Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy (15 page)

If you found that you didn’t feel clear about or were not interested in some of these statements you may find that you want to come back and try them again later. There are no special revelations that you should expect to have by analyzing your responses to these statements. This is just a way to get you to start working on what you need to remember and to record about the relevance of your childhood experience.

Writing Your Autobiography

Now it’s time for you to get your journal and write a few pages about yourself and how various aspects of your childhood may have formed the most important roots of your distancing patterns. You don’t need to write this as if you’re writing an essay for publication. Just let yourself write, forgetting about spelling, grammar, and style. This is for your eyes only.

As you do this important exercise, you may find that you feel scattered, your thoughts going to one area of childhood experience and then veering off to something else. You may discover that something you hadn’t thought much about becomes more important than you expected. You also may discover that you’re writing what feels like a whole book on just one part of your childhood. It’s all okay. Just remember that the purpose of writing your autobiography is to help you connect your childhood with what’s going on in your life right now.

You can work on this in more than one writing session. In fact, when you first start it, you will want and need to take some breaks from the writing. You may need some more time just to think about what you’re writing and to allow new thoughts to circle around in your mind before you come back to expand on or deepen what you began writing.

You may also find that bringing up painful thoughts and feelings is a pretty intense experience. This is normal. Take special care of yourself, though. Take a walk, take a bath, call a friend, play with the cat, take a break from your thoughts and read a mystery or watch a movie. While you are writing, always remember to use your breathing and muscle relaxation skills.

Sharing what you’re discovering and feeling also may feel right to you. Make sure that you feel trust in the person or people you choose to confide in. If you are in therapy, you may want to spend some time talking this over with your therapist. If you are in a relationship, you may want to share this with your partner. If you have any hesitations, wait! When we get to Step Three, you will have the opportunity to do some work with your partner that includes sharing what you’ve been learning about yourself in Step Two. You will be guided to do careful sharing with your partner so that the experience will help the two of you become closer rather than leaving you feeling raw and exposed and leaving your partner wondering how to respond.

In chapter 4 we will continue working with Step Two by remembering and learning from past relationships in adult life. This will be a less intense and less time-consuming part of Step Two. We will look at lessons learned from past relationships, but avoid dwelling on what went wrong, what was wrong with the other person, or what you think were your mistakes. This chapter will help those who are not in relationships now, those who are in both new and long-term relationships, and those who have avoided relationships completely.

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This chapter will guide you through the second part of Step Two, which is to look at the past relationships in your adult life. Instead of trying to forget your past—the mistakes, the heartbreak, the regret for the one who got away—you will learn how to make good use of what went wrong in the past. We turn now to focus on these relationships because they are an essential part of your ongoing examination of the roots of your distancing patterns. Just as you learned in chapter 3, the first part of Step Two, your past is a resource; it contains a wealth of useful information and precious experience.

Just as in childhood, there are pivotal experiences in our adult lives that determine the pattern of our responses in subsequent relationships. Adult experiences may have somewhat less power over us because we’ve already developed our basic biological, emotional, and mental characteristics. Nonetheless, we are always changing and growing and we are deeply affected by our adult experiences in both positive and negative ways.

It’s undeniable that if we experience trauma or tragic losses, that will have great importance in determining many things about who we are from that time on. For example, all those who have ever lost their homes because of a natural disaster, or social upheaval, or personal misfortune know that their feelings of personal safety and security will never be the same again. Other tragic events such as the loss of a child, a sibling, a close friend, or a life partner also change us permanently. But these tragic experiences can create new energy or spiritual awakening or a transformative life purpose, despite the awfulness of the loss.

Other major life events can create major changes in how we respond to the world. For example, someone may experience lasting repercussions from a life-threatening or life-altering accident or illness. Again, these kinds of experiences can create a new resilience that serves to counterbalance disability, fear, bitterness, and depression.

Addiction is another circumstance of adult life that creates its own set of responses in individuals and their loved ones. There is a broad spectrum of addictive behaviors that can change the course of an adult’s life, including well-recognized addictions to substances like alcohol, drugs, and food, and the sometimes less obvious “process” addictions like gambling, overspending, self-injury, sex, work, computer activities, television, and exercise. If you’ve struggled with an addiction yourself or been involved with an addicted person, you are well aware that this fact of life determines a lot about how you respond in the area of intimate relationships.

Seemingly neutral life events such as changing jobs or getting promoted, buying a house, having a baby, moving from one geographical area to another, getting deeply involved in community activism, religious activities, sports, or hobbies can also make a big difference in how we respond to intimacy.

In most cases, however, past relationships probably trump any of the types of formative events mentioned above. For the majority of distancers, their past relationships continue to play a major role in their current lives. It sometimes seems as though we repeat the worst of our childhood nightmares in the relationships we create in early adult life. There are many variations among the relational experiences of people who struggle with distancing. It’s likely that some of the themes and exercises that follow will resonate with you much more than others, depending on your personal history of intimate relationships.

Variables That Influence Relationships

There are some predictable variables in the overall history of your relationships that probably left their mark on you and even had an impact on those relationships you may not think of as significant in and of themselves. These variables can include:

• The sum total of distressing or failed relationships in the individual’s life: that is, if you’ve had a lot of failed relationships, each one adds to the picture you may develop about yourself in relationship (for example, victim, heartbreaker, “not really interested,” “too busy for love,” and so forth).
  
• The length or emotional intensity of the most significant relationships: that is, the longer you are with someone, the more you are likely to be affected by the distress or failure of the relationship.
  
• Leaving relationships frequently: the more often you leave relationships, the more likely you are to develop a picture of yourself as a “quitter” or some other negative label that can make you defensive.
  
• Experiencing frequent betrayal or rejection.
  
• Exploring relationships but avoiding commitment.
  
• Avoiding intimate relationships consistently.
  

Because of all these variables and more, there may be some issues that seem a good fit with your life experiences while other issues won’t resonate for you. As you answer some of the questions in this chapter and compare yourself with other distancers’ relational histories in the following thumbnail sketches, you’ll notice which are the most important for you.

Also, there are other factors that may play a role in how much you can identify with other people’s stories about their past relationships. These identifying factors include your age, your gender, your relational orientation (heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, celibate), your religious affiliation, your social and economic background and current options, your involvement with extended family, and other socioeconomic factors.

Although any or all of these may have been important in how you experienced your past relationships, there is no guarantee that because someone is similar to you in these categories you will have had the same experiences in couple relationships. Conversely, you may be surprised at how much you identify with someone who, on the surface, appears to be very different from you. For example, you may have a strong connection with your extended family, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that you will respond to intimate relationships just like someone else who has the same kind of strong family ties.

Now, let’s take a look at two distancers you’ve already read about, Sally and Luisa. Sally comes from a closely connected family like Luisa’s, but her way of distancing from a committed relationship is different than Luisa’s. Sally stays in relationship, and she makes few demands on her partner, Howard, but she remains elusive; she’s too busy and distracted to engage in intimacy. Luisa, on the other hand, distances by attacking; she arms herself with rigid judgments about her partner, Diego.

Although both women began shaping their distancing patterns in childhood, and went on to amplify those patterns in their unhappy adult relationships, their similarities are less significant than their differences.

It is vital to understand how your past relationships shaped how you respond in the present. If you don’t understand this, you may go on to experience a series of disappointments that can lead only to deeper despair and greater self-blame. But looking at your past is not easy. Here’s how you can get yourself through this part of Step Two without feeling worse or giving up.

Observing with Detachment

You can use the issues and exercises in this chapter as a map to help you explore and touch down briefly on a few of the most important legacies of your past relationships. You won’t need to review and revisit every intimate relationship you’ve ever had or ever wanted to have. We’re working with this part of Step Two just to highlight a few of the past experiences that changed you significantly and provided you with lessons about yourself in intimate situations.

Unlike experiences you may have had when talking to a friend, therapist, or new love interest, this review of your past relationships is not about your ex-partner (or partners). Although there were undoubtedly many negative and positive things about those people, understanding them is not central to the work of Step Two. The process of remembering in Step Two is all about who you are and what you’ve learned about yourself from your past experiences as an adult.

It can sometimes seem as if we are doomed to repeat the worst experiences of our childhood in our adult relationships. This can leave us completely confused, wondering if we are once again the victim of neglect, abuse, or whether we’ve become the victimizer when we unintentionally harm those we love.

Victim or Victimizer

There are many different ways that past relationships can leave their mark on you. The repetition of being the one who feels repeatedly rejected in relationships may create a self-image of “victim” that clouded the underlying distancing issues you’ve carried with you into each relationship. Jack’s series of relationships provide a very typical scenario.

Jack’s Story

Jack’s many relationships with women were like a parody of an old Mother Goose nursery rhyme. He was always jumping over the relational candlestick, trying to avoid being burned, without much success. There seemed to be an endless succession of women who alternately loved him and left him. Several of Jack’s partners, like Diane, became frequent flyers.

With each successive relationship failure, Jack became less self-confident. Although he appeared to want a lasting relationship, he grew ever more proficient at finding partners who would outdistance him. His relationship with Diane was the most extreme in terms of the number of their breakups. But Diane wasn’t the first woman to dance the “make up and break up tango” with Jack, and she would not be the last. For Jack, each successive relationship created a deeper wound and an ever-increasing tendency to repeat his distancing patterns.

Having the experience of failed relationships can create the distancer pattern of running away from healthy relationships, too. Sally’s story represents this kind of escalation.

Sally’s Story

Sally grew more and more self-blaming when she first began to watch herself distancing from Howard. She had fled from her first marriage to escape the burden of being forced to be a mother to her husband. Her leaving reinforced her growing image of herself as hard-hearted and unfair. But she had not adequately resolved her decision to leave her first marriage, so her self-blame became almost immobilizing as she felt herself pulling away from Howard.

When the Painful Past Builds Higher Walls

The fear of beginning a new relationship can become greatly intensified by failed relational attempts. Some distancers react to failed relationships by becoming more extreme in their avoidance patterns. Others use the experience of being wounded to sharpen their weapons against subsequent partners or would-be partners.

Janine’s Story

Janine had been emotionally scarred by her early adult experience of gang rape. When she tried to date, she was so afraid of seeming vulnerable that she hid behind an impenetrable wall of evasive communication and disappearing behavior. One young man did manage to get a bit closer than anyone else, partly due to his own ambivalent relational style. When Janine began to allow herself to risk a relationship with him, he suddenly disappeared, which left her feeling even more vulnerable and mistrustful.

Colin’s Story

Colin had been deeply harmed not only by his mother’s rejection of him as a child, but when he was a young man, he had his heart broken by the woman he thought was his “true love.” Colin had found the woman he believed was the love of his life at the age of twenty-five. They met when he was finishing law school, and they began a joyous and passionate relationship that promised to heal all of his childhood wounds. He began to think he was going to have it all: a brilliant career defending the rights of the oppressed, and a fairy-tale marriage that would carry him into the sunset and last until the end of his life.

Unfortunately, Colin’s alcoholic drinking continued to create huge problems for the otherwise happy young couple. Colin’s girlfriend had not grown up as he had in an alcoholic family; she found his drinking extremely confusing and disturbing. Finally, she gave him the ultimatum that if he didn’t stop drinking, she would have to leave him. Colin rejected Alcoholics Anonymous for dealing with his alcoholism, and, despite a brief effort at abstinence, he remained an active alcoholic. When the love of his life became the one who got away, Colin blamed her and all the subsequent women he met later in life for whatever went wrong with his relationships.

When Rigid Rules Hold You Back

Failures to communicate successfully in past relationships can cause people to set up rigid rules for their new relational efforts. This can happen when someone feels inadequate, attacked, or betrayed in an earlier relationship.

Chris’s Story

Chris might have been a little more open to the positive benefits of directly expressing her feelings had it not been for her past relationship with Molly. Chris and Molly’s relationship had lasted for two years, and almost kept Chris from ever finding Beth.

Chris got involved with Molly soon after graduating from college. Molly, a lovely young woman who lived in the same apartment building, was embroiled in a custody battle to keep her young daughter. Chris tried to help her. Molly’s ex-husband claimed that because of her sexual orientation, Molly was an unfit mother. Chris and a group of her friends championed Molly’s right to her child, and supported her in every way they could. When the dust settled, Molly had her daughter. Chris continued trying to make life better for Molly and her child. Then Chris and Molly got romantically involved, and Chris invited mother and child to move in with her.

Things went steadily downhill from there. Molly had a huge appetite for “processing” all of her emotional wounds. She had commandeered hours of Chris’s time whenever she felt upset by something Chris said or did, or didn’t say or do. Molly was also prone to sudden rage attacks, and she had asserted her need to fully “vent her anger to avoid the physical aches and pains caused by repressed feelings.” After she finally moved out of Chris’s life, Chris swore she would never get into a relationship again.

Sexual Obstacles