Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy (7 page)

When Parenting Interferes with Intimacy

Parenting is a very demanding and very important part of adult life for many women and men, but, unfortunately, it can seriously erode couple intimacy. When professionals or friends collude in keeping the focus entirely on parenting issues, the underlying distancing in the couple’s behavior can escape detection and leave one or both partners trapped in continuing loneliness.

This form of distancing happens most often when one parent is much more involved with the children than the other. Another variation in eroded intimacy occurs when one parent becomes jealous of the other’s closeness with the children, which sometimes leads both parents to become distancers. Another type of erosion in the couple relationship can take place when both parents are so consumed with parenting their children that they have no time left over to nurture themselves as a couple. Still another scenario happens when the parents engage in major battles around child-rearing issues, and by so doing demolish their capacity to feel tenderness and affection for each other.

All of these dilemmas require intervention, but focusing exclusively on the parenting issues may overlook yet another kind of distress. In many of these situations, parents may use the need to nurture their children to distance from true intimacy with each other, without having any idea they are doing so.

When the Past Threatens Love

Too much or too little focus on the past can also lead to intimacy failures. Sometimes, the past can obstruct necessary repairs to current intimacy when there is denial of its impact. On the other hand, experiences from the past can remain so central to someone’s emotional life that the current relationship (or potential partner) becomes eclipsed.

Some people distance from intimacy because they haven’t been willing to look at their past relationships. They haven’t come to terms with either the pain of the past or its lessons. Other people distance from relationships in the present by focusing too much of their attention and energy on their past.

“If Only She Didn’t…”

Another major mistake is to focus too completely on one person’s problems or impairments. This happens when one person is consumed with an addiction to a chemical substance or to work or gambling or online chat rooms, or any other addictive preoccupation. “Everything will be okay for us when he stops drinking (or overworking or… fill in the blank)” is a common myth verbalized by vast numbers of people who believe that the relationship can be saved by a change in one partner.

This also happens when one person is struggling with emotional problems like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or attention-deficit disorder. The partner, friend, or therapist lowers the other partner’s expectations for intimacy by saying things like, “She can’t help it… she’s depressed.”

Currently, perhaps the most common reason for intimacy to suffer or vanish entirely is an exclusive focus on someone’s history of past trauma and the resulting issues. Talk shows, professional helpers, friends, and family members perpetuate the myth that the trauma must be resolved before the relationship problems can be addressed.

After many years of working with adults who have experienced past traumas, I’ve learned that it is never really possible to wrap up the trauma work and then move on to dealing with relationships. It is more productive to determine how everything is related and then to address all aspects of the trauma’s legacy, including its effect on creating healthy intimacy.

In this chapter, you will be working on Step One: Raising your awareness. Awareness is the first tool you need to open your heart and tame the runaway distancer part of yourself. Think of awareness as a very active process of change rather than just a reminder to pay attention. Simply becoming aware—fully conscious—can radically change your capacity to give and receive love. Awareness, at the deepest level, means a willingness to change your whole life.

This may sound abstract or even unbelievable unless you have grown up in a culture where the practice of awareness is at the root of a spiritual practice, or you have incorporated awareness practice as a daily part of your life. As you will learn by doing Step One, cultivating awareness is anything but abstract. It is a very real, one-day-at-a-time process of learning to focus in new and deeper ways.

Learning to cultivate and raise your awareness is a lifelong process. Awareness is a multipurpose tool to help you with the most important learning experience of your life: how to leave loneliness behind and discover lasting love.

Active Awareness: Turning Arrows into Flowers

Buddhist teacher and writer Pema Chödrön tells this story about the power of awareness in Comfortable with Uncertainty (2002, p. 40): “On the night the Buddha was to attain enlightenment, he sat under a tree. While he was sitting there, the forces of Mara (the Buddhist equivalent of evil or obstacles) shot arrows at him to distract him from becoming enlightened, but with awareness he turned their weapons into flowers.”

You will be learning awareness skills that have the power to turn your own inner torments into flowers. Each of the areas in which you develop your awareness skills will lead you to the place where you will feel safe and empowered and ready for the work of remembering (Step Two) and the challenges of making new connections (Step Three). You will learn to cultivate the flowers of new awareness in the following areas:

• Awareness of your own natural learning style and process
  
• Awareness of how your mind and body are connected
  
• Awareness of your self-image, the story you tell yourself and others about who you are
  
• Awareness of the tactics you use to hang on to your distancing style, i.e., externalizing blame (it’s her fault, not mine), experiential avoidance (avoiding feelings, interactions, risk-taking), denial, dissociation, addiction, learned helplessness
  
• Awareness of how you are influenced by your connections to others, how social and cultural contexts affect you, how you feel and act in couple relationships
  
• Awareness of the fears, anxieties, and losses that you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to bury
  

Acceptance

As you learn to cultivate awareness, you will be engaged in an active process of acceptance. This means that you will be absorbing and assimilating new information. You will continue the work you’ve already begun in the preceding chapter, that of identifying your style or profile as a distancer. Acceptance means testing out your acceptance of your inner distancer, allowing yourself to sit with it, let it in, keep it in focus, and not run away from your awareness.

To help you stay focused, you will continue using the exercises in the book, writing in the journal that will become the new story of who you are, and learning at many levels how to accept your new experiences of heightened and expanded awareness.

Willingness

Willingness is an essential component of awareness. Making an active commitment to willingness means that you keep yourself open to new ideas, new insights, and new possibilities; it means that you are willing to learn new things about yourself and your relationships. You will practice the willingness to become fully conscious, to accept what you are learning about yourself, and to try out your new awareness-based skills.

There are four categories of awareness skills that you will be using in the Awareness, Remembering, and Connecting (ARC) model. These skills provide tools to help you become more fully and richly present in every aspect of your life. Here are the four skills that will be transformative, no matter how you choose to use them in your life:

1. You will learn to practice mindfulness, which is the practice of being more fully present or conscious.
   
2. You will deepen your general awareness of how you perceive your world: that is, how you think, how you feel, and how you act.
   
3. You will develop a curious, open mind in observing how other people feel, think, and act in relationships.
   
4. You will develop a general relational awareness of yourself as you relate to people who do not fall into the category of “intimate” or “couple” or “potential partner.”
   

Cultivating Mindfulness

Over the past several decades, the Western world has slowly begun to adopt some traditional Eastern practices. Learning to meditate, doing yoga, and practicing mindfulness have transformed the lives of many people who were living fast-paced, goal-centered lives. We see evidence of these Eastern influences in how many people in the United States have learned to meditate and practice deep breathing to calm and center themselves. “Practicing mindfulness” may be a very familiar idea to you, or you may be considering it for the first time. In either case, it is an essential part of the ARC model, at the bedrock level of transforming your relationships. Remember, “ARC” stands for awareness, remembering, and connecting.

Defining Mindfulness

It is way beyond the scope of this book to provide comprehensive instruction on what mindfulness is all about. People devote themselves to the study of mindfulness in workshops and other groups, and spend years learning to incorporate mindfulness in their lives. In the work we are doing together, we’ll define mindfulness by describing how it works.

Mindfulness entails slowing down and really paying attention to what’s going on inside you. It means that you pay attention to the root of being alive: your breathing. Mindfulness requires you to notice how your body is feeling and what is happening with the thoughts that circle around in your mind. Practicing mindfulness directs you to focus on bringing yourself into a state of being centered, calm, and alert. Mindfulness means being fully conscious so that at all levels of your being, you are fully awake.

Exercise

Mindful Breathing

Whether you’ve never practiced mindful breathing before or you’ve been doing mindfulness practice for years, spend a few minutes with this basic exercise. Take a little time right now to focus on your breathing. Try to make sure that you won’t be interrupted for at least five minutes or so. Choose the quietest place available. Get yourself into a comfortable seated position so that you can focus on your breathing.

You may or may not want to close your eyes to do this breathing exercise. The risks of closing your eyes range from falling asleep to feeling unsafe or dissociating in some way that keeps you from staying present for this important learning experience. If you prefer to do it with your eyes open, just look down at the floor, not focusing on what you’re seeing, and think about looking inside rather than outside yourself. This will help you to stay present.

• Now, gradually slow down your breathing by pausing briefly at the end of your out breath (the exhale) and then again at the end of your in breath (the inhale).
  
• Check your muscles to see if they are relaxed, paying special attention to relaxing the muscles in your hands, your shoulders, and your belly.
  
• Focus your attention on the experience of breathing, just noticing the feeling of breathing in, pausing, breathing out, pausing, and so on. See if you can keep your attention on just your breath for a few minutes. (If you haven’t done this kind of focused breathing before, don’t expect yourself to be able to do more than five minutes at first.)
  
• After a little while of slowing down your breathing and keeping your focus on your breath for a few minutes, notice again if your muscles have stayed relaxed.
  
• Finish this exercise by opening your eyes or bringing your attention back to your surroundings. How did doing this make you feel? Were you able to stay focused on your breath most of the time, or did you notice your mind jumping from thought to thought, or were you distracted by external noises, or tension, or pain in your body?
  

Don’t worry if it was difficult to do this mindfulness practice for the first time. Everyone has trouble at first. It isn’t a normal activity for most of us living in a busy, loud, goal-driven world to do this kind of breathing awareness exercise.

How Mindfulness Practice Will Help Your Relationships

As you gradually learn to be more fully conscious in many aspects of your life—your breathing, your thoughts, your body—you will become increasingly good at noticing what’s going on when you are engaged in interactions with others. You will be able to observe yourself, noticing what kind of distancing messages your mind may be giving you, or noticing how the other person responds to what you are doing or saying. By increasing your overall level of awareness through mindfulness practice, you will begin to feel much more capable of thinking and acting in new ways in difficult areas of your life, especially in your intimate relationships.

The following story will illustrate for you how this can work.

Yvonne’s Story

Yvonne had spent too long dreading the weekends. On weekdays, she was quite content with her life and her relationships. She went to work, had occasional dinners out with friends, went to her weekly chorus rehearsal, and worked out at the fitness club on the way home from work three times a week. She also enjoyed her nightly phone conversation with her boyfriend Mike, who lived two hours away in Boston.

Mike and Yvonne spent almost every weekend together. They loved going for drives in the country, hiking, and movies. They cooked together, played with Yvonne’s cats, and spent hours talking about everything that mattered to each of them, except sex.

Yvonne was tortured by her discomfort with sex. She was a defended distancer whose primary problem was feeling sexually shut down. Although Mike and Yvonne made love at least once every weekend, Yvonne had a very hard time staying present during their love-making. Her body would remain actively engaged in the love-making, but she wasn’t really there. She felt numb physically, her mind went off to more comfortable places, and her emotions would get so bottled up that at the end of the sexual interlude she would become irritable and depressed.

Yvonne had worked on this problem in psychotherapy. She knew that the roots of her distress were related to having been sexually abused by her older brother, and she was able to talk about her sexual distancing in the privacy of the therapist’s office. She kept Mike in the dark, both literally and figuratively. She was afraid to tell him how shut down she was, even though she knew that he knew.