Understanding Fear of Intimacy
By PsychAlive
- What is Fear of Intimacy?
What is Fear of Intimacy?
Fear of intimacy is an often subconscious fear of closeness that frequently affects people’s personal relationships. This fear of physical and/or emotional intimacy tends to show up in people’s closest and most meaningful relationships.
- Where Does This Fear of Intimacy Come From?
Where Does This Fear of Intimacy Come From?
While there are times when we are aware of actually being apprehensive and distrusting of love, we are more likely to identify these fears as concern over potentially negative outcomes: rejection, the deterioration of a relationship or feelings of affection that aren’t returned. However, our fear of intimacy is often triggered by positive emotions even more than negative ones. In fact, being chosen by someone we truly care for and experiencing their loving feelings can often arouse deep-seated fears of intimacy and make it difficult to maintain a close relationship.
- Why Do Positive Feelings Trigger a Fear of Intimacy?
Why Do Positive Feelings Trigger a Fear of Intimacy?
It may be surprising to learn that the real resistance to intimacy often doesn’t come from the acts of our partners, but from a lurking enemy within us.
The problem is that the positive way a lover sees us often conflicts with the negative ways we view ourselves. Sadly, we hold on to our negative self-attitudes and are resistant to being seen differently. Because it is difficult for us to allow the reality of being loved to affect our basic image of ourselves, we often build up a resistance to love.
- Where Do These Negative Attitudes Come From?
Where Do These Negative Attitudes Come From?
These negative core beliefs are based on deep-seated feelings that we developed in early childhood of being essentially bad, unlovable or deficient. While these attitudes may be painful or unpleasant, at the same time they are familiar to us, and we are used to them lingering in our subconscious. As adults, we mistakenly assume that these beliefs are fundamental and therefore impossible to correct.
- How Does Fear of Intimacy Affect Us?
How Does Fear of Intimacy Affect Us?
We don’t intentionally reject love to preserve a familiar identity. Instead, during times of closeness and intimacy, we react with behaviors that create tension in the relationship and push our loved one away.
Here are some common ways people distance themselves emotionally as a result of a fear of intimacy:
- Withholding affection
- Reacting indifferently or adversely to affection or positive acknowledgement
- Becoming paranoid or suspicious of a partner
- Losing interest in sexuality
- Being overly critical of a partner
- Feeling guarded or resistant to being vulnerable
- How to Overcome a Fear of Intimacy?
How to Overcome a Fear of Intimacy?
In order to overcome our fear of intimacy, we must challenge our negative attitudes toward ourselves and not push our loved ones away. It is possible to challenge our core resistance to love. We can confront our negative self-image and grow our tolerance for a loving relationship.
We can overcome our fears of intimacy and enjoy more loving and more intimate relationships.
- Ways to Improve Your Relationship
Ways to Improve Your Relationship
Relationships expert, Dr. Lisa Firestone explains some simple ways to improve your relationship.
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Love by any operational definition of the word (kindness, affection, respect, sensitive attunement, and shared companionship) is not only hard to come by, but strange as it may seem, it is even more difficult to accept and tolerate. Most of us profess that we want to find a loving partner but what we wish for in fantasy is not necessarily tolerable in reality. The experience of real love often threatens our self-defenses and arouses our anxiety as we become vulnerable and open ourselves up to another person. This leads to a fear of intimacy. Falling in love not only brings excitement and fulfillment; it also creates anxiety and fears of rejection and potential loss. For this reason many people shy away from loving relationships.
Early in life, when we experienced rejection and emotional pain, we began to rely heavily on fantasy gratification as a coping mechanism. Overtime, we came to prefer our reliance on these fantasy processes over actual personal interactions and positive acknowledgment. After being hurt in our earliest relationships, we fear being hurt again and are reluctant to take another chance on being loved.
The negative feelings we developed toward ourselves in our developmental years, became an established part of who we think we are. Therefore, when someone is loving and reacts positively toward us, we experience a conflict within ourselves between their view of us and our core identity. We then react with suspicion and distrust because our fear of intimacy has been aroused.
Existential issues also negatively impact our capacity to accept love and enjoy loving relationships. When we feel loved and admired, we come to place greater value on ourselves, and in appreciating and prizing our lives more, we necessarily face more pain related to death’s inevitability. We fear both the loss of our loved one and of ourselves, and in the process often unconsciously pull back from a love relationship.
Even though the fear of intimacy is a largely unconscious process, we can observe its effect on our behavior. We see it when we push away our partner and are refractory to their affection or positive acknowledgement. It is at play when we withhold the positive qualities our partner finds most desirable, thereby making ourselves less lovable. Our distancing behaviors act to reduce our anxiety, preserve our negative self-image and ultimately maintain our psychological equilibrium.
We can recognize the behaviors that are driven by our fear of intimacy and challenge these defensive reactions that preclude love. We can remain vulnerable in our love relationship by resisting retreating into a fantasy of love or engaging in distancing and withholding behaviors. We can maintain our integrity, learn to “sweat through” the anxiety of being close without pulling away, and gradually increase our tolerance for being loved. By taking the actions necessary to challenge our fear of intimacy, we can expand our capacity for both giving and accepting love.
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Tags: couple, defenses, fear of intimacy, intimacy, love, marriage, relationship
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This is the best article that I’ve read on the subject and I have read a few. It is certainly the most helpful. Thank you for using a movie that I loved (and never really knew why until now) to illustrate your point. Thank you.
wow, this is really a good article, will definitely go watch this movie again. Do keep writing!