of reflect. We defend instead of disclose. We blame instead of attune. We collapse into shame or explode in anger without awareness of our origins. We make our partner responsible for our regulation — or withdraw to manage it alone.

And most painfully, we then struggle to offer true accountability, because we aren’t fully present to our impact. If I can’t feel myself, how can I feel you or my effect on you? If I’m numb, fragmented, or dissociated, how can I be accountable for how I affect you?

This doesn’t mean we’re bad partners. It means we’re carrying early adaptations that were essential once . . . but are now obstructing intimacy.

Let’s be clear: to take 100% Responsibility does not mean 100% sefl-sufficient . . . doing everything yourself. It doesn’t mean you never need anyone. In fact, it’s the opposite.

It means knowing . . .intimately . . . when you are present and when you are not.

It means being able to say, “I’m disconnected right now. I need to pause. I need support. I don’t know what I need, but I know I’m off-center.”

This kind of awareness is radical. It breaks cycles of codependence and control. It allows us to stay in relationship without abandoning ourselves . . . or asking someone else to hold what only we can feel.

To take 100% Responsibility is to reclaim the right to exist . . . fully, vulnerably, and honestly . . . and to relate from that experience of aliveness rather than adaptation.

If you’ve spent your life surviving, it can feel impossible to imagine what “responding” might even look like. But this is where the work begins . . . not in performance, but in presence.

The Fluid Intimacy™ model offers a framework through which we learn to reconnect with the body, build internal coherence, and gently witness the protective patterns that have long stood guard. We begin to locate ourselves . . . again and again . . . until we can choose how to meet life, rather than default to how we were once conditioned.

The moments we can respond . . . truly respond to our sense of self . . . is the moment we begin to be intimate with ourselves.

And from there, intimacy with others becomes possible. Everything becomes possible.