Authors: Dusty Miller
Take notes on all your answers in your journal so you can come back to this and see how it fits with other information you are gathering about yourself. Let’s balance any negative thoughts and feelings you might be having about yourself by looking at your relational strengths. In your journal, write brief answers to each question below:
As you look over your answers to this set of questions, notice if you have cultivated a deeper awareness and appreciation for your strengths. Check out how your body is feeling now.
If you had trouble writing the positive things suggested in the second part of the exercise, remind yourself to come back to this and try again when you have done some more work with yourself and your relationships. Also, you might try asking a trusted friend to go over these questions with you to see if your friend can help you arrive at a more positive awareness of your strengths.
Awareness of Your Favorite Distancing Tactics
Although this area of awareness may seem relatively new to you, in fact, you’ve probably known for a long time how you create distance between yourself and others. Some of your tactics may be healthy. Others may have been keeping you trapped in confusion, dissatisfaction, frustration, and loneliness. Part of developing more awareness of your distancing tactics involves helping you to decide what to keep and what to let go.
To get started, we’re going to use a different part of your brain to access some new information. You will need a few pieces of blank paper and a sharp pencil with an eraser. You will be drawing a kind of diagram to show you how you position yourself in relation to others in certain situations, and to demonstrate visually how you handle discomfort related to your intimate relationships.
Exercise
Drawing Your Favorite Distancing Tactics
Here are some scenes you can draw to aid in obtaining new insights about yourself:
Notice if the two scenes you drew are very similar or very different. Do you seem to be closer and more comfortable in one picture than the other? Are you the one moving away in both scenes?
By drawing these scenes rather than writing about them or talking, you can obtain a different kind of information. When you use drawing instead of words, you will access a younger and more direct part of yourself. This part is like an “inner child” self who can observe and report the real fundamentals about how you distance. Using adult language qualifies everything and can become so complicated that you may end up not really knowing how to zero in on your primary distancer tactics.
Now, in your journal, write the three most significant things you learned from doing these drawings. Later on, you will refer back to this exercise in self-awareness to see what’s changed for you.
Common Distancer Tactics
As you continue to become more and more aware of your inner distancer, keep in mind that you are not the only one. Notice that many people use distancing tactics. Here are some very common ones:
As you think about these distancing tactics, think about which tactics you are most likely to use. Try to think of examples in your life that would illustrate these tactics. Write about these in your journal, taking your time to really deepen your awareness of what you’ve been doing to maintain your loneliness.
Awareness of Community Influences
We are all connected with one another. How you conceptualize and operate in intimate relationships is very much influenced by many levels in your community. There was the family you grew up in, the neighborhood, the schools, your ethnic community, racial, religious, and class identity—all of that just from your childhood.
Then there are all the influences in your adult life. That is, added to the influences that shaped you in childhood, you are also influenced by the people in your life now, the various smaller and larger collections of people or communities that have an impact on your life.
These communities might include your current family or couple relationship, your work or vocational identity, where you live now, who you socialize with, worship with (if relevant), who you attend support groups with, who your friends are, and so forth. Furthermore, there are the very powerful influences of the media: the books or articles you read, the TV shows and movies you watch, the music you listen to and love. All of these are also part of your extended community.
The ideas you’ve gathered over time about what a couple is supposed to be like are derived from overt messages and less direct influences from all of these parts of your life. It would be a very big task to trace each and every source of your current responses to intimacy as one of a couple, but you can gradually cultivate your awareness of all this at your own manageable pace. The following exercise asks some questions that will help to guide you as you enhance your awareness of these many social and community influences.
Exercise
Awareness of Social and Family Influences
As you experiment with deepening your awareness in this area of family and social influences, you will find that you can be creative and playful in learning more about yourself. This is also an area where you can invite your partner, or someone you’re getting to know, to join you in playing with the couple images this person might choose.
If you do this exercise with your partner, be prepared for the possibility that you may have very different images of the happy or ideal couple from your partner’s image. Use this opportunity to practice your new awareness skills of curiosity and mindfulness breathing if you begin to feel upset. Don’t jump right into thinking that because you don’t share the same picture that there’s something wrong with you, or your partner, or that your relationship is doomed.
I once told someone I was dating that my picture of the ideal couple was two people sitting and reading in a cozy living room, a fire going in the fireplace, a cat or two purring. At the same moment, they both look up from their books and smile at each other before they go back to reading. “That’s it?!” my new friend asked, going on to say that it sounded distant and boring. Eventually, I recovered from the disappointment I felt, recognizing that we each had very different responses to what my ideal image evoked.
A picture of deep connection and happiness for one person can be another person’s nightmare of disconnection and dissatisfaction. The point is to keep talking about it and see where the conversation takes you. For me, the peacefulness of the couple seemed deeply appealing in contrast to my experience of my parents’ marriage, and my experience of my least successful couple relationships. The image is a marked contrast to deeply disconnected people who never seem to be in sync with each other.
You can also deepen your awareness of how you are influenced by others in your life by doing some investigating into how others in your life operate as couples.
Exercise
Observing Other People’s Beliefs and Behaviors
Use your workplace, or a support group you attend regularly, or any other group of people you spend regular time with (your siblings or other extended family, a volunteer or activity-centered group you’re part of) to see if you can recognize and carefully observe another distancer. Choose someone you may identify with and notice how he or she describes an intimate relationship, either past or present. Here are a few examples of the kinds of things you might observe:
Does he or she…
If you are observing a distancer with his or her partner, notice the strategies that you think the distancer uses to avoid intimacy. Observe which strategies he or she appears to employ to prevent being vulnerable or close with his or her partner. Also, pay attention to whether the distancer usually chooses social activities that surround the couple with other people.
After you’ve completed your observation of the person you think may be a distancer, write a few paragraphs about why you think that, and what you think may have influenced how that person thinks about intimacy and couple dynamics. Do you think that you and this other distancer have been influenced by some of the same familial or social/cultural beliefs and customs? How do you think the two sets of influences may have been different?
As you think about what’s had the most influence on your thinking about being in a couple relationship, you will become more aware of some issues than others. Although you can’t uncover all such issues at any one time in your life, it will be useful to see which ideas remain the most prominent as you continue to develop your awareness.
Awareness of Fear, Anxiety, and Loss
The distancer’s biggest enemy is fear: the fear of mental and emotional pain. Learning to gently deepen your awareness will allow you to get beyond your fear and begin to work with issues that may have caused you years of emotional and mental pain.
In this last part of your awareness work, you are simply encouraged to accept the idea that you need to face some of those emotions and memories that you may have successfully avoided facing in the past by means of denial or dissociation. Don’t worry—you won’t be forced to excavate old wounds and dive down into your deepest fears, anxieties, or losses. This is just a gentle wake-up call to remind you that by gradually becoming more aware of your uncomfortable areas of experience, you won’t have to keep working so hard to keep pain in its cage and eventually you will begin to feel less lonely.