Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy (14 page)

Third, we’re going to move back in time now. Allow yourself, without thinking too long about it, to pull up a memory from your childhood, one that isn’t really bad or really good—something more or less routine. When you have your memory, anchor its details in your mind using some of the same prompts you used for the first and second parts of this exercise. That is, try to recall the surroundings in your memory. Take a guess at what you and any others might have been wearing.

Now, here comes the really important part of the exercise: Detach yourself from the experience by pretending that you’re the cameraman (or woman) filming this event for a movie. See whether you can put yourself inside the mind of this person who just wants to get all the details right. What does the camera see when it films you as a child? Try to get yourself into a place of detachment where you can observe this scene without going back in time and becoming part of it.

After doing this very important piece of work for a few minutes, switch your mind back into the present moment and practice any of the following self-care routines:

• Do some deep breathing (find a really comfortable position) so that you can feel your breath slowing down. This will help you to relax your entire body.
  
• Do a muscle tension and relaxation exercise: tighten various muscle groups (hands, shoulders, stomach, thighs, face), hold the tension for a count of five, then relax and shake it out.
  
• Look at pictures that relax or soothe you (for example, scenes from a beach, a brook, farmland, ocean waves).
  
• Smell an especially pleasant scented candle.
  
• Listen to some soothing music.
  

Congratulations! You’ve just completed a very important piece of work. The purpose of doing this exercise was for you to practice focusing on useful information from your past and learning skills that will help you to access childhood memories without allowing them to pull you back into the pain or distress you may have felt back in childhood when you didn’t have the choices you have now. If you had difficulty with this exercise, remind yourself that you can try recalling it again until you begin to feel more confidence in your ability to analyze the past from a detached place.

Avoiding the Fight, Flight, or Freeze Reaction

It’s fairly common to react to old memories by lapsing into old, dysfunctional forms of trying to protect yourself. When you were a vulnerable little child, you may have tried to protect yourself from your pain, fear, or anxiety by one of the universal, instinctive responses to danger; that is, fight, flight, or freeze behavior. Now that you’re an adult, your tactics of self-protection may not be as obvious as your childhood responses were.

When you were a kid, you may have tried escaping from your situation by running away, hiding, dissociating (so your body or feelings weren’t present), going numb, or taking your rage out on another child or yourself. Now that you’re an adult, you may find that you try to do the same thing when the distress of old memories triggers your emotions. Here are some of the most common responses to retrieving painful old memories:

1. Indulging in your addiction of choice: You may stuff yourself with food, or stop eating completely; or you may increase your drug or alcohol use; or try to escape through activities like overworking, compulsive shopping, spending too much time in cyberspace, or exercising compulsively.
   
2. Dissociating: This can include feeling as if you’re not really present; developing a quick case of amnesia for what you’ve just been remembering; shutting down so that you have no feelings at all; getting so confused in your thinking that your head feels like it’s spinning; or recognizing that you’ve temporarily turned into someone very different from your usual self.
   
3. Sleeping much more or much less than usual.
   
4. Picking fights with others or becoming supersensitive to what others say or do.
   
5. Feeling more anxious than usual.
   
6. Feeling increased sadness and depression.
   

As you look over this list, try to remember if there’s anything else you do when you are upset by old memories.

Choosing the Right Vehicle for Traveling Down Memory Lane

Although distancers share basic styles of being in relationship and common bonds in the challenges of their childhoods, each person has to determine what will be the best process for remembering, analyzing, and absorbing her or his formative experiences of the past. There are a variety of processes you can utilize for remembering your childhood and getting to the core of the experiences that formed your adult distancing patterns. Some people use all the methods described below, while others concentrate most of their efforts using just one approach.

Contemplation and Assimilation

For some people, the most important part of remembering is to contemplate the various possibilities among the relevant childhood experiences that led to adult distancing, and then assimilate the new information. They may do this in one long, concentrated burst of thinking, journal writing, meditating, or grieving, or they may process their memories more gradually, letting in a little bit of new information at a time. People who favor this process tend to approach life as a series of puzzles to solve, using rational thinking to strengthen and change.

Rick’s Story

Because he had been sexually abused, Rick had kept everything in his life tightly controlled. It was very important to him to feel that he was still in charge when it came to investigating his childhood and learning how it had shaped the roots of his distancing patterns. He discussed his memories without much emotion, then he began reading about the impact of sexual abuse and, gradually, arrived at an intellectual acceptance that the abuse had created lasting problems for him.

Once he felt that he was in control of the situation by absorbing all the information he could gather, he was slowly able to allow the emotional impact to surface. Bit by bit, he was able to assimilate both the cognitive and the emotional information about himself, and use it productively to understand and change his present-day relationships.

Investigation and Verification

People who need to approach their painful memories through some kind of activity instead of intellectual contemplation often prefer to use the process of investigation and verification. If this approach is your preference, you may want to get started right away. You can do this by talking to others who share the same family history, or were part of very similar families, to investigate and verify your memories.

This approach may also involve attending support groups and actively sharing similar memories of growing up in dysfunctional families. The families may have had abusive or alcoholic or drug-addicted parents or other relatives, or the children may have had to cope with a mentally ill parent, or struggle with geographical dislocation, or the many stresses of poverty. Regardless of the cause of the dysfunction, children growing up under these kinds of circumstances often suffer and cope in similar ways.

Reading groups can also work well for this style of processing: joining in a book group discussion about growing up with impaired or unhappily married parents may help to galvanize the process of investigation and verification.

Yvonne’s Story

When Yvonne’s book club read a memoir about childhood sexual abuse, she finally felt able to share her own history of sexual abuse with others. This freed her to share more of her history and herself with her boyfriend, validating for both of them that her complex responses to being sexual are very common among survivors of sexual abuse.

Creativity as a Healing Tool

People who best process emotionally charged information by using the nonverbal parts of their brains may prefer creative methods to explore their past and assimilate it into the present. Whether or not you think of yourself as creative, you may find that you feel more capable of absorbing your formative childhood experiences through the use of visual, tactile, and somatic experiencing. This might mean that you focus on experiencing where your memories are most powerfully felt in your body. For example, maybe when you think about your childhood, you get a heavy feeling in your gut. You could try drawing a picture of that feeling and then transform the heaviness intosomething lighter. Using this approach, you can experiment with transforming your memories into useful tools through your creative outlets.

Ben’s Story

As Ben continued to learn more about why he had become such an entrenched distancer, he also added a new activity to his life that helped him in his exploration of his childhood. He began experimenting with carving wood, sometimes doing abstract carving, other times carving representations of faces that illuminated his emotional reconstruction of his past.

Janine’s Story

Janine began to write poems about the strengths she was beginning to see in herself as she went through her painful process of remembering. She created powerful, transformative images in her poems: flowers that bloomed between the cracks of the cement sidewalks, thunderstorms that left glistening forests in their wake, and rocks that cracked wide open to reveal delicate veins.

Tools to Help You Learn from Your Memories

There are a variety of ways for you to continue working with Step Two. You’ll find that no matter how you do your best learning and processing, it will be helpful to try out several different ways to do the work. Also, you’ll need to find a variety of ways to take care of yourself throughout this process as you piece together your past and begin to understand how it shaped the person you are now. Here are some exercises you can use as tools or guidelines to continue the work you are now doing in Step Two.

Exercise

Somatic and Creative Work

Whether or not you are drawn to using creativity as a tool, the following exercise will help you experience using different parts of your brain to work with your memories.

Make sure you have at least thirty minutes of uninterrupted time to complete this exercise. Prepare yourself for it by getting some notebook or drawing paper and some colored pencils or markers. Try to find a quiet place where you can sit comfortably.

Part One: Follow the steps you’ve already learned to relax your body and slow down your breathing. Begin to allow yourself to picture some of those difficult situations you experienced in childhood. Tune in to your body as you sit here in the present moment, and see whether any part of your body feels strong sensations like pain, tension, or other discomfort. If you feel any of these sensations, try to picture how that body sensation would look if you drew a picture of it. Would it look like a burning fire? A huge, heavy pile of rocks? A giant ice cube? Stay with it for a few minutes.

Now, see if you can draw an image of that sensation, using colors and shapes to give yourself a rough idea of what you just discovered.

Part Two: Now go back into just relaxing your body and slowing down your breathing. When you are relaxed and breathing regularly, once again picture the childhood situations that caused you distress. Again, see where you feel the memories most strongly in your body. Again, see what sensations arise, what images, colors, and shapes these sensations might look like. Stay with these for a few minutes.

This time, try drawing some healing images. What could soothe a burning sensation? What could take the place of those heavy rocks? What would melt that giant ice cube?

Deconstructing the exercise: There are several purposes for doing this exercise. One is to help you use the nonverbal parts of your brain to investigate your memories, so that you can see what your body and the visualizing, sensing parts of your brain can teach you. Another purpose is to show you how to use other parts of your brain to get through the distress that the process of remembering may bring up. In part two of the exercise, you had the opportunity to transform a distressing memory so that you could go on to work more effectively with what you need to know about yourself.

Getting Yourself to the Starting Gate

You are about ready to begin authoring your autobiography; that is, connecting your memories of childhood with your current relationship challenges. Sometimes, it can be hard to get yourself into an energetic, active place to do the work of this nature. It’s very easy to slip into a passive stance where you take in a lot of information, and then allow your emotions to take over. Or some people find they just want to run away from this experience, and they try to block difficult memories using any number of avoidance tactics.

However, the whole purpose of going back into the past is to use it as a tool. You’ll feel much better once you start actively working with your tools. Here’s another exercise to get you started.

Exercise

Sentence Completion

This exercise will help you focus on what’s most significant in your store of memories, what it is that plays the biggest role in your current intimate connections. Remember to give yourself enough time to do this completely, and then let yourself write whatever first comes into your head. You can always go back later and add more details or rethink your answers; you can even change them. Now, complete the following sentences:

1. My parents’ marriage made me think that ______________________
   
2. As a child, my dream for when I grew up was that ___________
   

   (If your answer is something like “become a fireman” or “live in a big city,” see if you can add any wishes about love or marriage or children. If you can’t, then that’s something to think about too.)
   

3. As a child, I was often afraid that ______________________
   
4. I was taught to value certain things about myself like ______________________
   
5. Sometimes I felt bad about myself because ______________________
   
6. Most people I knew during my childhood believed the most important thing about a spouse (partner) was ______________________
   
7. I learned to be careful what I said and to whom I said it because
   
8. I used to believe it was my fault that ______________________
   
9. The biggest loss I remember from my childhood was ___________
   
10. The biggest disappointment I remember from my childhood was ______________________
    
11. The worst fear I had in childhood was ______________________
    
12. I was often angry as a child because ______________________
    
13. I knew that I didn’t want to be like my mother (or father) when I grew up because ______________________
    
14. I wanted to be like my mother (or father) when I grew up because ______________________
    
15. To me, the ideal couple was ___________ because
    
16. As a kid, I felt responsible for my mother (or father) when she (he) needed ___________
    
17. I was proud of my family because ___________
    
18. I was ashamed of my family because ___________
    
19. I felt closest to ___________ because he or she