We are group animals. Our need for connection overrides all of our other needs.

Whenever we engage in therapeutic practice, or any other healing event, we first need relationship. Our relationship reflects how close we are.

This closeness is a generic term.  Essentially all aesthetic experiences offer proximity, whether virtual or actual. As an example, we are physically close with strangers in a movie theatre, all of us observing life on the screen as the actors pull each of us into their experience. Through the sharing of an aesthetic experience the distance between us disappears, even though sometimes we are on different continents.

Inside our families, having a central awareness of proximity allows each of us to tolerate what it means to live together, despite the pain of our competing needs. The pain and conflict of our proximity brings us back to the beginning of attachment, which paradoxically, is separation.