The basement and the attic: where intimacy begins

A look at the places we overlook and why closeness with another person depends on visiting them first.

When closeness with someone you love falters, it is natural to look for the fault in how the two of you talk to each other. Sometimes that is where it lies. In my work as a coach, I often see that it lies elsewhere, in spaces of yourself you have never entered. Intimacy with another person grows from intimacy with yourself, and it begins in the basement and the attic.

Imagine your life as a house. It has the rooms you use every day, the ones you've furnished and made your own, where you live, work and rest. For some people it's a lively place, with doors often open, friends and family coming and going, a table always laid for one more. For others it's a quiet refuge, somewhere to draw breath, where only a few chosen people are admitted. Most houses are a bit of both, depending on who is in them.

Perhaps you share your days with a partner, children or housemates. Perhaps you live alone and invite people in on your own terms. However it's arranged, you built it over the years with what you had, using the strategies you learned in order to get by, and for the most part it has served you well.

Then, at some point, something shifts. Sometimes an event brings it on: a new love, a loss, a move, a change of direction. Sometimes nothing happens at all, except that the house, however lovely, is no longer enough.

What's hidden in the basement and the attic

Most houses also have two spaces that rarely belong to daily life. You tend to think of them as storage. They hold what you don't need right now or use only occasionally, like empty suitcases and seasonal items. They also hold what is no longer in use, or what you have never quite let go of, for reasons you seldom question: old books, photographs, toys, furniture that belonged to someone else. You put things there, close the door, and mostly forget about it.

These spaces aren't really lived in. Nobody has furnished them, put them to use, or touched them with imagination. They remain unclaimed: nothing has been made of them yet, and nothing has been ruled out either.

What lies in them is more than what the boxes and suitcases hold. Here are the emotions, instincts, thoughts, urges and energies you have suppressed, denied, or simply never explored. Fear and shame are here, and guilt, regret, rage, anger and despair, thrown in cardboard boxes, or locked in tight containers. But so are hope, dreams wrapped in tissue paper, and gold. All of it is what Jung called the shadow. What you couldn't afford to feel, and what you never knew you wanted, went behind the closed doors of the attic and the basement. They rustle and whisper. And these are the spaces you can now begin to explore.

That whispering is a call. To answer it is to begin claiming these spaces and turning them into rooms with a purpose: the alchemist's laboratory, the artist's studio, a study, a sacred space or a playroom. As they come alive, something begins to move through the whole house. Doors open, air circulates, light reaches corners it never touched.

This is intimacy: the freeing, flowing spirit of a house you fully dwell in, yourself first, and then those you invite in. You can only take another person as far as you have gone yourself. Until then, what looks like a communication problem is often two people at the threshold of a space that neither of them has entered.

What intimacy needs

Psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott saw the capacity to be alone, in the presence of another, as a sign of emotional maturity and as the ground on which closeness rests. He also saw play as the place where a person comes most fully into themselves: "It is in playing and only in playing," he wrote in Playing and Reality, that a child or adult is able "to be creative and to use the whole personality." Closeness alone is not yet intimacy. When it makes room for curiosity and playfulness, intimacy flourishes. The laboratory, the studio and the playroom are exactly such places.

Jung, for his part, wrote: "Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other." The basement and the attic are the containers of that shadow, for as long as you leave their doors closed. But a shadow can be brought into the light.

When you decide to visit these spaces, claim them and give them a purpose, what was hidden becomes something to work with. And when two people acknowledge the power between them and choose, with clear consent, who holds it and who yields it, power is no longer love's shadow. It becomes one of the ways love speaks.

The role of intimacy coaching

The basement and the attic are reached by stairs that have always been part of the house, and this is where the work begins. As a coach, I come as your thinking partner and an educator: I hold the light, bring maps and language, and think alongside you. The stairs are yours to climb, and you choose which door to open first.

Once inside, I shine the light where you lead. Sometimes I notice a box you keep stepping around, or a container locked for years, and I turn the light toward it and ask what it holds. Whether to open it, and when, is always your choice.

The doors to these two spaces have locks, and so do many of the boxes and containers inside. Every lock was put there for a reason: each once protected something, and each deserves respect. We don't break them. We look at what they guard, and you decide which to open. The key is yours, and consent is what turns it.

The first steps are small: a window opened, a lamp lit, one thing lifted out of a box and looked at. We build trust first, and that trust is the first intimacy we create together. But comfort is not the aim. Once the ground is steady, I will challenge you as well, gently and directly, because what has been locked away for years rarely comes out on request.

I can also draw on another map: a blueprint of the whole house that reveals what has been stored away in the basement and the attic. It doesn't say what we will find. It shows us where to look. I also work as a thinking partner and educator, and I will tell you honestly when a space calls for a therapist.

A house lived in from the basement to the attic is not a different house. It is the same one, with more of it in use, and more of you at home in it. If you have begun to hear the rustling and whispering behind those doors, there is no hurry. The stairs are already there, part of the architecture of the house. If you would like a thinking partner as you climb or descend them, reach out to a coach.