Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy (10 page)

Take notes on all your answers in your journal so you can come back to this and see how it fits with other information you are gathering about yourself. Let’s balance any negative thoughts and feelings you might be having about yourself by looking at your relational strengths. In your journal, write brief answers to each question below:

1. Are you a person who is careful about getting into close relationships, taking some time to observe, reflect, and consider whether the other person is likely to bring positive things into your life?
   
2. Do you have a pretty good intuitive sense about other people, knowing when someone is not necessarily a good fit for you?
   
3. Do you enjoy solitude and welcome your own company? Do you know how to make the most of your time alone?
   
4. Do you know how to keep yourself free to pursue activities that really matter to you, such as creative pursuits, platonic friendships, playtime with pets or the children in your life, your spiritual practice, travel, and adventure?
   
5. Are you able to keep healthy boundaries in close relationships so you don’t lose track of who you are and how you’re feeling?
   
6. Do you assert your own preferences and desires when you are sexual with someone?
   
7. Do you enjoy a wide variety of activities, and give your time generously to family, children, friends, and other relevant communities in your life?
   
8. Do you know how to be there for others, helping them to feel understood, consoled, and loved?
   

As you look over your answers to this set of questions, notice if you have cultivated a deeper awareness and appreciation for your strengths. Check out how your body is feeling now.

If you had trouble writing the positive things suggested in the second part of the exercise, remind yourself to come back to this and try again when you have done some more work with yourself and your relationships. Also, you might try asking a trusted friend to go over these questions with you to see if your friend can help you arrive at a more positive awareness of your strengths.

Awareness of Your Favorite Distancing Tactics

Although this area of awareness may seem relatively new to you, in fact, you’ve probably known for a long time how you create distance between yourself and others. Some of your tactics may be healthy. Others may have been keeping you trapped in confusion, dissatisfaction, frustration, and loneliness. Part of developing more awareness of your distancing tactics involves helping you to decide what to keep and what to let go.

To get started, we’re going to use a different part of your brain to access some new information. You will need a few pieces of blank paper and a sharp pencil with an eraser. You will be drawing a kind of diagram to show you how you position yourself in relation to others in certain situations, and to demonstrate visually how you handle discomfort related to your intimate relationships.

Exercise

Drawing Your Favorite Distancing Tactics

Here are some scenes you can draw to aid in obtaining new insights about yourself:

1. Draw yourself and a new love interest during the early stages of starting up a romance. Don’t worry about drawing accurate pictures. You can use two circles or a circle and a square to represent how close you two are, whether one of you is chasing the other (label which figure represents you), whether you are surrounded by lots of other people or not (draw more circles or squares), whether you have “happy faces” or are looking scared or angry, whether you’re walking off a cliff together or huddled together in a house or under a tree. Is one of the figures moving toward someone else even while the “partner” figure is still in the picture?
   
2. Use your imagination to draw whatever else you want to represent whatever is most typical for you in a new relationship.
   
3. Now, try depicting a relationship that is more settled and committed. It could be the relationship you’re in now, or one you were once in, or one you imagine yourself being part of in the future.
   

Notice if the two scenes you drew are very similar or very different. Do you seem to be closer and more comfortable in one picture than the other? Are you the one moving away in both scenes?

By drawing these scenes rather than writing about them or talking, you can obtain a different kind of information. When you use drawing instead of words, you will access a younger and more direct part of yourself. This part is like an “inner child” self who can observe and report the real fundamentals about how you distance. Using adult language qualifies everything and can become so complicated that you may end up not really knowing how to zero in on your primary distancer tactics.

Now, in your journal, write the three most significant things you learned from doing these drawings. Later on, you will refer back to this exercise in self-awareness to see what’s changed for you.

Common Distancer Tactics

As you continue to become more and more aware of your inner distancer, keep in mind that you are not the only one. Notice that many people use distancing tactics. Here are some very common ones:

• Blaming the other person
  
• Avoiding the expression of your feelings
  
• Pretending that everything is okay when it obviously is not (also called “denial”)
  
• Giving in or giving up (learned helplessness)
  
• Using addictions to cover up your feelings and keep yourself disconnected
  
• Using various forms of dissociation, which means that you split your mind off from what’s really happening so that you aren’t really present with the other person, even if you seem to be more or less there
  
• Filling up your life with lots of other people so there’s little or no time left to nurture your couple relationship
  
• Using jokes and sarcasm to keep others at a distance
  

As you think about these distancing tactics, think about which tactics you are most likely to use. Try to think of examples in your life that would illustrate these tactics. Write about these in your journal, taking your time to really deepen your awareness of what you’ve been doing to maintain your loneliness.

Awareness of Community Influences

We are all connected with one another. How you conceptualize and operate in intimate relationships is very much influenced by many levels in your community. There was the family you grew up in, the neighborhood, the schools, your ethnic community, racial, religious, and class identity—all of that just from your childhood.

Then there are all the influences in your adult life. That is, added to the influences that shaped you in childhood, you are also influenced by the people in your life now, the various smaller and larger collections of people or communities that have an impact on your life.

These communities might include your current family or couple relationship, your work or vocational identity, where you live now, who you socialize with, worship with (if relevant), who you attend support groups with, who your friends are, and so forth. Furthermore, there are the very powerful influences of the media: the books or articles you read, the TV shows and movies you watch, the music you listen to and love. All of these are also part of your extended community.

The ideas you’ve gathered over time about what a couple is supposed to be like are derived from overt messages and less direct influences from all of these parts of your life. It would be a very big task to trace each and every source of your current responses to intimacy as one of a couple, but you can gradually cultivate your awareness of all this at your own manageable pace. The following exercise asks some questions that will help to guide you as you enhance your awareness of these many social and community influences.

Exercise

Awareness of Social and Family Influences

• When you think about what a happy couple would look like, do you picture any couples you know now or you knew earlier in your life? Who are these couples? Are they family members? Are they friends? How would you describe their relationship? (Imagine you are being interviewed by a talk-show host and have only a few minutes to capture the essence of why these two people seem to fit together.)
  
• Are there fictional couples you identify with on TV or in books or movies? Why do you think you chose these particular couples? In what ways do they represent other couples from the world you identify with now? For example, suppose you’ve chosen movie stars or other media personalities who seem dedicated to children and family. Is that a strong value that you feel most connected to in your current life? Or is the emphasis on children and family something you’ve carried with you from childhood? Or perhaps you chose people who seem to lead very exciting lives, traveling and committing themselves to social justice concerns. How does this fit with the values you try to live by? Are these values shared by others who are part of your life now? Were these values part of your life when you were growing up? And what are the values associated with choosing very glamorous people? How does that fit with the other influences in your life?
  
• Is there a picture in your mind of an ideal couple? What are the ways that this couple reflects the values you grew up with? How is this couple different from the relationships you may have been taught to emulate in childhood?
  

As you experiment with deepening your awareness in this area of family and social influences, you will find that you can be creative and playful in learning more about yourself. This is also an area where you can invite your partner, or someone you’re getting to know, to join you in playing with the couple images this person might choose.

If you do this exercise with your partner, be prepared for the possibility that you may have very different images of the happy or ideal couple from your partner’s image. Use this opportunity to practice your new awareness skills of curiosity and mindfulness breathing if you begin to feel upset. Don’t jump right into thinking that because you don’t share the same picture that there’s something wrong with you, or your partner, or that your relationship is doomed.

I once told someone I was dating that my picture of the ideal couple was two people sitting and reading in a cozy living room, a fire going in the fireplace, a cat or two purring. At the same moment, they both look up from their books and smile at each other before they go back to reading. “That’s it?!” my new friend asked, going on to say that it sounded distant and boring. Eventually, I recovered from the disappointment I felt, recognizing that we each had very different responses to what my ideal image evoked.

A picture of deep connection and happiness for one person can be another person’s nightmare of disconnection and dissatisfaction. The point is to keep talking about it and see where the conversation takes you. For me, the peacefulness of the couple seemed deeply appealing in contrast to my experience of my parents’ marriage, and my experience of my least successful couple relationships. The image is a marked contrast to deeply disconnected people who never seem to be in sync with each other.

You can also deepen your awareness of how you are influenced by others in your life by doing some investigating into how others in your life operate as couples.

Exercise

Observing Other People’s Beliefs and Behaviors

Use your workplace, or a support group you attend regularly, or any other group of people you spend regular time with (your siblings or other extended family, a volunteer or activity-centered group you’re part of) to see if you can recognize and carefully observe another distancer. Choose someone you may identify with and notice how he or she describes an intimate relationship, either past or present. Here are a few examples of the kinds of things you might observe:

Does he or she…

• Blame the significant other for failures in the relationship?
  
• Mention only superficial events when talking about couple activities (e.g., things they bought together on a shopping trip, or why they liked their rental car on a recent trip they took)?
  
• Refer to the significant other only when talking about activities involving their children?
  
• Rarely mention his or her partner?
  
• Complain often about having to participate in shared activities initiated by the partner? For example, “She dragged me to another play again last weekend” or “I have to go visit his daughter with him again.”
  
• Change the subject when others in the group are talking about special moments they shared with their partner (or a new love interest)?
  
• Complain that the partner expects too much?
  

If you are observing a distancer with his or her partner, notice the strategies that you think the distancer uses to avoid intimacy. Observe which strategies he or she appears to employ to prevent being vulnerable or close with his or her partner. Also, pay attention to whether the distancer usually chooses social activities that surround the couple with other people.

After you’ve completed your observation of the person you think may be a distancer, write a few paragraphs about why you think that, and what you think may have influenced how that person thinks about intimacy and couple dynamics. Do you think that you and this other distancer have been influenced by some of the same familial or social/cultural beliefs and customs? How do you think the two sets of influences may have been different?

As you think about what’s had the most influence on your thinking about being in a couple relationship, you will become more aware of some issues than others. Although you can’t uncover all such issues at any one time in your life, it will be useful to see which ideas remain the most prominent as you continue to develop your awareness.

Awareness of Fear, Anxiety, and Loss

The distancer’s biggest enemy is fear: the fear of mental and emotional pain. Learning to gently deepen your awareness will allow you to get beyond your fear and begin to work with issues that may have caused you years of emotional and mental pain.

In this last part of your awareness work, you are simply encouraged to accept the idea that you need to face some of those emotions and memories that you may have successfully avoided facing in the past by means of denial or dissociation. Don’t worry—you won’t be forced to excavate old wounds and dive down into your deepest fears, anxieties, or losses. This is just a gentle wake-up call to remind you that by gradually becoming more aware of your uncomfortable areas of experience, you won’t have to keep working so hard to keep pain in its cage and eventually you will begin to feel less lonely.