Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy (16 page)

Sex can be both wonderful and complicated even under the best of conditions. When sexual problems arise in adult relationships, they often worsen because, for most people, it’s difficult to talk about what’s bothering or confusing them. Frequently, both people in the relationship develop the belief that only one of them is to blame for whatever isn’t going well. This can escalate into blaming all past partners, potential partners, or all men (or women).

Rick’s Story

For Rick, who had never been able to talk about the sexual abuse he suffered as a child, it felt impossible to talk with his wife Carla about his extreme need for sexual control. He disliked it when she took the initiative to get things going sexually, and any attempt on her part to change their routine sexual patterns was intolerable to him.

Rick had become engaged to Carla just before he left home for his military service, but he got into a relationship with a servicewoman he met while he was serving in the Middle East. Since this was a secret relationship, this experience only intensified his childhood feelings of guilt and shame about sex. Both Rick and his new partner had someone waiting for them at home, so they agreed to limit their affair just to the time they were stationed abroad. By repeating the abuse dynamics from his childhood, Rick was engaged in a secret sexual relationship that he believed was wrong.

Yvonne’s Story

When Yvonne became a teenager and was no longer subjected to sexual abuse, she was not sexual with anyone. This changed when she was in her early twenties. She had a brief affair with her boss, a man who was significantly older than she. Yvonne enjoyed his attentions, and she felt sexually powerful when she was with him because he was always so grateful for her sexual favors. He ended the relationship after asking her to marry him and being rejected.

Yvonne carried her guilt and discomfort from this relationship into each subsequent one, and the experience continued to cast a shadow over her efforts to be open and loving with any man, including her current boyfriend.

Idealizing Past Relationships

Some people use an idealized past relationship to keep all the possible later partners at a distance. This is often the case when one distancer finds another, and experiences the distancing maneuvers as both safe and tantalizing. Both during and after the relationship both distancers may idealize everything about the ex-lover and the relationship without recognizing that what they are idealizing is the perfect mirror image.

Ben’s Story

Ben had allowed himself to stay in a long-term relationship only once. He had gotten into a much more settled relationship with Liz than anyone before or since. He thought of his long-past relationship with Liz as the gold standard against which all other relationships failed to measure up. Liz had always been very busy, a community activist who advocated for the rights of animals, children, mental patients, and many other disenfranchised groups.

Ben appreciated his partner’s passions and commitments, but he often found himself wishing that she were more available to spend time with him. This tinge of loneliness felt very strange to him because he greatly valued his freedom after having escaped his mother’s suffocating preoccupation with him. On the other hand, he felt a pleasant edge of desire for Liz that never disappeared since she was always so elusive. Even when they lived together, Liz outdistanced Ben. She was either off on one of her missions or filling the house with people who were part of her many social activist organizations.

Liz went to such extremes of unavailability that eventually Ben left her, but he was miserable in the wake of the failed relationship. Although they eventually became good friends, he never stopped believing that she had been the love of his life. No one else could dance away from him in the same endlessly desirable swirl of activity. He also convinced himself that he had been the victim in the relationship, so that he wasn’t always the heartbreaker.

As you can see from reading these various examples about the effects of past relationships on the formation of distancing patterns, there are a number of ways that distancers can experience and process their past adult relationships. It would be an impossible task to categorize all the possibilities, so if you haven’t found your experience described here, that doesn’t mean that you are somewhere off the grid.

Now, you can begin working on your own story, searching through your old memories for the moments that led you to this point in time.

To help you get started looking at your past relationships, here’s a warm-up exercise that will help you go back in time to remember what may have been an influential past relationship.

Exercise

“First Love”

Pick up your journal, open to a blank page, and write a few paragraphs about your first love affair or first couple relationship. Don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. Describe what thrilled you about the person. Describe how the other people in your life responded to this relationship. For example, how did your friends, family, religious or neighborhood community feel about you being with this person?

Next, name a few things this person valued most about being in a relationship with you. What about you? Did you value the same things? What do you remember as the most challenging part about this first experience? How did it end? How did you feel about its ending?

If you had to choose a title for your first experience of being in (or wanting to be in) a couple relationship, what would the title be? Examples might be: “Young and Innocent,” or “Love Hurts,” or “Me and My Shadow,” or “What Was I Thinking?”

Deconstructing the exercise:This exercise has several functions. It’s designed to get you to focus on the task of extracting useful information from your past. It will also provide you with some clues about what you used to believe about love and whether your beliefs have changed since then. You may learn that how you feel about your first love has played an important role ever since in how you respond to or think about relationships.

Note:You may decide that the relationship you’ve just recalled took place when you were so young that it didn’t really make a significant groove in your relational memory. If so, you might want to do the exercise again, but this time use a later relationship to see if you can learn more. On the other hand, you may decide that your early experience definitely had a significant bearing on who you are today.

Lessons Learned from Past Relationships

As you can see, there are many ways to reconstruct the past. It doesn’t matter much what you remember about the specific details of a past partner’s emotional or relational profile. It doesn’t really matter what did or didn’t happen in terms of significant events, or who said and did what during a major argument. It doesn’t even really matter why the relationships ended. What you are trying to discover is what you learned from your past efforts in intimate relationships. What lessons did you take with you when the relationship ended? You are looking for clues about what might have shaped your current ideas, fears, dreams, tender places, and sore spots.

So, instead of getting lost in your happy and unhappy memories on this trip down Memory Lane, you should look for the signposts that signal what your past relationships have to teach you. You want to discern what stands out as important danger warnings and what the welcome signs were, too. You are looking back for the relationships that taught your gut to flash “Danger, Falling Rocks!” so that you learned to keep your eyes open. You are also looking for what you learned about your ability to find the bypass signs that allow you to detour past the worst of the swamps and sinkholes.

Use the following exercise to remind yourself about some of the things your past relational history has taught you about yourself.

Exercise

What Do You Know About Yourself?

Check off any of the following statements that are a good fit for you. Put an asterisk next to those that seem to fit particularly well.

In your journal, you can add anything else to this list that you think might be an important aspect of who you are in relationships. You’ve learned both positive and potentially difficult things about yourself when you are in a relationship, so allow yourself to think about both the “good” and the “bad” as you add to your list.

When you’ve finished adding to the list, go back to the items you noted as being especially true for you. Take a few minutes to reflect on which of these items seem most relevant to certain past relationships of yours. Start by writing the partner’s name who helped you to recognize this about yourself. (You may find there are several names attached to some or all of these items.) Keep this fact in mind: the best teachers may be the people with whom you had the most difficult relationships.

If you are having trouble matching the most important items with specific people, don’t worry about it right now. You are engaged in a process of remembering that tends to stir up all kinds of memory fragments and random associations. Just keep on writing down whatever connections come to you. It’s all useful.

Whether or not you were able to match specific names to the self-awareness items in the above list, you may want to make a few notes about those you highlighted as most important. You could note whether this lesson you’ve learned about yourself is something you’d like to change or not. You could note whether what you feel most strongly about is an old awareness or a new one. You could note whether or not your ex-partners would agree or disagree with any of your self-awareness lessons. You could note if some of these items have changed over time.

If you feel that this is a useful exercise and you want to go into more detail, go ahead and write further about any of the lessons you’ve learned and which were the relationships that taught you the most. Or if you feel that this is enough for now, you can end the exercise, knowing that you can always come back to do more work with this later on, after you’ve had time to reflect.

Remembering Your Strengths

As you do this work, it’s also important to look back on the strengths that you learned you had. For each unsuccessful or incomplete relationship in your past, there are also moments for you to honor. For example, you had the strength to leave, or to survive the ending of relationships that might once have promised everything. You learned more about yourself from each missed connection or bruised feeling or wounded heart. You can look back on the relationships, or “almost” relationships, or fantasies of relationship, and see them as valuable building blocks in your creation of a whole self.

These past relationships (including those that didn’t really ever take off) are like books in a library that you’ve created, stories you’ve written, read, or collected about your journey through a vital part of human experience. You own the complete, collected works of you. You are the author and you can go back to check out all the separate parts of your story whenever you need to.

Exercise

Healing Exercise

Reviewing old relationships is hard work emotionally, no matter how carefully you’ve been trying to use your past as material to study in the service of creating a healthier present. This is a great opportunity to practice some self-care work to heal any old wounds that you may have opened doing the last exercise. Take about twenty minutes or so to do this next exercise. It will help you soothe any distress you may be feeling.

First, get into a comfortable sitting position so you can feel relaxed without falling asleep. If you enjoy listening to soothing music or ambient sounds, such as ocean waves, you may want to use that as background. Make sure you won’t be interrupted by people or phones ringing or any other predictable distractions.

Also, you might want to tape-record this visualization exercise for yourself or get someone to read it to you. That way, you can relax completely and let yourself be in the experience, rather than trying to remember what you are supposed to be doing.

Instructions: Close your eyes (or just look at one place on the floor if closing your eyes makes you feel too spaced out or sleepy) and take some slow, deep breaths, paying attention only to the sensation of your breathing. Now begin to slow down your breathing. Remind your muscles to relax and let go of any tension.