Stop Running from Love: Three Steps to Overcoming Emotional Distancing and Fear of Intimacy (9 page)

When you begin to think about all you can learn from this multilayered exercise, you can see that this particular area of awareness is huge and that it has the potential to become a little complicated and confusing.

Now, take a short break to do something completely different for at least thirty minutes. When you come back, write a short description of yourself as someone who exhibits some central themes or consistency in how you relate to other people, but also as someone who clearly has some contradictions.

End this part of awareness skill-building by writing an affirmation about your strengths in relationships. At first, doing this may feel a bit silly or even embarrassing, but it will help you to honor what is most important to you across the board. And it will give you a goal to work toward, that is, the ways in which you would like your intimate relationships to change in order to be as successful as your other, less challenging relationships may be. Here’s a sample affirmation to use as a model:

Sample affirmation: I like myself most when I am being compassionate toward the people I care about and letting them know that I am really there for them. I will become able to do this in my intimate relationships. I know that with awareness and willingness, I can.

Let’s start this process of learning to practice awareness in regard to your intimate relationships by doing an exercise to illustrate what can happen when you become aware of your own natural learning style, or the process that works best for you when you’re starting a new project.

Tuning In to How You Learn

Although it may seem tangential to start with a focus on your learning style, it will make a big difference in how successful you are in this whole process. Once you focus your awareness on what works best for you when you face new challenges and changes, you will be better prepared to use your best learning skills in your journey.

For example, do you approach new ways of connecting by first reading and learning through assimilating information, then analyzing yourself through writing and self-reflection? Or will you do better if you involve others right away in your learning process, availing yourself of their ideas and support? Do you like to use visualization to help you imagine how you want things to be? Do you need to try out new things by “doing,” rather than reflecting or talking about it? Will you discover that it really helps you to use body awareness to guide you in what is freeing and what is too distressing?

Not everyone learns the same way. The more you become aware of how you learn best, the more you will know about how to cultivate your awareness. Some people like to know everything about how the new task or activity is supposed to be done before they will try it, while others will learn better by trial and error, that is, “learning by doing.” Some people are visual learners while others learn through language. Then there are people who are more intuitive or kinesthetic than logical: they learn how to do something through sensing.

Exercise

Didactic, Experiential, or Intuitive? Learning Your Preferences

Focus on a time when you were learning a new skill. Perhaps this learning experience seemed hard or challenging at first, but eventually you gained confidence and competence. To do this exercise, you can center your attention on something recently learned or you can go back to the past, maybe even as far back as childhood. Your new skill might be learning a new recreational activity, like tennis or salsa dancing, or a new spiritual practice like yoga or meditation. It could be a work-related skill involving some new level of computer competence. You could go back to childhood when you learned to swim, ride a bike, sew, or build a tree house.

Take at least five minutes to concentrate on the details of the experience before you begin to use this to develop increased awareness of how you learn.

Here are some guidelines to help you focus:

• Think about the people who may have helped you with your learning experience.
  
• Think about how your body felt.
  
• Remember what your emotions felt like.
  
• Picture what surrounded you in the environment where you learned this skill.
  

Once you’ve really grounded yourself in the memory of this experience, write a paragraph or two describing what was most helpful and what was least helpful. What did you need in order to master this new skill? What might have been an obstacle in your learning process? What helped you know that you were beginning to be successful?

If you feel stuck, read the following example to give you a better idea of how this exercise works.

Example:
How I Learned to Improve My Tennis Serve:
When I began to really try to learn tennis (instead of just attempting to hit the ball back over the net, something I had tried every five years or so), I had the good fortune to find a wonderful teacher, a tennis coach about my own age.

What I remember most about this learning experience was that I felt joyous and free on the tennis court almost from the beginning of participating in the tennis clinics (groups that were working on their tennis skills with the tennis coach). I think this was because the coach, Deedie, was so encouraging in her praise of us all. Every time one of us did something right, she noticed and commented enthusiastically.

My most vivid memory was a private lesson. I had been frustrated by my inability to achieve a good serve. It seemed that I either smacked the ball into the net or else I hit it over the fence, which might have been fine if we had been playing baseball, but was embarrassing on the tennis court.

What changed that day was the way Deedie helped me learn.

She came across the court and stood behind me where she could watch all the details of how I was hitting the ball. Then she stood right beside me and gently guided my arm through the serve, helping my muscles learn the way they were supposed to work. Finally, she pointed to a cloud low in the sky and told me to aim for the cloud as I hit the ball. This seemed counterintuitive to me. If I hit the ball aiming at the cloud, wouldn’t I keep hitting it over the fence? Deedie told me to just relax and give this image a try. She stood back and I began to serve. To my astonishment, the ball went smoothly across the net and into the box where I wanted it to go! I was able to do this repeatedly. I was thrilled. Deedie matched my enthusiasm, reinforcing my joy and astonishment when the new serve kept working.

What does this memory teach me about how I learn best? Here are the main ingredients that I have distilled from this example:

1. I learn best when someone else is helping me in a supportive way, using praise rather than criticism.
   
2. I learn best by having someone show me something by doing it with me, that is, engaging me by “walking through” the fundamentals of the activity rather than simply describing how to do it.
   
3. I learn through visualization.
   
4. I learn best when I let go of my rational, skeptical mind and just let myself do something new instead of thinking about all the reasons why it won’t work.
   
5. I learn best when I share my success with someone, giving myself real praise for what I’ve accomplished and letting my positive emotions reinforce the experience.
   
6. I learn best when my intuition has reassured me that whoever is helping me is a “safe” person.
   

Now it’s your turn. In your journal, write down your memory of your learning experience and then make a list of what your memory teaches you about your best learning style.

Doing this exercise has just helped you lay the groundwork for increasing your own awareness of your learning style. This will help you choose the best process of transforming your intimate relationships. Keep what you just learned as a reference throughout this process of learning and changing.

Awareness of the Mind-Body Connection

The mind-body connection is increasingly a central focus in a multitude of books, workshops, magazine articles, medical and mental health practices, meditation, yoga, and other spiritual practices. You may have already done a lot of work on increasing your awareness of how your mind and body are powerfully interconnected. Whether you are very familiar with this topic or not, this is an important area in which to enhance your awareness.

As you begin making any major changes in how you think and interact, your body will often know how well you’re doing with the transition before your mind does. Your body signals to you when distressing emotions like fear, shame, anger, and anxiety are bubbling up and making you uncomfortable.

Perhaps, like many people, you often don’t know what you’re feeling in your conscious mind, but your body tells you by creating physical pain, jumpiness, numbness, or gastrointestinal distress. You can also count on your body to let you know when you’re starting to get comfortable with a new idea or behavior or interaction. You may feel a pleasant sensation of your muscles relaxing little by little, or an overall sensation of lightness.

Try the next exercise to see how this works for you. If this is a new focus for you, you may want to take some extra time to make notes on what you’ve just learned. If this concept is already familiar to you, go ahead and do the exercise anyway to see if anything new comes up for you.

Exercise

Your Body Is Wiser Than Your Mind

This is a two-part exercise. Make sure that you do both parts to avoid side effects.

1. Move into a comfortable place where your body and mind feel relaxed. (If you lie down, you may fall asleep, so you might want to do this in a comfortable chair or even while walking very slowly around the room.) Think about something that’s going on in your life right now that’s really bothering you. Let yourself concentrate on the details of who or what is really disturbing you. Tell yourself that it’s okay to briefly focus on this distressing situation or person because you’re not going to stay there.
   
2. Now begin to slowly scan through your whole body as if you were doing a mental X-ray. Notice where in your body you feel the most discomfort. Where do you feel pain or an unpleasant tightening of your muscles or a feeling of jittery jumpiness?
   
3. Think about what that unpleasant feeling in your body would look like if you drew a picture or a cartoon. What color is the image or scene? What is it doing to your body? (An example would be picturing red-hot knots all tangled up in your belly, because it feels like knots of tension are burning up in there.)
   
4. Now take that image and see how you can transform it into something very soothing and pleasant. You could turn the knots into soft, warm ocean waves, releasing the knots, and healing your belly. Stay with that healing, soothing image for as long as you can. Enjoy its details. See if you can actually feel the healing within your body.
   

What you’ve just accomplished was to use your awareness of your mind-body connection to inform yourself about the pain and emotional impact of what’s been bothering you. You also used that awareness as a healing tool. Easing your belly pain may not resolve the situation, but now you have a new tool to use whenever you need to deal with the same person or situation the next time around. You can tune in to your body, see what’s going on emotionally for you, and visualize a healing image to inoculate yourself against the external distress.

Developing your mind–body awareness will also help to improve your intimate relationships. You will be using this form of awareness in Step Three when you actively practice new skills in your connections to others.

The Story You Tell Yourself

We all have certain images of ourselves or stories we tell to ourselves and others about who we are. Usually, this is a combination of who we want to be and who we really are. Sometimes, we also tell the story of ourselves in a very negative light, emphasizing what we can’t do, or what we always do wrong, or the mistakes we’ve made and can’t let go of.

Now let’s expand your awareness to go both deeper and wider in creating your awareness map of yourself in intimate relationships. This will help you find a new, more useful story about yourself. To begin focusing your awareness of how you characterize yourself in relationships, let’s go through the questions that were raised in earlier chapters as you may have begun to think about yourself as a potential distancer:

Exercise

Who You Are in Couple Relationships

In your journal, write a brief answer to each of the following questions:

1. Do you think that you tend to distance in relationships?
   
2. Have others told you that you back off, disappear, withhold, or otherwise distance yourself from getting close?
   
3. Do you generally avoid intimate relationships?
   
4. Do you prefer intimate relationships in which there’s no expectation of commitment?
   
5. Do you change partners frequently, never really finding what you’re looking for in a couple relationship?
   
6. Are you already moving toward someone new even while you’re still in a relationship?
   
7. Do you go through the motions of being in a committed relationship but feel as though you’re not fully present?
   
8. Do you fear or avoid being genuinely close sexually?
   
9. Do you keep yourself so busy that there’s never enough time to give to your couple relationship?
   
10. Do you feel that people expect too much of you and that their needs always seem to pull you under?
    

You have already been considering these questions as you worked with awareness in chapter 1. This time, use your answers to prioritize the issues that are most relevant for you. You can cross out the questions that have little or no relevance for you. Take the questions that remain and consider which ones say the most about you. As you think about these glimpses of yourself, tune your awareness into your body. What’s happening inside your body as you think about these matters?

Now take the one or two top questions on your prioritized list. Who else would agree with you about the fit? Would some people be surprised by your self-diagnosis? Would anyone disagree? Again, use your body as a tool to see how this area of awareness makes you feel.