Love

Hello Courageous Pals,

This month we’re continuing the series on psychologist Alfred Adler’s Five Life Tasks. Today’s task is Love – specifically, intimacy. Adler conceptualised this as the kind of love you have with a life partner and a sexual intimate: a marriage. My coaching teacher Colin Brett has usefully reconceptualised this as ‘one to one’ love, as opposed to the ‘one to many’ relations of friendship, family and community. Perhaps your most intimate relationships entail multiple partnerships, or no sexual component at all: the main distinction here is that this Life Task is all about the strongest and closest emotional relationships that you have in your life; the partnership or partnerships you rely on, and who can rely on you, for a trustworthy, honest, communicative, respectful and accepting relationship of equals.

Courage Pie (to go):

We all know that intimacy, particularly the sexual variety, is a very powerful emotive force, something that can cause intense pain or intense joy. There are lots of ways to get off track with intimacy; to engage in behaviours and beliefs that interfere with true completion of this Life Task. We can avoid true intimacy by extremes – either through fear, shyness, and distance from any potential intimates, or through demanding so much of another person that we refuse to act as an equal partner in a relationship; to respect our own autonomy. We can engage in superficial sexual diversions and distractions that might be fun as hobbies but which don’t allow us to meet human to human; to stand, in the words of Jane Eyre, with “my spirit that addresses your spirit…equal — as we are!” It takes a great deal of plot and many pages after this for Jane and Mr Rochester to find a relationship truly based on equality in which both partners have a sense of self-worth and cooperation in the world instead of against it.

One of my favourite things about Jane Eyre is her insistence that at the level of the soul, people are equals. It is this self-respect which allows her to be firm about her boundaries and to refuse situations where she cannot act as an equal, a power that she exercises several times throughout the novel despite the rigid conventional expectations of society and station into which she was born. The first task of any loving partnership is to love oneself; to believe oneself worthy of love.

Fancy a discussion on the move? Join us at 3 PM tomorrow (note later than usual start time!) 19 August, outside the Populus Cafe at Leith Community Croft for a gentle walk (or wheel) around Leith Links. Sign up via Eventbrite to be notified of any last-minute changes! Can’t make it in person? Reach out to a courageous pal and use the Questions to Go below for a reflective walk of your own.

Questions to Go:

• What does intimacy mean to you? How does intimacy relate to partnership? To commitment?
• What forms of intimacy are important to you in a partnership? Do all these forms of intimacy need to exist in one relationship, or can they come from several different partnerships?
• What do you need to have in a relationship of intimacy or partnership which distinguishes it from friendship?
• What qualities do you bring to an intimate relationship? What’s your best quality as a partner?
• How should people prepare for entering into relationships of intimacy?
• How do people know when it’s time to end a relationshp of intimacy, and how should they negotiate their exits?

Science Behind the Slice:

Brett, C. (2025). What if I Could? How to Be Your Own Coach. 193-196.

Cohen, R. (2024). The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. St Marten’s Press.

Ansbacher, H. L. (1968). The concept of social interest. Journal of Individual Psychology, 24(2), 131. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/concept-social-interest/docview/1303444927/se-2

Coming up & out & about…

As usual, Courage Pie: to go happens the day after these newsletters go out – Wednesday 19 August! Sign up via Eventbrite so you can keep track of changes like this month’s later start time.

Our Creative Roots, Open Wings (CROW) wellbeing series at the Corvidaeum is taking a little break this month – we’ll be back next month for a session all about Corvid Community Power 🐦‍⬛🙌 So often we struggle to ask for or accept help – this session will help the Corvidaeum community think about what you need help with, who to ask, and how to ask without guilt.

In the meantime, Gwenne Dickson of Living Your Best Life coaching recently interviewed me about my experiences using creative practice to help me process my cancer diagnosis back in 2023, and make something beautiful from a very difficult time. Watch the interview here, and earlier this summer I made a new website about the Picture Your Poisons project!

I’ve also recently launched a new series of self-paced Curious Catalysts toolkits – these are some of my favourite research-backed coaching techniques all put together for you in a straightforward, DIY format. Stay tuned as I’ll be launching more throughout the autumn! If you haven’t received your free copy of the Gremlin Getting-Along Guide as a newsletter subscriber, just reply to this email and I’ll make sure you get one.

If anything in this newsletter series has brought up a topic you’d like to work on one-on-one, here’s where you can find all the info about my coaching approach and current offers.

Very best,

Caitlin