Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy (19 page)

Reviewing Mindfulness Skills

Throughout your work with the ARC model, you’ve had opportunities to practice mindfulness. Once again, you can use mindfulness to help you quell any anxieties you may be feeling about trying out new roles in new situations. You can even use your mindfulness skills to help you think about these new action challenges.

As you most likely remember, quieting your mind and body and focusing on the present moment are at the core of mindfulness practice. Instead of jumping ahead to how much you’re going to hate being in a group or anticipating imagined failure in a new role, just remind yourself to stay in the present. Focus on your breath and observe any details around you that will help you to center yourself in the Now. You don’t have to race forward or recall past mistakes, disappointments, humiliations, or pain.

Remember to use the breathing techniques that were introduced in chapter 2 when you began to deepen your awareness of your patterns in intimate relationships. You’ll find that you can move yourself into just about any new situation with composure and a sense of calmness—if you focus on slowing and deepening your breathing. The more you practice this breathing technique, the more it will ground you in any new or distressing situation.

It’s like managing pain. We now know that the secret of keeping pain from becoming unbearable is to contain it from its inception rather than toughing it out and letting it reach the number 10 (the standard hospital indication for unbearable pain on a scale of 1 to 10). As you work with the information and activities in Step Three, remember that you have the skills to stay in the present moment, and remember to calm your mind and body through deep breathing and focusing on the present moment.

Using the Mind-Body Connection

You can also tap into the mind-body connection you read about in chapter 2 as you face negative thoughts, self-doubt, and judgmental evaluations of others that will very likely arise while you begin to engage in new ways of relating. The body can be a great tool for changing the mind. When you find yourself starting to make negative judgments against either yourself or others, try changing your body chemistry instead of trying to force yourself to think positive thoughts. Here are some ways you can do this:

• Before you enter a new group or situation, try to do some form of vigorous exercise that will get your heart pumping harder and your breathing faster. The amount of time you exercise will vary with your needs and your habits. One person might want to play a set of tennis first, while someone else might want to do sit-ups for ten minutes. When you finish exercising, you will then enter the new situation in a significantly calmer physical state, which also will change your body chemistry sufficiently to calm your mind.
  
• Try to break the train of thought that takes you down the mental path of dread or negative energy. You can change your mental channel by taking a hot shower or bath, or listening to music you like. Work at an activity that gets your body into sync with your mind like gardening, giving your dog a bath, or doing something creative that fully engages your mind and body. For example, make a painting, a bookshelf, a complicated recipe; fix a car engine, or repair an appliance.
  
• If you feel yourself becoming frustrated or angry at the thought of trying out a new group or activity that you think you’re going to completely hate doing, try to do something physical that will release your anxiety-driven anger. You could drive around in your car—keeping the windows rolled up!—and shout at the top of your lungs. Or try punching pillows or shadow boxing. You could write a letter about what a stupid idea this group experiment is. Or call a friend to tell her why you are really furious about having to do this.
  

These are just a few ideas, but you get the picture. The key is to change your mental and emotional energy by changing your body chemistry. When I’m anxious or angry or frustrated or bored, I take a walk. It rarely fails me, and so I’ve learned how to prepare myself for walking in almost any climate or on any trip. Even in an unsafe area, I can usually walk on the treadmill in a hotel, or find a mall to walk around. I know from much practice that changing my physiological state automatically helps me ease into a better mental and emotional place.

Surrendering Control

Being able to surrender control is a skill that’s often the hardest to learn. It certainly is the one that I continue to struggle with. Yet it actually can be the easiest, because when you take a longer look at whatever happens to be up for you, you will realize that you’re not really in control of most situations to begin with.

It will help you to begin the process of finding a community to engage with by recognizing that surrendering control over the outcome of a venture is something you routinely practice. Let’s take the example of surrendering control when you are stuck in a traffic jam. You can’t move until the traffic starts moving, so you have to surrender control of the outcome, which is staying on your own personal schedule, or you will drive yourself crazy, have an attack of road rage, hold others hostage on your cell phone while you complain about the traffic jam, or otherwise spin your wheels mentally and emotionally.

Think about how you can surrender your efforts to mentally control the situation you are anticipating. No matter how carefully you try to control how the new group or event or role will turn out, control over the outcome is an illusion. You can’t control the variables that other people will present, whatever they may or may not do. Then there’s the unpredictability of how you may respond to any number of scenarios. Again, the more you allow yourself to surrender control of outcomes, the less you will be frustrated or disappointed by whatever transpires.

Surrendering control is especially important when you begin to practice new ways of being in intimate relationships. Trying to control what others do or say is almost always an exercise in futility; we all know this even if we sometimes forget it. So here’s your chance to practice letting go by starting out with surrendering control within a group context.

Choosing Your Targets for Change

There are certain relational challenges that most distancers need to target in whatever groups or communities they select to learn their new relational skills.

Exercise

Targeting Relational Challenges

Use the following list to note the challenges you think are most relevant to yourself, rating the top five in order of their importance to you:

• Taking risks in sharing feelings and self-disclosure
  
• Letting go of being in control of others
  
• Prioritizing one-to-one relationships (within the group)
  
• Avoiding old patterns of approach-avoidance, that is, sticking with the group or community as opposed to dropping out or switching from one group to another
  
• Noticing and decreasing judgmental attitudes toward others
  
• Letting go of goal-oriented focus when relating to others
  
• Practicing cooperation
  
• Setting appropriate boundaries
  
• Overcoming fear of new people
  
• Using honest, direct communication instead of sarcasm or an indirect style
  

When you’ve targeted the relational challenges you’re going to start working on, you may want to do a little planning as to how you will proceed in the community or group you select. Your course of action may seem immediately obvious, or you may feel puzzled about how this is going to work. Let’s use an example of another distancer’s experience to illustrate how this works. By going through the details of what happened to Janine, you can watch someone experience what you are about to do, and come out okay at the end.

Janine’s Story

As you may recall, Janine had begun to develop more trust in relationships when she got involved in a women’s group for trauma survivors at the local women’s community drop-in center. There she was able to become vulnerable enough to allow other women to get to know her. She discovered after months of participating in groups at the women’s center that she could trust the other women not to betray her trust or to blame her for her past suffering.

She still wanted to work on some other problematic areas of relationship, and she chose to prioritize letting go of the illusion that she could control what others might do, say, or think. She had also chosen “spiritual-based community” as the new social group she really wanted to explore. She knew she didn’t want to return to the church affiliation she had grown up with, but she felt drawn to meditation groups.

Janine learned to meditate in my Addictions and Trauma Recovery Model group (ATRIUM) for trauma survivors at the women’s center. Meditation made her feel much more peaceful both mentally and physically, and she was hoping that she would begin to feel more connected at a spiritual level. So she joined a meditation group that a woman at the center had recommended. It was open to anyone who wanted to drop in, unlike some meditation groups that required introductory training.

Janine wasn’t sure this would be the best place to practice letting go of her fear of others and her pattern of judging others before she even got to know them. How can you practice these skills in a group where there is very little action, and conversation is kept at a minimum? Nonetheless, she felt safest when she thought about risking her new relational practices here, and the group met her need for a community that might become a long-term source of nurturance and support. To her surprise, she found she was able to work on her goals sooner than she expected.

Many people in the meditation group went out for breakfast in the late morning after the meditation session ended. They invited Janine to join them, and putting aside her usual fear of new people, she did. It soon became clear that there were many ways in which she was still judging how safe others were and holding herself back. She wanted to control who she sat down next to, whose friendly questions she answered, and how many people squeezed in together at the little tables in the nearby coffee shop.

Janine especially wanted to avoid contact with one man who irritated her in every way. She disliked his scraggly beard, his scent (sweat with an overlay of wood smoke), and his self-confident friendliness. He often sat next to her, and seemed to have no qualms about asking her personal questions. Worse still, he often insisted on telling her all about how the meditation had gone for him, including the details of how comfortable (or not) his back and knees had been during the hour of silent sitting on cushions. She disliked everything about him, including his weird name, Wyatt.

Reminding herself that her discomfort offered her exactly what she was there to practice changing, she calmed herself by breathing deeply, and gradually began to be less judgmental toward the group and even toward Wyatt. One morning she came close to tears after a deep meditative experience when she had the powerful experience of feeling her beloved grandmother’s presence. Her grandmother had died the previous winter and Janine was still grieving her loss. When Wyatt squeezed in beside her at the coffee shop, she was ready to get up and leave.

“Hey,” he said, “what’s up? You look really sad, or something.”

Janine reminded herself that she was practicing new ways of being closer to people, even to Wyatt. So, she took another deep breath, coughing slightly as she breathed in Wyatt’s sweat and wood smoke scents and said, “I am sad.”

Wyatt surprised her by not asking why. He just took her hand in his and held it. It felt surprisingly okay. They sat there for what seemed like hours to Janine. After her initial discomfort, she discovered she didn’t mind holding his hand. She even noticed that she didn’t want to pull her hand away. After a while he said, “Your tea is probably cold by now. I’ll get you another cup. Ginger peach, right?” He took her cold drink, and returned quickly with a cup of hot tea.

They ended up staying in the coffee shop long after the others left. Wyatt didn’t try to comfort her with words, but he listened carefully to everything that she told him through her tears about her grandmother. “She sounds like she was one cool lady,” he said at the end of their conversation. After that day, Janine began to feel much less alone and she found that she was enjoying getting closer to Wyatt and the others in the meditation group.

Staying the Course with Your New Experiment

Not everyone has Janine’s luck in matching their choice of group and their target relational challenges. Sometimes you have to work at it for quite a while to pull it all together. If your experiment starts to unravel despite your best efforts to plan carefully, Ben’s story may help you to feel less alone.

Ben’s Story

Ben decided that he would work on his relational challenges within the community of his condo association. His condo was in a beautiful old building in the country. Built in the nineteenth century by affluent New England seekers who believed that a simple life in the country was the only healthy way to live, it had once been a utopian community. The rambling three-story building had been turned into condominiums in the 1980s. Although the buildings and the land were lovely to look at, there were a host of structural problems for the condo dwellers.

Ben made the decision to take a leadership role in getting the old building’s structural problems repaired, and to use this opportunity to work on the relationships he was slowly forming with the other residents. He had decided to prioritize deepening one-to-one relationships within the group, and to stick with the group through the good and bad times rather than following his old approach-avoidance pattern in relationships. He also changed his usual skittish style by concentrating his energies on this one group rather than having several other new ventures lined up as soon as he began to feel restless.

He chose the condo association as the best setting for his Step Three work because it was the type of community he had always wanted to be part of, despite some previous failures. He gave it two stars to indicate that it was the kind of community he wanted to try again. He believed it would be both comfortable enough and challenging enough to meet his requirements.