Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy (17 page)

Imagine that you’re in a favorite peaceful place. Picture the surroundings, feel the air against your skin, listen to any sounds that you usually enjoy hearing in this favorite place. As you continue to picture this place, invite someone comforting to come into that place with you. (You may prefer the company of an animal or a presence; for example, invite your Higher Power, or Spirit, instead of a person.) Just enjoy the picture in your mind of being in that favorite place with this comforting person or presence.

Picture yourself handing over your past disappointments, hurts, and losses to this person or presence. Ask this being to take away these burdens from you, trusting that you can say good-bye to old memories of suffering without having to forget the people attached to the memories.

When this being has taken away your burdens, give yourself a little time to continue picturing yourself in this favorite place. Give yourself permission to feel lighter and freer. When you are ready, you can slowly return to the present moment, letting yourself know that you can always go back to this place to meet this special being again, whenever you need to hand over your old memories of suffering and lighten your emotional load.

If you have trouble allowing yourself to do this kind of exercise with a whole heart, you can always experiment with giving yourself a simple reminder to relax and let go of past memories of suffering.

We will end the work of Step Two by consolidating what you’ve learned from your past relationships into solid building blocks for the foundation of your future relationship enterprise. You’ve now worked with what the past has taught you, and this is useful information to guide you into the future.

We’ll start by making a red-flag list of the people you’ve learned you must avoid.

Exercise

Red-Flag List

Everyone has a different set of danger signals that they learn to watch for, whether they’re hoping to begin a new relationship or wondering if they should leave their current partner. Here’s a typical “red flag” list:

People to stay away from:

• People who don’t seem curious about who I am
  
• People who seem to be overloaded with problems and needs
  
• People who never seem to stay in relationships for long
  
• People who don’t have much going on in their lives
  
• People who always have too much going on in their lives
  
• People who don’t share my fundamental values
  
• People who don’t enjoy activities like ___________ (fill in the blank with what really matters a lot to you, for example, outdoor activities, or cultural events, just hanging out at home, or doing social stuff with groups of friends and/or extended family)
  
• People who don’t like ___________ (fill in the blank with categories like children, or animals, or whatever really matters to you)
  
• People who are too opinionated (or those who have no passionate convictions about anything)
  
• People who always need to be in control of everything
  
• People who seem constantly angry, depressed, or anxious
  
• People who always get jealous of what I have (for example, my job, my income, my skills, my friends)
  

When you’ve finished looking over these examples, write down your own red-flag list. You may notice that it resembles what you’ve been reviewing about what you learned from past relationships. Notice whether there are any surprises. You might decide that you want to avoid people who don’t like animals for example, not so much because you have pets but because of what you’ve learned about people in the past who didn’t like animals. Maybe the ex-partner who was the most jealous of everything you had didn’t like animals. You’ve learned that you must stay away from these types of people because they won’t allow you to really enjoy whatever you have and love, including pets or the possibility of pets.

Now, you are finally at the brink of stepping into the world of making a new relational life for yourself. You’ve used your awareness skills to focus on who you’ve been in past relationships, and you’ve journeyed through memories of your childhood and previous adult life. Now, you have enough self-knowledge to consciously design the kind of relational future you deserve.

Exercise

Your Wish List

You can use your self-knowledge to design your ideal relationship. Throw away all the abbreviated descriptions from the Personals section of the newspaper, or the mindless requests for the perfect partner in the outer reaches of cyberspace. Here’s your chance to create a wish list based on what you’ve come to know about yourself in relationships.

The following examples will help you develop your own specifications for a healthy relationship. You can use this as a checklist, and once again use an asterisk to indicate an especially important item:

In my ideal relationship…

Use this list to get started making your own list. You can make the longest list you want to. Don’t edit yourself by being too reasonable. Let yourself write down whatever you think you really want in a relationship. Also, let yourself be as specific as you want to be; for example, “I want someone who has always dreamed of going to the Grand Canyon to watch the sun rise,” or “I want a partner who is good at fixing things around the house,” or “I want a partner who can help me to learn to tango and look good doing it.”

Exercise

Writing Your Dream Story

To conclude Step Two, take as much time as you need to write a short story about your ideal relationship. (This exercise applies to you even if you’re currently in a relationship. Just imagine that in your short story, the couple is transformed into your ideal relationship.)

Before you begin to write your short story, here are a few things to think about. You don’t have to share this story with anyone. It’s for your eyes only. Just relax and write. This exercise will help you to envision all of what matters the most to you in a relationship. It will also help you to make your vision become reality. The more thoughtfully we picture our goals, the more likely we are to get what we want.

Write about the things you and your partner appreciate about each other. Describe what you do together day by day. Create a few special events or moments that you share (this could even be facing something difficult together). Write about how you work together to make a good life, including the challenges that face any couple when the going gets tough. Describe how you and your partner play together. Describe what makes you happy about this relationship. Write about how other people in your life respond to you as a couple. Write about the dreams you share with your partner in this ideal relationship.

You are putting together all the knowledge you’ve been gathering about yourself and your past. You are also beginning the work of transformation.

In the next two chapters you will work on how to make this ideal relationship happen as you practice making new connections between yourself and others, including your communities of support, and you’ll learn how to create new connections with a partner. You will be able to do this because you have completed the work of building a very strong and deep foundation for your new life.

5

When you fully engage in community, your capacity for intimate relationships will automatically begin to change and improve.

Once again, the Awareness, Remembering, and Connecting (ARC) model challenges you to try a new approach to changing your relationships with others. You are about to begin a unique action plan for changing your basic approach to intimacy. You’ll experience something different from any other approach to love and intimacy that you might have tried because rather than start with the couple relationship, we will begin with relationships you will build between yourself and your community.

As we move into the work of Step Three, you will experience how the transformation of your relational approach in groups can transform your relational capabilities at every level. Eventually, we will focus on intimate relationships, but not until you’ve first explored new ways to relate within group or community contexts. This chapter will help you understand and activate this secret to success in intimate relationships.

Although it might seem more logical to focus on changes in your one-to-one relationships, you are about to discover why starting with groups is more likely to make changing your one-to-one relationships successful. Here are the primary reasons why you need to first deepen and expand your relationships within a group or community:

• When you get involved in a community or group, it defuses your fears and expectations about intimate relationships. That is, it decreases your anxieties, fears, and expectations around trying to create a perfect couple relationship. When you put all your energy into trying to get what you need from a couple relationship, often working twice as hard to protect yourself from vulnerability, you can easily get stuck in your old patterns of approach-avoidance, which are triggered by fear of failure. When you are engaged in satisfying relationships in the community or group of your choice, this intense pressure decreases.
  
• Give yourself a break. You can safely try out new ways of relating to others in a group or community context. Don’t risk trying out your new ways of relating in the most problematic relationship of all, the couple. For example, suppose you fear being consumed in an intimate relationship. Your usual pattern might be to erect aggressive and impenetrable walls when a simple two-way conversation would be enough. So, your assignment for changing your distancing style is to practice setting less rigid boundaries. It will be much easier to experiment with this process in a group instead of doing it as one of a couple where your deepest vulnerability is at stake. Here’s another example. Suppose you’re so afraid of closeness that in your quest for intimacy you always pursue people who are clearly unavailable. When you do the work of Step Three, you will make connections with members of a group who are more relationally available. This will increase your self-esteem and will give you the positive experience of making closer connections with available people.
  
• By fully engaging in almost any form of group or community, you will have more people to learn from, people whose actions and ways of being can teach you a lot about relationships. This can be particularly helpful when you have been stuck in a narrow, little emotional room filled with your solitary thoughts about closeness, or when you’ve been limiting yourself to the thoughts and beliefs contained within your couple relationship.
  

Suppose you’re feeling put off by the idea of getting yourself involved in community interactions, even if theoretically it makes sense to you. You can think about it this way: When you take the focus off your love life and meet your emotional needs in a different kind of social situation, it might allow you to relax and enjoy life a little more, right? So … just let go and see what happens.

“But I don’t do groups!” the average distancer may exclaim in horror. I know, I know. I was once right there with you, kicking and protesting against any suggestion of group activities or joining any form of community. “I like one-on-one relationships. That’s it!” I replied when invited to participate in group activities. This was obviously not true or else I would have been happily nestled into a successful couple relationship! However, I was oblivious to my faulty logic.

For many reasons, groups or community might seem like the last thing any distancer would choose. Entering any form of community or group can feel strange, scary, even impossible. Nonetheless, if you take this leap of faith, weird as it may feel, you will discover that it is the most effective way to leave loneliness behind.

Tackling Your Resistance

What have you got to lose? You’re already in the process of reevaluating your world, your operating modes, your whole identity, so you might as well keep on going. You are ready for change. If you weren’t, you would accept your loneliness or unhappiness, and ignore the idea that maybe your relational life could feel a lot better. If you weren’t ready to try to change your life, you might be curled up with the latest book by your favorite mystery writer, letting the world of relationships carry on without your presence. Instead of working with the exercises in Stop Running from Love, you could be reading a book about raising Yorkshire Terriers or making better investments.

Now you’re ready to get started on the actual transactions that will transform your relationship patterns. You will be guided through a menu of opportunities for working on new relationships within a community. You’ll concentrate on several areas of common relational challenge for distancers. But first you need more information about the concept of “community.”

Let’s start with a description of what we mean by “community.” Stop worrying that you’ll be told to join a group or cult you wouldn’t wish on even your worst enemy. You won’t have to go to community potlucks at the local neighborhood center or join a book club or sign up with the Welcome Wagon committee, although, if you did, you might find out that you enjoy such activities. You don’t have to stop your already busy life and make space for a group or community affiliation that would eat up all your free time. You will explore only those groups or communities that fit your individual personality, interests, preferences, or beliefs. And you can participate as little or as much as you want.

Guess what? You’re already a part of a community, whether you define it that way or not. That’s because there are so many forms of community that each of us connects to in some way. You’re already involved in various forms of community. So, first think about any group of people with whom you already have some affiliation.

You are very likely to be a member of a family. You are a resident of a town, city, or neighborhood. You are also likely to be part of a workplace community or job-based network of some sort. You may be affiliated with a spiritually based group, a recreational group, or a group that exists because of a shared interest in nature, hobbies, books, sports, community improvement, social change, music, and so forth. You may be involved in a support group, like a 12-step program, or an exercise or health-focused group. You may be part of the cyber community, participating in listservs, blogs, or chat rooms.

Exercise

Create Your Community Map

Begin by examining how you see yourself in relation to all the various forms of community that are already in your life. This exercise will help you picture how all these communities connect to you, both those from your past and those in your current life.

Instructions: Get a blank piece of paper and draw yourself as a face or stick figure in the center. Now, using a word or two to describe the various communities or groups in your life, jot these down, using as much of the space on the paper as you need. You can make the map easier to read by circling each word and drawing a line between it and your image in the center.

If you want to organize this exercise a little more, you can also try placing the groups that are currently most important in your life closer to your image. Or you can place past groups and communities on one side of the page, and current ones on the other side, creating a visual time line. Here’s an example:

Young Adult Groups/Communities:

music groups (chorus, rock band, fan club)

women’s consciousness-raising groups

work groups (researchers, daycare workers, carpenters)

family of origin

political action groups

friends

Early Midlife Years:

graduate school friends

work colleagues (therapists, supervisees, mentors)

students

family (adopted sisters, nieces, partners)

Current Groups/Communities:

Raging Grannies singing group

12-step support groups

tennis teams

current family (partner, stepdaughter, son-in-law, grandsons)

friends

Although the degree of your involvement may be a minor part of your daily life, your map illustrates that you already have the experience of being a part of various groups or communities. You also know that you have a variety of relationships with the other members of those groups.

You’ll begin Step Three by focusing on how you connect with others in the communities you’re already a part of, along with exploring new groups or communities that you may want to choose as your new frontier for exploring relational change.

Family: The Original Community

Let’s start with the most likely common denominator for all of us, the family. You may be part of a close-knit family or you may feel detached or separated from your relatives, but you are part of a family in some way. We all start out in a family, and no matter the size or health of the family system, we form the core of our relational patterns based on what we experience in that original group, our first community.

Even if you have chosen to separate from the family you grew up in, or you’ve severed relationships with the family you created in adult life, you are never really without family. Family relationships live on in your memory, as do certain connections you make with others, including your pets, your friends, your dates, and your partners. They all produce familiar dynamics that relate to your family relationships. The original family continues to influence us in all the other communities we enter throughout our lives.

Sally’s Story

For some of us, the word “family” can evoke warm feelings; for others, it brings up misery or revulsion. For Sally, who grew up in a large chaotic family with too many responsibilities, changing her relationships within her family of origin was a good place to begin working toward a different way of relating to others. Remember, her distancing pattern was to keep her husband at arm’s length by always being too busy with their kids, her work, her friends, and the boundless support she provided for her siblings whenever they were in crisis.

Sally began by first recognizing and accepting herself as a typical distracted distancer, and then by examining the overfunctioning role she had played in her family of origin. She began her Step Three work by changing her role with all of her siblings. When either her brother or her middle sister went into one of their predictable crisis scenarios, Sally coached them to turn to each other for support instead of always turning to her. She also worked with her youngest sister and persuaded her to take responsibility for the family gatherings at holidays and birthdays. After some time, Sally was finally able to turn some of the family crisis-response tasks over to this previously disengaged sister.

Sally’s biggest change in her relationships with her siblings came when she had to ask them all for help when she found herself in financial distress after Howard’s back injury forced him to stop working.

The end result of Sally’s changing role with her siblings was that she became able to ask her husband for more emotional support and she turned more of their family’s responsibilities over to him. She stopped seeing him as yet one more potentially needy person. She could let herself become more open and available to him, as you will see in chapter 6.

Workplace Communities

Another common form of community for most of us is the workplace. Workplace communities can vary greatly in size and degree of intimacy, but they generally function to help us relate to others in a variety of group settings. Even those who are self-employed must engage in a set of work relationships that provide a form of community. A self-employed carpenter may spend many hours working alone, but he or she interacts with customers, material suppliers, contractors, and other tradespeople. A stay-at-home mother is necessarily based in her home, but this too is a workplace community comprised of her children, partner, friends, neighbors, school personnel, doctors, and everyone else she interacts with in her daily life.

If we spend a lot of our time working—and most of us do—workplace communities play a major role in our lives. Like the family, the workplace is also a community in which the relationships are not necessarily with people you would naturally choose as friends. This makes the workplace a great community to practice relational skills to learn how to “hang in there” with inescapable situations, such as having to share an office with people you don’t really like, or working on a job with other workers who don’t do things the way you think they should be done.

Jack’s Story

Jack was prone to approach-avoidance relationships in his workplace, just as he was in his intimate relationships with the unavailable women he pursued. He was an instructor in the art department of a large university and was frequently pursued by his female students. He enjoyed his students’ attentions and danced a thin line between graciousness and flirtation. Several of his faculty colleagues (female) tried hard to get Jack’s attention, but he avoided their overtures because, although he didn’t understand this at the time, they were too available.

Things changed for Jack after he began the work of recognizing his distancing patterns and tracing their roots back to the dynamics of his unhappy childhood. He slowly came to realize that his job was an unhealthy community for him because he was surrounded by unavailable women—his students—whose flirtations kept him stuck in a subtle form of the same approach-avoidance dance he had played out with Diane and the other distancers he had pursued. He realized he needed to find a community that would provide healthier work-based relationships.