Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy (18 page)

Making a real commitment to the change-making work of Step Three, Jack decided to leave the safety of his university job. He began to produce and sell his artwork more regularly. He also began studying creative mediums he had never explored before. In the next chapter, you will learn how this led Jack to a lively, mutual relationship that developed through his new work network.

Vision-Based Communities

There are communities that draw people together because of a shared belief system or vision of making things better. For some people, getting involved in a church, temple, mosque, or meditation community may offer a comfortable way to get more involved with community relationships. For others, a shared conviction about social justice issues (peace, racial equality, neighborhood safety, environmental issues) may provide a way to expand and deepen nonintimate relationships.

Within such communities, there is often a solid base of shared values that support any disagreements and conflicts that occur between group members. For distancers who are afraid of confronting difficult or demanding issues within an intimate relationship, this kind of community can provide an ideal safety zone to explore how relationships can survive conflicts.

Chris’s Story

Chris, who was so afraid that she and Beth couldn’t survive a single argument, learned to stop fearing conflict after she got involved in a group that worked to support gays and lesbians’ right to marriage. She observed people disagreeing with each other, sometimes quite heatedly, and yet after their arguments were resolved, they remained good-natured and friendly as they continued working together toward their common goal.

The turning point for Chris came when she got into an intense argument with a man in the group. She had been feeling very comfortable with Michael until they began arguing. She stopped suddenly in the middle of a sentence as she felt herself starting to freeze. She was sure he hated her, and that the whole group saw her as a troublemaker. “Sorry. I’m coming on too strong,” she mumbled to Michael and the rest of the group. She began putting on her jacket so she could beat a hasty retreat out the door. She was sure she would never come back to the group.

“Hey, honey,” Michael said, “don’t back down on me now! We were just warming up. I’ve got four older sisters. It would take a whole lot more than what you just said for me to feel you were coming on too strong.”

This was an important moment for Chris when she realized that within the group, conflict was not something to be avoided, and when it occurred, it didn’t destroy relationships. After that, she began taking increasing risks, showing her feelings more spontaneously and learning that the other people in the group stayed connected to her whether she agreed with them or not.

Support Groups

Perhaps the most perfect community to help the distancer practice new relational skills is the traditional support group. For some, involvement in a support group is a lifelong commitment, while for others it may be time-limited. Whether the group has a permanent structure or is more temporary, a support group is generally a very safe place to practice relational risk-taking.

There are many kinds of support groups, but they are all based on the same principles. Everyone in the group needs support and everyone is there to give support as well as to receive it. The group shares a common experience that motivates them to seek help, information, acceptance, and hope. In a support group, everyone is equal because of their shared experiences of challenge, hardship, and their need to change. Everyone hopes to find a way out of individual suffering by participation in the group.

The support group is an ideal community for distancers because it demands some amount of vulnerability, some degree of accountability to the other group members (like showing up and following the guidelines for the group process). The average community of support permits a cautious pace and offers clearly defined boundaries that help the distancer to feel safe.

Colin’s Story

Colin, the attorney whose sarcastic and judgmental behavior had caused him to be consistently rejected by the women in his life, found an ideal place to begin to work on relationships. After yet another initially dazzling romance ended badly, he finally faced his alcoholism and began attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

At first, he was contemptuous, making fun of the slogans and routines of the program whenever he could find friends to entertain with his caricatures of the meetings he grudgingly attended. But, gradually, he began to soften, to listen to stories that were always in some way like his own. He saw tougher guys than he was shed tears as they talked about losing their kids, abandoning their friends, betraying their wives and girlfriends.

As he began to risk sharing his own losses and his pervasive feelings of loneliness, he discovered what it was like to be genuinely close to other people and to be emotionally open with them.

Now that you’ve read about some examples of community settings where you might want to practice new relational skills, let’s begin the process of finding the best group or community for your initial explorations. This will be a slow process, one that will both guide and encourage you to experiment with finding the best kind of group or community for yourself.

Exercise

Assessing Your Interests and Comfort Zone

This is a three-part exercise. So, set aside about an hour to complete it. You can also come back to it later after you’ve had more time to think about it.

Part One: Make a list of all the groups or communities you have been involved with during your adult life. If it makes it easier, you can cluster related groups together under a single heading, for example, “Recreation” or “Spiritual” or “Support/Health Care.” Don’t worry about being orderly and don’t try to itemize every single group. The point of the exercise is to create a map of where you’ve been and what types of groups you’re most likely to choose.

Part Two: Circle the category or clustered activities where you think you’re likely to feel most comfortable engaging in the relational experiments of Step Three. Now think about whether there might be a group or activity that might appeal to you, but that you haven’t tried before. Add that to your list. Finally, put a star next to any group or community that you’ve tried before but found too difficult. If you think you might like to try this one again (or a group like it), put a double star next to it.

After doing this exercise, you’ll have set up some possibilities to explore. This way of organizing what you have already experienced, along with some new group activities you might be willing to try, will help you match your Step Three starting point with what is most likely to work for you.

Part Three: Now, you need to think about your emotional comfort level. If you’re someone who does better when you feel really challenged, you might decide that pursuing something that’s completely new will give you the jolt you need to get going. But if you’re likely to become anxious and back off when something is too new and different, this may not be your best choice for practicing new ways to relate to others.

Perhaps you’ll choose to try your new relational skills in a group or community you’ve experienced before, but with a new set of goals and a new mind-set. If you do your best when you feel safest, you would probably choose to practice your new skills in a group that’s the most familiar and comfortable. Distancers respond to new experiences in a variety of ways, so take your time in determining what setting will work the best for you.

This exercise was a real challenge for Rick, the sexual abuse survivor who kept himself safe by tightly controlling everything in his world. See whether “walking through” this exercise the way that Rick did will help you understand how this works.

Rick’s Story

In getting started to do this work, Rick remembered that he had participated frequently in groups for recreational purposes, including a men’s softball league, coaching his kids’ soccer teams, and rock climbing with friends. He circled the category “recreation/sports” as what would feel the most ordinary and comfortable for him.

Next, he added the category of “spiritual” as a possible community he had considered exploring, but he hadn’t pushed himself to try that yet. He thought a lot about returning to his church roots or finding a new spiritually centered group.

Finally, he put a star next to “family” as a community he had tried to be a part of in the past. Family had been difficult for him. He wasn’t sure whether to mark this category with two stars, even though he wanted to become more fully a part of his family of origin and to feel closer to his current family. He considered developing a new set of goals and a new mind-set about what he wanted to happen with his family, but he realized it was just too anxiety-provoking. He just wasn’t sure if he wanted to start out being so vulnerable, so he chose not to give this category two stars.

While thinking about these things, Rick contemplated his emotional comfort level. He knew he was someone who did well when challenged by something new. He thought about pursuing an involvement in some form of spirituality that would be new enough to challenge him to really invest time and energy in Step Three. On the other hand, he came to understand that he did not want to return to his childhood religious roots and that he was uncomfortable with the idea of something so far outside his experience as a meditation group. It would be “too different,” he thought.

Then, he started feeling frustrated and angry about the whole idea of finding a group, and considered letting his life go on just the way it always had. At this point, he was about to give up, but then he remembered one of his buddies talking enthusiastically about martial arts. From what his friend had told him, he understood that if he got involved in this particular community, he could choose the comfort of engaging in a physical activity but also learn about a discipline with a more spiritual grounding.

After a few months of studying tae kwon do at the local dojo, Rick noticed some major changes in his pattern of controlling behavior. He began to feel less guarded and was becoming more comfortable with the experience of allowing his teacher to be in charge of the whole situation. As he experienced this new vulnerability, he became more open and more emotionally accessible without feeling that he had undergone a whole personality transplant. “I didn’t feel as if it was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers or anything like that,” he told me, smiling a little, “but I did start to feel like a really different person. My wife and kids began to respond to the changes in how I related to them too. It was pretty cool.” The longer he participated in the martial arts community, the more Rick’s closeness with his wife continued to deepen and increase.

Now you’re ready to make your own list and to decide what kind of group or community will provide you with your best option. Keep in mind the purpose of this exercise is to help you figure out how to explore new dimensions of your relational repertoire in a way that will be both new and comfortable. Also, you should be entering a community or group that will work for you over time, so that you will gain the long-term benefits of your new affiliation.

Don’t be surprised if at this point you want to back off and forget about Step Three. Risking change is always difficult, especially for distancers. Let’s take another look at why this is a real challenge.

Why Distancers Hate Change

If you are really honest with yourself, you may discover that you just don’t like taking new relational risks, period, whether in a group or not. There are plenty of reasons why you might want to end the journey you’ve been on right now and try to convince yourself you can live with everything in your relationship domain staying the same. As you know, the forces that shape our individual ways of approaching intimacy and challenge our comfort with intimacy are very powerful. It makes sense that if we risk new ways of connecting, we risk being vulnerable to old pain. We could be badly disappointed, hurt, betrayed, or trapped all over again. The temptation to stay away from such risks is often very strong.

Years ago, scientists studying animal behavior proved that if an animal keeps experiencing unpleasant responses to its actions, eventually, it will just give up and stop trying to change its situation: this is the condition called “learned helplessness.” Our learned helplessness is another reason we may choose the misery we know rather than risk a new experience that potentially could lead to humiliation, heartbreak, or suffering. Distancers can get into this mode and become very comfortable with it because of their repetitive experiences of relational failures. It becomes habitual to give up and stop trying just as soon as we sense a shadow of anticipated pain.

Another reason to avoid taking action might be the belief that you already know all there is to know about yourself; you absolutely are sure about the parameters of what you like and don’t like, what you will and won’t do, what works and what doesn’t. However, even though these notions may seem completely logical and sensible, the belief that you have nothing new to learn about yourself comes from a place of fear. Although there are, of course, some things you do know definitively about yourself—for example, you know you don’t want to go hang gliding, or attend a Tupperware party, or live in a thatched hut in the Everglades —there are also many things you haven’t explored that could enrich your life and teach you new relational skills. Keep in mind that you don’t really know how a new venture might turn out once you have the right preparation and a new rationale for taking risks.

Remember, this is your show. You can start out with whatever experiments for exploring community feel the most comfortable. You can make this a slow process. You don’t have to push yourself into doing anything that feels too big and unmanageable. Think of yourself as a scientist studying new aspects of yourself. Let your curiosity lead you. You learned some new skills in earlier chapters. You’ll be able to use them to help you try out new situations and new ways of being close to others. Before going any further, let’s spend some time reviewing and expanding those skills.