"I recently learned as well that expressing emotional intimacy can be seen as a dance. You reach out and bravely await a response that might come or not, and that might be positive, negative or indifferent. Your move, their move, and so on."

Maybe try contact improvisation, then it becomes a literal dance. Emotions expressed as body motions. And you act and react to others. Exploring, moving forward, or backward and block yourself again. How you feel it. And also deal with rejection. Cool, that move was too much, I back off. No big deal, I also set my own boundaries. And maybe I open later. But all that I didn't really learn in school or in childhood. There I rather learned to keep my walls up.