Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy (11 page)

Awareness of the Painful Past

Your ideas about love and couple relationships were undoubtedly very much influenced by your childhood relationships as well as by your past and present couple relationships. These powerful influences usually carry a mixture of gifts and challenges.

Avoidance, on the other hand, is rarely a gift; it is very hard work. Keeping a tight lid on disturbing emotions and memories and trying to ignore your fear of loss can use up enormous amounts of mental and emotional energy, and the stress is bad for your health. Awareness can replace avoidance, both in regard to past pain and in being open to any painful parts of a current relational experience.

Some distancers got so hurt in their early, formative relationships that it made them skeptical and anxious about ever opening their hearts again. In doing this work with awareness, you can make use of your past painful experiences as a teacher, instead of trying so hard to avoid them.

Reviewing and Restorying Old Wounds and Losses

The part of your brain that functions at the primitive level of self-protection can keep you fearful at a completely unconscious level. You probably have many layers of reasons for distancing, yet you may be conscious of painful early experiences only at the more sophisticated, language-based layers of awareness. By working with mindfulness, and learning from the mind-body connection, along with restorying (that is, retelling your stories) of your past experiences, you can begin to develop the level of awareness that allows you to make sense of what has been feeding your inner distancer.

Understanding why you feel fear is the first step to being able to let go and take new risks. Cultivating awareness around fears and anxieties will help you understand more about what may be keeping you from finding authentic happiness in your relationships. Facing past (and possible future) losses is a step into the awareness that everything changes, no matter what you might do to try to deny that, and that therefore you know, at your deepest cellular level, that there is nothing that you cannot get through.

Janine’s Story

For too long, Janine’s fears, anxieties, and the loss of her social network made her avoid anything that could possibly pierce those layers of pain. She stayed encased in a great cocoon of denial. She pushed her awareness of her emotional and mental suffering deep underground into her unconscious by trying to feel nothing at all. She used food as her drug, eating addictively until she ate herself into a stupor of numbness.

It was her sister’s intervention around Janine’s weight-related diabetes that forced Janine to withdraw from the cocoon of denial and go to the women’s center for help. When she began to participate in the trauma and addiction support groups there, she started to glimpse the possibility of allowing some light to enter her shrouded world.

Janine entered the process of cultivating her awareness by learning mindfulness breathing, becoming aware of the intricate relationship between her mind and her body, and finally beginning to believe that she could get beyond the pain of her past.

She used her newly acquired awareness of the family and cultural influences that had caused her to feel such shame about her victimization; slowly she began to see that the lack of support she’d been given by the people who supposedly loved her derived from a place of ignorance. Their callousness had been caused by their lack of awareness, their lack of consciousness, not because they had stopped loving her.

Finally, Janine was ready to move toward awareness of fear, pain, and grief, taking slow little steps, one at a time. There was no magic formula for doing this. It was just the way it is for everyone else who has been running from pain. She let awareness enter slowly, sharing her experience with others who knew what it felt like and were able to offer her true empathy and compassion. As she worked through the remembering process of Step Two, she learned that she could finally put all the pieces together and gain enough confidence to try out the new connections she would make doing the work of Step Three.

Now that you are moving forward to do the work of Step Two, the next task is to understand the factors that most influenced your approach to relationships. You will discover that the roots of pain also contain the strength of resilience. Now, take a deep breath, and step through the next door.

3

You are about to begin Step Two, which is remembering the roots of your distancing patterns. Some of the early experiences that shaped you may be as clear in your mind as the stones in a clear stream, while other important relationships and situations may have been tucked away in the deepest recesses of your memory. In this chapter, as we work with the past, you will slowly extricate yourself from the quicksand of painful old memories. We will explore the past carefully, going back just long enough to uncover the mysteries of your current relationships.

Step Two is a two-step process. First, in this chapter, we will focus on the people and events in your childhood that created the roots of your distancing. Then, in chapter 4, we’ll move on to examine the key aspects of the relationships in your adult life that have brought you to this point in your relational journey.

There are many roots for distancing. There are ghosts, past experiences of being wounded or betrayed that may play a major role in your need for distance. Past experiences may have led to defensiveness, anxiety, or fear; combative behaviors like excessive joking or sarcasm; or being very judgmental. Childhood experiences may have caused you to fear that you could lose your self, your identity, your autonomy, or your freedom of self-expression. You may fear the loss of your independence because as a child you had too many responsibilities (for example, caring for alcoholic or emotionally impaired parents). Being in a committed relationship may frighten you because you fear losing your economic independence; as a child, you may have watched helplessly while the adults in your life lost housing, jobs, or dignity because of their love relationships.

You may have had childhood experiences that planted the seeds of ambivalence, the belief that there’s always something better out there waiting—the “grass is always greener” anywhere but in the relationship you’re just getting into or just getting out of. There may be ancient subterranean rivers of anxiety within you that fuel your current spinning as a “crisis junkie.” Maybe you cannot focus on a partner because you get hooked by every little daily life drama; for example, a friend’s marital problems, your cat getting into a minor skirmish with the cat next door, or your indecision about whether to attend your cousin’s birthday party or your neighbor’s annual June barbecue.

The Only Way Out Is the Path Through

While the ARC (Awareness, Remembering, and Connecting) model emphasizes learning new insights and skills to help you change your present to a better one, you can’t arrive at a healthy present without understanding the past. During my own recovery and the healing experiences I’ve shared with friends and clients, I’ve learned there are some very good reasons to take the sometimes difficult trip back through the past.

Refusing to remember is a trap that keeps us stuck in old, unnecessary dysfunctional patterns. I remember watching my mother put on her “happy” face; she avoided painful memories by stating proudly “I remember only the good things.” She paid a steep price for her embrace of denial.

Below are some reasons to choose awareness over denial:

Self-Knowledge Is Power

You have a choice: you don’t have to be the victim of loneliness. You can take charge of your present-day relationships by using your awareness and your knowledge of the past. Remembering and understanding the lessons of the past will give you much more control over how you choose to act in the present.

Remembering Stops Painful Repetition

Remembering and getting to the root of your relationship issues can save you from repeating the same mistakes. You can actually choose to avoid that moment when you suddenly realize you have become your mother or father.

Remembering Increases Compassion

While you are piecing together all that comprises the root of your current relationship patterns, you will begin to steadily increase your compassion for yourself. You will also gain more compassion for your significant others, both past and present. Feeding compassion is like feeding a growing child: nurturance is required, but the rewards are immeasurable. Compassion is the best antidote to the poison of self-hatred and resentment toward others.

Remembering Strengthens Your Capacity for Change

The more you are able to remember and analyze your past, the more you can enrich and expand the complex story of who you are. As you become aware of the full richness and texture of your story, you will become more hopeful about your capacity to change. Those who get stuck in the rut of endless unhappiness are often trapped in an oversimplified view of themselves: Telling yourself that you “just can’t do relationships” is sentencing yourself to self-imprisonment. Such a prison is built on a foundation of ignorance, the refusal to examine the past.

Understanding Your Own Roots Increases Your Understanding of Others

The more you can learn about your past’s influence in shaping your current relationships, the more you will understand the other person in your current couple relationship, or the person you left, or the one who got away. Your increased capacity to understand the past is such a valuable tool because it allows you to recognize and understand that relationship challenges are neither all your fault nor all your responsibility.

Remembering Helps You to Prioritize Your Areas of Challenge

Let’s say that you’ve recognized that you were most negatively affected by your parents’ alcoholic marriage and their emotional neglect of you. When doing Step Two work, you might decide the most important change you can make would be to decrease your workaholic patterns in order to stop distancing from your partner. You might realize that you don’t want to be missing in action from your marriage, the way that your parents’ alcoholism prevented them from connecting emotionally with each other. Prioritizing your relational challenges means you are successfully using your memories to improve your current relationships.

“But I’ve Already Overanalyzed the Past…”

You may have been told that you’ve already spent more than enough time remembering your past and analyzing it. Many kinds of recovery treatments do direct people to stay away from their painful pasts and focus on learning new skills and new ways of retraining the brain. Even trauma experts currently place less focus on remembering and more emphasis on learning to cope in the present.

In the work you’ll be doing with the ARC model, however, you’ll find that there are ways to revisit the past without having to relive it. If we just wade into our past painful memories without the necessary swimming skills, we can easily drown or be pulled into treacherous quicksand. We need to know how to touch down lightly, looking at what shaped us long enough to understand it. We don’t need to move back into memory’s house of ghosts and monsters.

Even if you have spent a substantial amount of time already examining your past, Step Two will give you new tools and new goals. Working with Step Two is like taking a class in which you are the subject, and you are the expert. You are enrolling in a self-study course and you determine your schedule. You can choose to pace yourself. Take a break anytime you feel yourself slipping back into old feelings of anxiety, shame, depression, anger, or fear.

Exercise

Explore Your Resistance

Now that you’ve been introduced to some of the reasons to revisit your past by going into it—not around it—you can ready yourself for Step Two by doing this exercise. It will help you examine any resistance you may have to remembering your past, so that you can go on to Step Two with increased willingness.

Part One:Here are some questions to help you look at your personal roadblocks:

1. What would tempt you to skip over your past and go directly to Step Three?
   
2. Who would tell you to avoid looking at your past?
   
3. Who would urge you to dig into your memories?
   

Take a few minutes to write your answers in your journal. Then we’ll move into the second part of the exercise.

Part Two:By thinking about who would urge you to skip over your past, you deepen your awareness of the influences that may have most affected your past choices. Visualize these influences being erased from your mental screen so that you can concentrate on what you need to do. Practice tuning in to your awareness of those people who would be your best supporters. Picture these people cheering you on, or shaking your hand to congratulate you, or beckoning to you to join them at the finish line of your personal marathon.

If you start to feel disloyal to the family you grew up with, here are some tips on how to let go of your guilty feeling. Remembering doesn’t mean that you have to judge or condemn or expose any of the people or events from your childhood. You are simply observing what happened and noticing how this influences your current relationships. You’re not blowing the whistle and you’re not blaming others. You’re just examining the past in order to construct a happier life for yourself in the present.

Seeds of Resilience Within the Painful Past

You don’t have to focus exclusively on the painful parts of your relational legacy. You must also learn to honor the strengths you gained from your early experiences. Here’s the buried treasure, the essence of why we do the work of Step Two. Write the following slogan in your journal, and come back to it as often as you need to:

Within our vulnerabilities lie the seeds of our strength.

Despite having endured a very painful childhood, I discovered the truth of the famous maxim “that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I was tormented by my father’s sexual and physical assaults. But he had other qualities I loved, especially his endless repertoire of bedtime stories. My father’s stories actually helped me survive the craziness of his abuse. Not only did the stories transport me far away from what was happening in the darkness of my bedroom, but I delighted in a world of fantasy where anything was possible.

Although I was unquestionably harmed by my father’s nighttime visitations, I was also inspired by the adventures my father created for me. In these stories, my father created anever-continuing hero’s tale in which I was a brave little ship’s captain, navigating a magical journey in my Noah’s Ark, which was filled with whimsical animals who were free to become anything they chose.

Fortunately, the day came when I escaped my father’s abuse. I was no longer silent. I began to tell stories of my own. The telling of these stories gradually released me from shame and isolation. Eventually, I learned to heal myself by creating a world in which I was a whole, powerful, and joyous being. Only then did my identity change from that of a victim trapped in helplessness to that of a whole person with a large repertoire of responses and emotions.

All human beings can learn to heal through hearing the stories of others. Stories of others who also had difficult childhoods showed me I was not alone, and gave me the courage to throw off the shackles of victimhood.

No matter what kinds of childhood experiences shaped who you are today, there are ways to honor the positive significance of your experiences by understanding their power to make you stronger, smarter, more resilient in mind, body, and spirit. There are skills to learn: new ways to think, new awareness to cultivate about how your mind and body work together to heal and strengthen. And, finally, new capacities will emerge as a direct response to difficult past experiences that offer the promise of relating to other people in a deeper, more joyful way.

There are five major clusters of childhood experience that most often generate distancing patterns in adult relationships. They are as follows:

1. Dysfunctional parental marriages,
   marked by constant conflict, scarring betrayals, or chronic disengagement
   
2. Inadequate parents or caregivers,
   who were impaired by substance abuse, mental or physical illness, or personality disorders
   
3. Loss,
   of a parent to death, loss of the original parental unit to divorce, loss of home or community to family misfortune or community disasters
   
4. Neglect,
   as evidenced by grossly inadequate nurturance, the absence of parental attention and affection, or inadequate basic material resources (clothing, health care, personal possessions)
   
5. Abuse,
   including physical, psychological, and sexual abuse
   

To help you figure out what were the most significant formative influences from your childhood, here are some illustrations for each of these five categories that tell the stories of other distancers:

Unhappy Marriages as Formative Models

The most obvious root of problems with intimate relationships is attributable to growing up with unhappily married parents. Whether or not the marital misery culminated in divorce, the atmosphere created by an unhappy marriage has a very strong negative impact on how the children of that marriage grow into their adult relationships. As a rule, unhappy marriages are characterized by frequent conflicts between parents, or betrayals (affairs are the most common), or simply a passionless, disengaged, “dead” marriage.

Andrew’s Story

Andrew had a number of negative challenges as a child. His father was an alcoholic, his older brothers were verbally abusive, and his mother spent more time at church than with her family. But as I continued getting to know him, it became clear that the most difficult challenge Andrew faced was the model of his parents’ marriage. His hyperanxiety might have been generated by the unpredictability of his father’s alcoholism, but his fear of intimate relationships went straight to the core issue, the marriage he had witnessed throughout his childhood. His memories of this powerfully negative relationship controlled him on a deeply unconscious level.

Andrew had grown up observing a distant, passionless marriage. His father was lost in the bottle and his mother was hidden in the priest’s confessional booth. Andrew was able to talk easily about both his father’s alcoholism and the verbal violence inflicted on him by his brothers, but he was oblivious to the impact of how his parents’ marriage had affected him. “Why didn’t your mother leave your father when she couldn’t bear his drinking any longer?” I asked Andrew at one of our early meetings.