Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 233, “How to deal with fears of intimacy.” Before we get started, let’s just take a moment together, if you will, to center, perhaps taking a deep breath in… And a deep breath out. And perhaps as you turn inwards, just noticing, giving recognition and honor to whatever is alive in you, particularly as it relates to relationship. Perhaps something you’re experiencing, feeling, contemplating, and just, again, giving recognition and acknowledgment.
The intention for the Empowered Relationship Podcast is to support you in navigating the long-term terrain of intimacy, knowing that there will be many different turns, ups and downs, and that really it’s less about there being tricky terrain to navigate, and that that’s somehow wrong or bad, but more of how we deal with it that determines our experience… That we can gain more authenticity with ourselves, feel more intimacy with another, and grow our relationship. Oftentimes, we need a little bit of support, because it can be threatening, and scary, and sometimes asking us to expand the capacity for more love and more joy; and as we’re gonna be talking about today, when we open up to love, that also evokes fear that maybe we have not been aware of, as we enter into a more sign cant love relationship.
So all of the interviews, episodes, tips, tools, resources, everything is all in the intention of supporting you to feel better-equipped, more prepared and more aware of what to expect, and also some things to consider as you contemplate your next moves… Again, all with the goal of cultivating happiness, more love, more connection, more safety, security in relationship.
If you would like access to today’s show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com. There you can find many resources, articles, other interviews that I’ve done on other shows, as well as courses for you to go deeper with these principles and self-study… As well as how to engage in getting more direct support in the way of coaching. You can find that at Work With Me. And then you can find today’s show notes under the tab Podcast There you’ll find all of the episodes, and today’s episode, again, is 233, “How to deal with fears of intimacy.”
In today’s topic I am referencing the book “The highly sensitive person in love” by Elaine Aron. I was reading this several months ago, and I came across a section around fear of intimacy… And she’s listing the six common fears of intimacy, which were identified originally by Elaine Hatfield in her research around love and intimacy. She’s a social psychologist.
I remember coming across these fears, these identified six fears of intimacy, I believe in undergrad, maybe evening grad school… And I think it’s really important to consider, because fear of intimacy can impact us at any stage in relationship. I think we’re most aware in the beginning, because that’s when we have the opportunity to open more deeply. But if you think about it, I believe relationship is forever unfolding, and I think we weave in and out of our capacity for more intimacy and developing that, as well as taking note of our tendencies, or perhaps what’s coming up in us… Because there may be fear, or there may be protection, or guardedness that is indicating to us that there’s something there that we’re having fear around… And that’s okay; there’s good reason.
I also wanna note that I don’t wanna confuse fear of intimacy with needing alone time, or needing some sense of separation. As I talked about in a podcast — I wanna say maybe last year, maybe it’s even been longer… I will make sure to put that podcast on today’s show notes… And I talk about the two conflicting needs of relationship. That’s that desire and that need for oneness and closeness, and that sense of intimacy… As well as our need for independence, and separateness, and autonomy. And they’re both critical to a life of long-term intimacy, that we can’t just be the same and be connected all the time, and so we need a healthy balance. Now, the balance can look different for different individuals, as well as different couples… But we’re talking more specifically about fears of intimacy.
Elaine Aron in the book “The highly sensitive person in love” defines intimacy as being authentic, revealing to another your most private and true-in-this-moment self, thoughts, feelings, bodily self. In return, the other reveals his or her true self to you. This requires trusting each other. So intimacy equals authenticity, which is permitted by trust.
Fear of intimacy is often subconscious, or even unconscious, in that we’re often not aware of this deeper fear, that typically will not get activated or triggered until we enter into a very significant love relationship that evokes this positive emotion, and it’s very confusing and alarming for people to experience such connection and love, and simultaneously feel a high degree of fear. And unfortunately, what happens often is that people will push away from the person or the relationship that seems to be causing the distress, when really it’s coming from within, and it’s being brought to awareness by this intense love.
Let’s look at some common ways that people distance themselves emotionally as a result of this fear of intimacy. It can look like trouble with affection. It can be someone withholding their affection, like they wanna reach out and they wanna hug and snuggle or be close, but they’re feeling fear, so they don’t. Or perhaps it’s someone who gets tight or retreats, or even acts indifferently or adversely to their loved one, reaching out to them with affection.
Feeling guarded and protective. Not wanting to be close, and sometimes pushing your partner away. This can take many different forms. It can be in the way that we might have a bad attitude, or be critical, or judgmental… It can also be physically distancing yourself.
Another way that people distance themselves, and again, in this fear of intimacy, is not sharing needs, preferences and wishes. Not coming to the table… And we’re gonna talk about the fears that inform that. But it’s feeling like it’s not okay, it’s not safe.
Other examples are being paranoid or suspicious of your partner, or losing interest in sex, or being overly attached to the physical and erotic through porn, toys, positions… But again, it’s that distancing from the emotional, intimate space and love-making. Or perhaps, again, as I said, being overly-critical, as a way to feel that distance and push your partner away, because they’re likely to get defensive… Or even self-sabotage behaviors. There’s a great interview on this show around self-sabotage, and I’ll make sure to put that on today’s show notes if you missed it.
Another way of distancing is getting angry a lot. Again, as a reminder, when we engage in these ways of distancing ourselves for fear of intimacy, this is often happening subconsciously or unconsciously, so it’s not as though we’re maliciously pushing someone away. We’re having fear, we’re not sure how to deal with it, and these are ways that we create distance to feel some relief… And so in today’s conversation I’m hoping that we can have more awareness around what’s at play, and then hopefully there’s an opportunity to do a deeper-dive in uncovering, understanding, and possibly healing some of the pain that informs this fear.
A few more ways that we distance ourselves in relationship – perfectionism. Over-working and being too busy. Or being lost in fantasy. Perhaps having emotional crushes, or even emotional affairs, and preferring that to actual relationship. Perhaps choosing people that are unavailable, or having a series of failed relationships.
Elaine Aron, again, in the book “The highly sensitive person in love”, says:
“The unconscious holds in part the ideas and memories we have forgotten, but could remember if we tried. Here resides also those experiences we had so early, we had no words for them, but that come back to us through symbols and dreams and bodily memories or reactions. The language of the unconscious. The unconscious also seems to serve to keep out of consciousness anything that seems too traumatic or shameful.”
If you’re interested in a little more on the unconscious and the shadow, I encourage you to check out the episode by Dr. Keith Witt, and I’ll make sure to put that on today’s show notes for easy access.
Typically, we love the excitement and the fulfillment and the experience of love when we enter into relationship, or perhaps have been in relationship for a period of time. We enjoy this sense of love and connection, and therefore it can be difficult to accept or even tolerate that it will also evoke anxiety, fear of rejection, or loss… And it can threaten our defenses… Because intimacy and love requires vulnerability and openness, therefore we cannot be defended and protected at the same time.
Many times when we’re young we will experience rejection, or emotional pain, and we learn to adapt, perhaps shutting down, or learning to not rely on people, or learning to perform through tasks and earn a sense of acceptance and approval. And these coping strategies tend to continue, and then, again, as we’re talking about this deeper pain might not even be in our awareness, so we might not even understand that’s what’s fueling this self-reliance or this super-overachieving tendency. But at its origins is, again, that fear of being hurt again. And I have two quick client examples to illustrate this, that this can occur at the beginning stage of a relationship, and this can also occur even in a long-standing relationship.
The first example – a client, she’s a young adult, and is entering into perhaps her first significant serious, adult, romantic relationship. In our last session, she was telling me “I think I’m depressed”, and she was telling me all the reasons why… And I led her in a somatic exercise, for her to get out of her head and all the different things that she was thinking, and into her body… And through that experience, she was able to locate how afraid she is of being hurt… And it was so helpful for her to be able to deal with the fear directly, instead of all the other tendencies that run her on a hamster wheel. Again, as I’m mentioning, this was not conscious to her, as she was thinking she was actually depressed.
Another client that I started working with recently – he describes on paper that he’s got an amazing life. He’s got a beautiful wife, beautiful children, he’s got a successful business, he’s healthy, he’s got friends and family, extended family, you name it… And he was describing how much of his life has been in pursuit of goals. And as we’ve been discussing, it’s quite possible that very early in his life he made a decision that he was gonna be smarter, more accomplished, better, and that that was gonna give him some sense of approval, of value, of love; he’s gonna prove it to people. But in this forward motion of continually pursuing something that’s ahead of him, he’s described not feeling as happy, not as present, not as alive; and there’s other circumstances that have led to him reaching out, and I’m not gonna go into those details… But I will say it’s quite possible that there’s this fear of intimacy, or receiving and giving from this very authentic place in himself, that perhaps he hasn’t given much time and space to. Again, I wanna mention often this is not conscious.
As I have shared on this podcast, I have had my own struggle with fear of intimacy, and one of the tendencies that I did to distance myself from intimacy was to choose men that were not that available… Because if you look at it, since they’re not available, I get to be distracted by them not being available, rather than choosing in on someone that is available, and then deal with my own fears around intimacy.
As I go into naming the six original fears and then the two that Elaine Aron is adding, Elaine Aron comments that the more we’ve experienced reason for any of these fears in the past, the more likely you are to feel them in the present. And again, a lot of this we’re typically not super aware of, so just holding it gently and just noticing what comes up for you.
And as I read each of the fears, I’ll give a little bit of an example, and then I’ll also talk about what to do, how to work with that fear.
Number one, fear of exposure and rejection. Whenever you open up and are authentic, you risk exposing something that the other will find unappealing, silly, or even disgusting. Humans can rightly feel exposing many things – greed, envy, ignorance, moments of dishonesty, awkwardness, destructive impulses, anxiety, so intense it leads to panic. Forms of sexuality that at least somebody somewhere would disapprove of.
She goes on to say, “Sometimes a sense of being deeply flawed becomes symbolized by a facial feature, or a bodily curve that we work on endlessly to hide or be rid of… Or we cannot let anyone study our face, look into our eyes, or see us less than fully dressed. Important forms of intimacy. We can’t expose ourselves.”
When I first encountered relationship hardship and was contemplating perhaps that there were things happening in me that I could look at, I turned to many self-help books, one of which was Gay and Katy Hendricks’ Conscious Loving. I loved this book; it’s written several years ago. Part of what they’re really recommending is being able to be aware of the things that we hold; we withhold, we withdraw. And essentially, when we do this, we stop the flow of energy. This is what we’re talking about today – we stop the flow of intimacy, allowing someone to see us and allowing ourselves to engage in that authentic connection that Elaine Aron was talking about.
And fast-forward about a year, maybe about a year and a half, when I met my now-husband, I was deeply committed to this practice of revealing the uncomfortable truth or the microscopic truth that we tend to hold and hide, with the intention of supporting more of this flow, this intimacy that can continually be developed. There were several instances that I recall being terrified in that first year of dating, where I was committed more than the actual relationship to speaking this vulnerable truth; the things that I was ashamed of, or afraid to reveal. Because so often in relationship the conversation will cover a topic or veer towards something that will bring up a memory or bring up something that’s true for us. And so often the tendency is to wanna hide or withhold; that’s not attractive, or that’s not sexy, or they wouldn’t wanna know that, or that’s not lovable. And so we choose to hold. And I was in the practice of “Nope, I’m gonna reveal. Here’s another opportunity.” And I’m telling you that there were several instances that I was so, so scared that he wouldn’t like me, that he wouldn’t find whatever my experience had been in the past or whatever it was that I was sharing with him not likable, not lovable, or that he would be less interested in. So I was definitely managing the fear of rejection.
Elaine Aron, again, in the book “The highly sensitive person in love” says: “Relationships are critical to overcoming the fear of exposure, because they can reduce your fear to a more realistic size.” She invites us to think about people we know in our lives well, and it’s possible we can identify the flaws that they have, and that we still accept them and love them anyway.
Several weeks ago I was working with a client, and he was describing his fear of rejection, and really feeling terrified to get out into the dating world again, even though being in relationship is one of the things that he most longs for. He’s got a very great job, and he’s got a lot of success in his life, but relationship is one area that he has struggled to really cultivate long-lasting partnership. And listening to his narrative about having experienced so much rejection, we talked about that. And as we went through some of his history with rejection, it was interesting, because a lot of what he experienced was not feeling included, which is a form of rejection, but it wasn’t overt rejection… And also, the lack of experience. He had pretty strict parents growing up, and he was really limited, and then therefore when he was in college, he just didn’t feel like he had the same confidence and experience to be able to socialize to the same degree… And also, he didn’t really find partying that attractive; so there were some of the group activities that he just wasn’t as interested in. So there were a few things that complicated his experience of feeling well-received. But as we looked at his experience, we were able to reframe his narrative… Because the story that he’s telling himself is that “I will be rejected”, and this interferes with his ability to even show up or seek opportunities to meet new people.
More often than not, when we reveal something we deem as a flaw, or something that we are afraid to share, it often softens the space, where it gives other people permission to perhaps share things that they’re not proud of, or feel some level of inadequacy around… And this level of revealing more vulnerably cultivates intimacy. Again, it’s another irony – the more that we open and show what feels not attractive, it creates connection… Therefore, this kind of self-disclosure increases intimacy, rather than decreasing it.
With one client I remember he was struggling with this very thing as well, and I had posed to him possibly practicing sharing things that he feels embarrassed by, or finds perhaps somehow shameful, and in small steps, with people that he has long-standing friendships with, where he knows he’s loved and he knows that he’s cared about… And these relationships, again, have real solid foundation and security. And so he’s been practicing revealing, and he has been experiencing this level of intimacy, emotional intimacy, with some of his friends. So this does give an experience of what it’s like to reveal and practice being vulnerable, and having that exposure that then I think gives more practice to be able to do this in a romantic relationship.
Number two, fear of angry attacks. Anger can be an intense emotion to be either receiving or be witnessed to, and there’s a big difference between what I would call constructive anger, versus destructive. Destructive anger is where we are intentionally trying to break down, destroy, damage property, or even a person. And I would really not engage at all with a destructive anger.
Anger, when fueled constructively, can help us know when there’s a boundary that’s been crossed or something has significant meaning, or perhaps there’s an injustice. So in relationship, that anger can alert us to something that really has a lot of seriousness to it… And again, I wanna really clearly underscore the importance of how it’s delivered… But as I mentioned in the beginning, that when we’ve experienced pain in one of these areas in the past, it’s likely we’re gonna feel that fear currently.
I have a client who grew up in a family environment where his father was harsh with him, and critical with him… And also, he did not experience a lot of warmth or emotional attunement, so it created this degree of fear of how somebody was gonna respond to him – was he gonna get harsh criticism? Was he gonna get attacked? And he also unfortunately experienced some level of bullying in high school, so he has this fear, again, of how he’s going to be received. Is he gonna be misunderstood? Is he gonna be seen? Which I think goes back to the fear of exposure and rejection, but also the fear of attack… And he unfortunately also, fast-forward, had a very long, significant relationship where his significant other would react, feel insecure and take issue with him in very harsh, critical and angry ways… So he’s learned to shut down.
If you listened to that episode about stonewalling, it’s very much part of what he did to cope with that dynamic. And if you missed that episode, I’ll put that link on today’s show notes.
One of the things that we want to do if we notice we’re fearing an angry attack is to help someone know “Anger doesn’t work for me. I start to not be able to listen, or I get flooded, or I get over-aroused and I lose my ability to stay present to what you’re telling me. Or perhaps anger isn’t necessary. Like, “I really care about what you’re saying, and I take it with a level of seriousness, and I’m listening, and so therefore the volume doesn’t need to be as high.”
I remember I was working with a couple, and in this case the wife was the one that would get angry, and the husband was feeling really challenged with her level of anger, and what felt very volatile to him. He would go into his fear of inadequacy and not being good enough… So when we were working on this, I was asking her “Well, on a scale from 1 to 10, it sounds like when you start to communicate you’re at like an eight or a nine… What would it be like to communicate to him when it’s more a three or a four?” And she was like “He won’t listen to me. I’m afraid he won’t actually take me seriously.” So sometimes people use anger to feel heard, but it can backfire if you’re relating to somebody who has this fear of anger.
Even with criticism, it can feel like an attack, and if you’re interested in learning more about how to shift out of critical tendencies, as they can be so damaging to the bond and the sense of connection, I wanna encourage you to perhaps check out the free guide “Shifting criticism into connected communication.” I’ve had many people share that the simple language and comparison around what’s critical and what’s more constructive is just a game-changer. It really helps them see so clearly. And really fundamentally what’s going on here is that it’s helping someone turn a criticism in to a request. We have a need, and so often we’re trying to get that need met, but through critical means… And your partner is probably gonna get defensive, will shut down or not respond well in response to the criticism, so then you’re not getting your needs met. I encourage you to check that out. Again, you can find that on today’s show notes, DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast and you can find today’s episode, 233, “How to deal with fears of intimacy.”
On the show notes, if you scroll down to the section that says “Mentioned”, you’ll find a free guide, “Shifting criticism into connected communication”, and there you’ll just click and it is opt-in, so it will ask for your email, but then you’ll get directly emailed the download. From there, you’ll get more information about shifting criticism and an option to engage into the Shifting criticism into connected communication course.
Number three, fear of abandonment. Elaine Aron, again, in the book “The highly sensitive person in love”, writes “Of course we fear abandonment. If we don’t fear abandonment, our partner leaving or dying, then we are in total denial. The idea of the death of your loved one is awesome. Fear of this can be far more influential than we ever are conscious of. As for breakup over relationship, it is just that – the blending of two lives is sundered, and it feels terrible. All sorts of endings hurt.”
Elaine Aron talks about the fear of betrayal, as well as having experienced early childhood abandonment and how that can impact us. She’s also encouraging us to acknowledge the impermanence of life, and recommending that it’s far better to risk intimacy than to have the opportunity taken away from us. And she says “What I’m about to say may sound impossible to accept, but I think it is the goal. You cannot predict or stop the sort of eruptions in a partner’s unconscious that can cause even the seemingly nicest person to suddenly betray you. But to be fair, nor can you completely control your own. This is part of the unpredictability of life and the human psyche.”
When we are confronted with the fear of losing our significant other, we may even notice a sense of loss and grief as we imagine what it would be like to not have them in our life, or to potentially lose them… So this might actually evoke previous loss and pain, as we’re talking about, that often gets activated if we have known pain the past; it will trigger a current experience. So as we take time to contemplate this impermanence – it’s a very kind of Buddhist perspective – to accept the uncertainty and embrace there are no guarantees in life… And also the belief that we can get through this. Because that’s part of the main tragedy when we experience betrayal and abandonment – oftentimes, our sense of self or self-esteem or self worth takes a hit.
Brené Brown talks about this, that oftentimes people have a fear of their lovability. So when we have that level of betrayal or abandonment, it calls into question “Are we lovable?”, when often it has nothing to do with one’s lovability. If we’re truly in the practice of acknowledging and honoring our value and worth as a person, then betrayal and abandonment will hurt no doubt, but it might not be as crushing. Believing that you can get through it, that you will be okay. And there can be self-compassion for this experience of loss and grief, again, knowing that we are okay.
Today we have discussed the first three fears of intimacy: the fear of exposure and rejection, fear of angry attacks, and fear of abandonment. We’ve also talked about what to do and how to work with those fears. Again, the conversation here is to bring awareness, so that we can start to work with those parts more directly that feel fear and have some opportunity for healing and advocacy, so that we can cultivate more intimacy in our relationships.
If you would like access to today’s show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast at the top navigation bar, and there you’ll find all the episodes. Today’s episode is 233, “How to deal with fears of intimacy.”
Until next time, IÂ hope you take great care.
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