Signs You’ve Lost Intimacy with Self (and How to Return)

Intimacy with yourself sounds nice in theory, until you actually try it. Self intimacy is not a skincare routine or a solo vacation. It's sitting with your thoughts when they’re inconvenient and its realizing how much of your day is spent trying to prove you’re okay. 

Self-intimacy and self care is often the missing link in why so many women feel disconnected, depleted, or are feeling lonely, even when everything on the outside looks good.

I've noticed the women who feel magnetic aren’t necessarily the most confident or put-together. They’re the most present with themselves, with their no, and with their desire.

This article is about what it actually takes to be with yourself in an authentically intimate way.

What Does Intimacy with Self Really Mean?

I used to think intimacy with self was just another way of saying “self-care.” Like… take a bath, light a candle, say something nice to yourself in the mirror and boom, there's a deep self connection. But as I have learned over time, it’s a bit messier than that, yet it ultimately leads to more joy.

Intimacy with self means having a loving, conscious relationship with your thoughts and emotions, learning how to stay present with what you feel, and prioritizing your well being. Instead of avoiding, overthinking, or pushing away, it means approaching what comes up with patience, compassion, and care, not judgment or urgency to fix.

I didn’t realize how often I leave, get busy, intellectualize, or try to make it all make sense. I can tell you why I feel a certain way, but not always what I actually feel in real time.

Self Love, Self Intimacy & Intimate Relationships

This kind of intimacy with self directly impacts how we connect with others and the quality of our relationships.

Because intimacy with someone else is also being able to sit with their emotions, their thoughts, and their rawness, without needing to change it. It’s being present for who they are, even when it’s uncomfortable. And you can’t offer that understanding to someone else if you’ve never learned to offer it to yourself.

If you flinch at your own sadness, you’ll flinch at theirs. If you rush your own discomfort, you’ll rush theirs. If you constantly override what you feel, you’ll struggle to make room for what someone else feels. Intimacy with self and intimacy with others are different, but they’re directly linked. The more capacity you build to stay with you, the more capacity you’ll have to stay with them.

Why Do we Struggle with Self-Intimacy?

Societal Conditioning

We need to stop pretending that women are naturally better at emotions and intimacy and men just need to catch up. That myth has done damage to everyone.

Boys are taught to shut down their feelings, which has led to a lack of emotional fluency. Girls are taught to manage theirs in a way that keeps everyone else comfortable. Boys get “man up.” Girls get “calm down.” And somewhere in between, both stop learning how to be emotionally fluent.

Emotional fluency is the ability to notice, name, feel, and express what’s real, without shame or shutdown. Most people, regardless of gender, were never taught how to do that.

Men are taught to suppress. Women are taught to make everything digestible. Either way, nobody learns how to stay present in discomfort. Nobody learns how to hold space for emotions that are inconvenient, messy, or not easily resolved.

The cultural script goes that women are the emotional ones. They’re the feelers, the nurturers, the ones who keep emotional connection alive. But what no one says out loud is that women are often expected to carry the emotional weight of both partners, without support, without skills, and without ever being taught how to hold their own grief, rage, or confusion without being dismissed as irrational.

Women aren’t emotionally fluent because they’re women. In fact, a lot of women feel completely disconnected from their bodies, dissociated from their feelings, and exhausted from being the emotional anchor in relationships while secretly not knowing how to anchor themselves. But it’s all hidden under the surface, because women are supposed to be “good at this” and maintain their happiness.

When men do try to access their inner world, they’re often met with encouragement, as long as it’s palatable. As long as it’s love, gratitude, or some kind of redemption arc. But show your sadness, your helplessness, or your shame, and watch how quickly it makes the room uncomfortable. Even in so-called progressive spaces, there’s still a hierarchy of what emotions are welcome. And men quickly learn which ones are not.

We’ve all inherited a system that punishes emotional depth, just differently, depending on your gender. Men get shamed into silence. Women get praised for their emotional labor and punished the moment their emotions stop being convenient.

Fear of Vulnerability

Many women struggle with self-intimacy because it means doing something they were taught not to do - take up space with their real, unfiltered emotions and face their insecurities.

From a young age, we’re shown that certain feelings are fine, as long as they’re polite, contained, and don’t make anyone uncomfortable. Over time, you learn to keep those parts hidden because being fully seen in them was met with rejection or silence.

So you adapt, you learn how to look fine, you stay agreeable, you smooth things over. And in the process, you disconnect from the part of you that’s still feeling everything beneath the surface. Many see this as weakness, but it's actually a survival mechanism to protect against deep-seated fears.

Disconnection from the Body

We aren’t born disconnected from our bodies. We become disconnected as a form of protection. When touch becomes unsafe, when expression is punished, when desire is shamed, or when basic needs are repeatedly ignored, the body learns that feeling too much is dangerous. So it learns to feel less. We dissociate, not just in the extreme sense of being “out of body,” but in subtle, socially sanctioned ways.

This dissociation often begins in childhood, when emotional attunement is inconsistent, when the body is policed or shamed, or when pleasure is taboo or absent. In these early environments, the body stops being a trustworthy place. Instead, it becomes something to manage, monitor, or escape. What starts as a survival strategy becomes a lifelong pattern, often overshadowing the good things we could experience . And by the time we reach adulthood, many of us have lost the ability to feel ourselves in real time, impacting our self worth.

Busyness and Distraction

If you ask most women why they don’t spend more time connecting with themselves, the answer is usually some version of I’m just so busy. But if you listen closely, busyness is rarely just about logistics and more about emotional avoidance and not knowing how to be with what shows up in the silence.

Modern life doesn’t just glorify productivity, it attaches moral value to it. A woman who’s busy is seen as responsible. She’s achieving, she’s needed, she’s not idle. And so we build lives packed with appointments, tasks, errands, texts, mental lists running in the background. We stay in motion, because movement feels like progress.

For many, what surfaces in that pause isn’t peace, it’s agitation, or just a disorienting emptiness that begs to be filled again. So we go back to doing because it feels safer than feeling, and we often don’t imagine what it’s like to just be .

This is why busyness is seductive - it’s socially rewarded and it numbs without judgment. And it lets you look like you’re doing great while staying completely disconnected from your inner world.

The Push-Pull of Expression: When It’s Not Safe to Feel

A lot of women live in a constant back-and-forth, wanting to express what they feel, but not trusting that it’s actually safe to do so.

You try to be honest. You bring something up, maybe it’s how you’re feeling, something that’s been bothering you, something you need. But the moment you say it, you watch the other person shut down. They change the subject, get defensive, tell you you're overreacting, or go silent. So you shrink it. You soften it. You say, “Forget it.”

But you don’t forget it. You carry it.

And then eventually, it comes out. Not perfectly, not calmly, but all at once. Because you’ve been holding it in for too long. And then, you’re “too emotional.” “Too sensitive.” “Hard to talk to.”

This is the trap: you’re asked to be open, but only if your emotions are small, quiet, and easy to handle. You’re told to communicate, but not in a way that actually shows how you feel. You’re told to express yourself, but not if it makes anyone uncomfortable.

And when you’re constantly walking that line, it messes with you. You start thinking you are the problem. That your feelings are too much, that your timing is bad, the way you talk is wrong. Basically, everything about you and how you do things is unacceptable. That you should just “get it together” and not need anything in the first place.

You start keeping everything inside. Not because you don’t care, but because you’ve learned that being honest means being seen as irrational. And that, over time, leads to a kind of numbness.

What makes this harder is that in many relationships, especially with men, there’s no real space for full emotional expression. You’re encouraged to talk, but only in a calm, logical way. Only once you’ve cleaned it up. But how do you talk about something emotional without emotion?

You can’t. Not honestly.

This dynamic makes women seem unpredictable. But what’s really happening is that we’re being pulled between two impossible expectations. You can’t win in that system. You just get quiet. Or explode. Or live in that middle zone where nothing feels real anymore.

Why Self-Intimacy Provides Safety

When emotional expression feels unsafe, inconsistent, or too costly, self-intimacy becomes a necessary refuge. It gives you a way back into relationship with your own feelings without needing someone else to validate them or make room first. Instead of waiting for permission to feel, to speak, or to need, self-intimacy teaches you how to hold space for yourself and acts as a way to process and release deep inner emotions. 

It helps you regulate, express, and understand your own experience before it's outsourced. The more you can stay in contact with yourself, the less likely you are to collapse, explode, or disappear. Self-intimacy gives you the awareness to name what's true, meet it with care, and move forward from a grounded place.

The Layers of Self-Intimacy

Physical Intimacy

Physical intimacy with self is the ability to stay connected to your body through touch, sensation, and awareness.

When it’s embodied, it means you feel at home in your skin. You know how your body feels. You touch yourself without needing a reason, and you listen when your body speaks through sensation: warmth, tightness, hunger, arousal, ease.

This also includes sensuality and self-pleasure. You explore your body curiously. You breathe deeper when sensation rises instead of rushing through it. You choose touch that feels good to you, because you want to feel.

Embodied physical intimacy shows up in small, quiet ways like how you hold your belly, how you apply oil to your thighs, how you pause when things are overwhelming. There’s a calm certainty that you belong to yourself and you don’t need to perform for touch or suppress desire to feel safe. You know how to stay present with your own body, whether you’re turned on, tired, sad, or everything at once, enjoying your own company.

Emotional Intimacy:

Emotional intimacy with self is the ability to feel what you feel, name it honestly, and stay present with it, without numbing, analyzing, or apologizing for it.

When it’s embodied, it looks like catching yourself in the moment you’d normally shut down, and staying. It’s noticing sadness in your chest and letting it sit there for a minute, instead of pushing past it. It’s saying, “I feel this,” without needing it to make sense to anyone else.

When something hard comes up, resentment, shame, unmet need, we often check out, disconnecting from our own feelings. We go into our heads, into productivity, into caretaking, into rationalizing. We don’t even register what we’re feeling until it shows up as tension, burnout, or irritability.

Emotional intimacy interrupts that cycle and helps you with being present. You don’t have to express everything out loud. But you do need to stay with it long enough to hear what it’s trying to say. True emotional intimacy is not letting the hard stuff slip past you unnoticed.

Mental Intimacy

Mental intimacy with self means being aware of the beliefs shaping your decisions, and taking the time to question them.

Most of us aren’t operating from conscious thought. We’re running on programming, rules picked up from parents, school, religion, trauma, and culture. Mental intimacy is the process of slowing down enough to notice what’s behind your choices.

Letting go of a belief doesn’t always feel good. It can be disorienting if you’ve spent years tying your value to productivity or being liked, stepping outside of that pattern can feel like losing part of your identity. But that’s the beginning of clarity.

You don’t need to change every thought. You just need enough space between the thought and the reaction to choose something different. Over time, self-trust grows, decisions get clearer, old patterns lose their grip ad you stop living in defense of who you are and start acting from who you actually are.

Sensual Intimacy

Sensual intimacy with self is the ability to experience pleasure through your senses, on your own terms, in your own body, without shame or performance, savoring these moments.

This means allowing yourself to feel good simply because you can and choosing to enjoy physical sensations, warmth, softness, movement, arousal, without needing a partner, a goal, or a reason. You’re doing it to connect with yourself.

Practicing sensual intimacy can be as simple as taking time to touch your skin with care, run a bath and actually feel the water, breathe into your belly, or use a crystal wand or your hands for intentional self-pleasure. The focus is on staying present with what feels good in your own skin.

When you start practicing this regularly, you become more attuned to what feels good and what doesn’t, without overthinking. You stop relying on someone else to “turn you on” or validate your desire, and you feel more connected to your body, more relaxed in your skin, and more confident making decisions from a place of felt experience.

Spiritual Intimacy

Spiritual intimacy with self is the ability to connect with your inner truth and live in alignment with it along your path , even when no one else sees it, and even when it’s inconvenient.

It’s not necessarily about being religious or looking “spiritual” but more knowing what you believe at your core, and allowing that belief to shape how you show up in your life.

For some, that truth might come from faith, offering hope and guidance. For others, it’s a personal principle, like love, compassion, honesty. Whatever it is, spiritual intimacy means you stay in relationship with that truth. You don’t just think about it or talk about it, you authentically live it, that truth pulses through your veins and expressions.

If your truth is care for all beings, you let it influence how you treat people, how you respond in conflict, how you navigate discomfort, how you speak, and how you hold space for yourself and others.

Viva La Vagina: A Journey to Self-Intimacy

Viva La Vagina is an online membership for women who want to feel connected to their body again, and are ready to do that in a real, practical way.

This course is built to walk you through what self-intimacy actually looks like. You’ll learn how to feel your own boundaries from the inside and how to breathe into your pelvis without tightening or checking out. You will learn how to use a crystal wand with intention, and how to explore your cervix or G-spot or womb space to have a deeper understanding and connection with yourself and your authentic desires and intentions.

Inside Viva La Vagina, you’ll explore practices that support sensation, arousal, repair, and self-trust. You’ll hear real, grounded guidance on things most women are still afraid to say out loud, like how to tell if your body’s actually ready for penetration. What to do when you go numb, how to move through boredom and how to work with real-life symptoms like pain, tightness, or low libido without panic or shame.

Conclusion: Your Commitment to Self-Intimacy

Self-intimacy is your ability to stay in real contact with yourself, through sensation, emotion, thought, and desire. It’s the capacity to feel what’s happening in your body, name what’s true in your experience, and respond to your needs without waiting for permission.

It’s not about being self-aware in theory but more building a relationship with yourself that holds up in real time, when you’re overwhelmed, when you’re touched, when you’re triggered, when you’re numb, when you’re turned on. And you do that consistently, understanding that self-intimacy takes time to develop and nurture.

Meet Your Authors

Courtney & Danelle

Together, Courtney and Danelle fuse their passions for female empowerment and authentic storytelling. Their combined expertise guides women on a transformative journey, celebrating sensuality, self-love, and the bold exploration of pleasure.