Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy (8 page)

For Yvonne, using mindfulness practice was the key to a big turnaround for her relationship with Mike. She and Mike began to sit together to do some meditating. They both learned how to engage in mindful awareness.

One Saturday, Mike suggested that they do their practice of mindful breathing and meditation right before they made love.

To Yvonne’s delight, moving from a place of mindfulness with Mike into love-making with him allowed her to stay more present. Once she was able to stay in her mind and body—a little bit at a time—she became able to allow herself to play a more active part in guiding Mike to give her sexual pleasure. It was a huge breakthrough for her when she became capable of staying aware of who it was she was in bed with, that in the present moment she was making love with her gentle, kind boyfriend and not being molested by a violent ghost from her traumatic past.

Although mindfulness practice does not magically transform all the places where distancers may feel helpless or hopeless, it is a tool that can gradually open many doors. You can begin incorporating mindfulness in many or all parts of your life. Try doing the mindful breathing practice once a day for five minutes.

Daily practice will help you to use mindful breathing spontaneously at other times when you need to calm and center yourself.

Deepening and Expanding Your Self-Awareness

We are all experts on ourselves. We know how we perceive the world, how we respond emotionally, how we generally relate to others. Often, however, we don’t know we are experts; we don’t know what we know. Who we are biologically influences the areas about which we are more aware. So does our accumulated life experience. Because I’m an expert on myself, I’ll use myself as an example of how one person perceives and responds to the world.

I have always had very high energy, physically. I have rapid responses to all forms of stimulation through all of my senses, and my energy level ranges from active to hyper, even with the natural brakes of getting older. My rapid response system means that I feel physical pain and physical pleasure very quickly and very intensely. It also means that I have trouble staying still. I have a generally heightened awareness of sounds, smells, tactile sensations, my visual surroundings, and even taste.

The good news about my heightened levels of awareness is that I easily take in so much of whatever is pleasurable. The bad news is that I’m uncomfortably sensitive to negative experiences. At the biological level, for instance, I have a low pain threshold, and a strong negative response to loud noises, bad smells, or unpleasant tastes.

Because I am constantly taking in so much of what’s happening around me, I’m better prepared to see and react to danger than many other people. On the other hand, it’s sometimes energetically draining to be so hypervigilant; there are too many ordinary situations where my immediate impulse is to rescue, protect, freeze, or flee.

I’ve also been shaped by my personal experiences and the social messages and practices surrounding me. My experience as a child who felt loved influenced who I am in all kinds of relationships. But I was also shaped by my experience as a child who was forced to be my mother’s emotional caretaker and my father’s sexual plaything and punching bag.

These personal childhood experiences were mediated by adult relationships and the culture I grew up in and live in today. This means that I’m influenced by being a woman, a person who came of age during the civil rights movement, and someone who’s spent most of her life in one geographical place—the town where I grew up and still live.

Everything I’ve just described played a role in my awareness of how I perceive and respond to the world. Everything I am aware of about who I am helps me to understand why I respond to closeness and intimacy in the way that I do. Self-awareness at all these levels also helps me to know the best ways for me to learn and to make big changes in my life.

The following exercise will guide you to expand your awareness of how you perceive, think, and act.

Exercise

The Self-Awareness Scan

Think over the week that just passed. Choose one particular incident or episode from your week, an event that was particularly memorable. It could be something that stands out because it was unusually pleasant, or unusually sad, or because it really got to you in some way—it stirred up negative feelings or made you really stop and rethink something.

Try to keep the parameters of the episode relatively simple. For example, you might decide to choose something that took place in a short span of time, like one conversation at work, or a part of a walk. When you have this incident in your mind, write a one-paragraph description, a very short summary of what happened. Keep it simple. When you’ve written this brief description, take some time to relive the incident or event in your mind, going over as much detail as you wish. When you are finished, look at the following categories and use them to figure out what is the clearest part of your memory of the whole experience:

• Feelings you had (your emotional responses)
  
• Your senses in remembering the details (sounds, smells, visual impressions, the feel of anything your body had contact with, the taste of anything you might have eaten or had to drink during the incident)
  
• Your thoughts in response to the episode, for example, “This is really unfair,” or “This will have a big impact on…” or “How does this compare to something that happened before? How does this contrast with other experiences I’ve had?”
  
• How your body felt
  
• What your body did, that is, it got very jumpy, started sweating, went numb
  
• What other people were doing or saying
  
• What you believe others were feeling or thinking
  
• Fantasies you may have had about being somewhere else or doing something else
  
• Others you wished were present for you
  
• Others you wanted to protect or share this experience with
  
• Anything you did during or after the episode that relates to your spiritual practice
  

You may want to try doing several different exercises like this. Include good experiences as well as disturbing ones. After doing this a few times, you will begin to notice some dominant patterns in how your awareness works.

Remember: There is no right or wrong (or better or worse) way to perceive the world. The important thing is to develop your awareness in the ways that work best for you so that you can use these skills to grow and to find better solutions to the challenges you face.

Cultivating Curiosity

Most teachers, writers, and others who work with awareness skills do not include curiosity. However, my observations over many years have taught me to value curiosity as an extremely important part of cultivating awareness. This becomes obvious when you think about how children learn.

A small child’s curiosity is at the core of what motivates many important learning experiences. A child learns most of the most critical survival skills by being curious, which leads to learning about boundaries and limits. The child learns about many things: how something works, what a cat or a dog is likely to do, what objects taste, feel, smell, and sound like—all because of the innate sense of curiosity that leads to exploration.

Curiosity is a vital part of any important relationship. The more you can cultivate your curiosity about the other people in your life, the more you will move toward them. Curiosity will also lead you to feel more secure with the people you are close to because you’ll have a pretty good sense of what they’re likely to think, feel, say, or do.

You’ve probably been appreciative of the people in your life who’ve been curious about who you are. That’s because it feels good to have someone ask you how you are doing, and know that he or she is asking a real question; that the person is curious enough and cares enough about you to want a real answer.

Now, here’s a self-diagnosis exercise you can do to check out how active your sense of curiosity is.

Exercise

Rating Your Sense of Curiosity

Use the scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being “this is very true for me,” 4 meaning “this is mostly true for me,” 3 being “this is true for me about half of the time,” 2 meaning “this is true for me occasionally,” and 1 being “this is rarely true for me.”

Total score:
__________

If you rated yourself 5 on most of these questions,
then you have a very healthy sense of curiosity. Good for you! You can move right on to the next section of this chapter.

If you scored lower on questions 1 to 5 than you did on questions 6 to 10,
then you may be very curious, but are hesitant to ask others directly about themselves. This could be because of family or cultural values that you’ve learned about not being too direct, not “prying,” or “staying out of other people’s business.” Give yourself permission to allow your curiosity to be more assertive. See what happens when you ask people the questions that you have wondered about but have been keeping to yourself. You may be surprised at how many people actually like being asked about themselves, especially what they think and feel about people, places, and events.

If you averaged 3 or lower on the answers to all ten questions,
then you need to find out what holds you back from asking questions or being more curious about other people. In your journal, keep track of any ideas you come up with about why you are not especially curious about others. Are you too anxious or nervous or fearful to think about what’s going on with other people? Are you too busy just trying to get through all the tasks right in front of you to be curious? Are you so worried about what others are thinking about you that it doesn’t leave any room to be curious about them?

Julie

Remember Julie, the nineteen-year-old college student you met in chapter 1 who spends a great deal of her time alone? She is so fearful of relationships that she is rarely curious about other people. Because her mother’s severe depression threatened to destroy Julie when she was a child, and because she internalized the profound fear that her own hunger would swallow others, she has very little room for curiosity. Julie has spent her life hiding from other people, so it is very difficult for her to develop any curiosity about them.

What might work for Julie would be to build on her deep interest in and comfort with animals. She doesn’t find animals threatening, so she is very curious about how they live. She could begin building up her sense of curiosity about other human beings by first focusing on the feelings of closeness and security she’s learned through her connections with animals. By reviewing and focusing on the value of feeling so safe with animals due to her intense curiosity about them, she could take some small steps toward allowing herself to become a little more curious about her own species.

Be patient with yourself if you are not readily curious about other people. There are powerful reasons why you haven’t been able to protect and develop your natural capacity for curiosity. You will be able to get to the root of some of these obstacles as you work with remembering in Step Two. In the meantime, praise yourself whenever you do notice that you are questioning or wondering about other people’s lives.

Developing Awareness of Yourself in Noncouple Relationships

Becoming more aware of yourself in noncouple relationships could help you overcome your challenges with intimacy. Developing your awareness about yourself in how you connect to your friends, family, children, parents, siblings, coworkers, and others is an important part of learning from your successes. As you become increasingly aware of who you are in various relationships, you may see some very consistent patterns or you may notice that you have more varied relational styles depending on the person you’re thinking about.

One of my friends is very gentle and calm in relationships with people who need her support like her clients, anxious coworkers, frail elders. But when she is with people who are less vulnerable, her lack of self-confidence can cause her to be somewhat unpredictable and capricious. When it comes to intimate relationships, she gets into very anxious, avoidant patterns. This woman on a date bears little or no resemblance to the woman who is so competent and emotionally available in her relationships with more fragile people.

Exercise

Building Your Awareness Skills

• In your journal, draw three vertical columns. Label the first column heading “Friends and Colleagues”; the second heading should be “Family (Past and Present)”; and the third “Partners (Current and/or Past).”
  
• Use an alarm clock or stopwatch to time yourself. For three minutes, write as many one-word descriptions as you can, describing yourself in relation to people who fit in column 1. For the next three minutes, do the same exercise for column 2. Then do the same exercise for column 3.
  
• Circle any words that appear in more than one column. What does this tell you about yourself? Did you notice that any one of these three columns was easier to do than the other two?
  
• Do this exercise a second time using the same headings for the three columns, but this time, write one-word descriptions that you think the people in each category would use to describe you in your relationships with them.
  
• Again, circle the words that appear in more than one column. Are these the same words that showed up when you were writing down your self-awareness descriptions? If not, why do you think others don’t see you as you see yourself? Are you tougher on yourself than they would be, or do you think you know yourself better than they do?
  
• Choose one word that you would most like to see showing up in all three columns, no matter who is rating you.