S2 EP248 – Dodging Intimacy: Are You Relationship-Avoidant?

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. I work with many people who consciously deeply desire to have a loving and intimate relationship, yet unconsciously do everything they can to make sure this doesn’t happen. They often believe that they just haven’t found the right person, not realizing that they have a deep fear of intimacy and commitment.

Why would someone be afraid of intimacy? Don’t we all want to feel close and connected with someone?

Yes, most people want that, but there are very real fears that may be keeping you from opening to emotional intimacy in a primary relationship.

What is the first fearful thought you think when you think of feeling close to someone? This is what I hear from my clients who say they want a relationship yet keep running away when they get close to someone:

“I’m going to be rejected or I’m going to be abandoned.”

“I’m going to be smothered, engulfed, controlled. I will lose myself.”

“If I lose the person I love through death, I can’t handle the pain.”

These are some of the fears that are behind the fear of intimacy. And actually, it’s not the intimacy itself, but the bad things that can happen that are sometimes part of an intimate relationship.

These fears come from the pain of having been rejected, or of having lost ourselves in a relationship, or of having too much loss without knowing how to handle grief. These experiences may have been so painful that you are afraid to experience them again.

Is this pain inevitable in an intimate relationship? Yes and no. The pain of rejection or engulfment is NOT inevitable. The pain of losing a loved one through death may happen and is always a huge challenge, but would you really rather live a life without love than face this challenge?

Many people say they want to be in a relationship, yet they consistently do things that keep them from achieving this. If you answer yes to some of the questions I’m going to list, you might be relationship avoidant. 

• Do you consistently choose unavailable or inappropriate people
  
• Do you find yourself being overly critical of the other person once it seems like this relationship could become more serious? Do you find yourself being very picky over small things
  
• Do you find yourself feeling interested when the other person pulls back, but then pulling back if the other person shows renewed interest
  
• Do you often pine for an old relationship, building it up to be better than your current relationship, or better than it actually was
  
• Do you come on strong at the beginning of the relationship, believing that you have found ‘the one,’ and when the other person reciprocates, you pull back equally strongly, suddenly losing interest
  
• Do you often find yourself not having time for the relationship
  
• Do you feel pulled on when the other person wants your time and attention, and do you go into resistance
  
• Do you often blame your partner for doing the very things that you are doing
  
• Once you break up, do you reach out to the other person just to make sure they are still there and somewhat available
  
• Do you generally feel like you have one foot out the door
  
• Do you consistently tell yourself that the problem is that you have just not found the ‘right one’
  
• Were one or both of your parents very controlling
  
• Do you often give yourself up to please the other person and not get rejected, and then end up feeling trapped in the relationship
  
• Do you believe that being in a relationship means having to give up your freedom
  
• Do you tell yourself that being in a relationship means that you are responsible for the other person’s feelings, and this causes you anxiety
  
• Do you fear losing yourself in a relationship?
  

If you identify with some of these, you might want to consider that as much as you may think you want a relationship, you might be afraid of being in a one.

Children who are raised by one or both controlling parents often have a fear of losing themselves in the relationship. Many children needed to give themselves up and allow themselves to be controlled in order to not lose their parents’ approval, and as adults they may continue to fear that this is what relationships are all about.

Emotional intimacy is one of the most wonderful experiences we ever have. Nothing else really comes close to the experience of sharing our deepest thoughts and feelings with another, of being deeply seen and known, of sharing love, passion, creativity, laughter and joy. The experience of intimacy fills our souls and takes away our loneliness.

Yet too often, people believe that it’s their fear of intimacy that gets in the way of emotional intimacy.

However, as I said, it is not actually the intimacy itself that people fear. If people could be guaranteed that intimacy would continue to be a positive experience, they would have no fear of it. What they fear is the possibility of getting hurt as a result of being intimate with another.

Because many of us have learned to react to conflict with various controlling behaviors – from anger and blame to compliance, withdrawal, and resistance – every relationship presents us with these issues of rejection and engulfment. If one person gets angry, the other may feel rejected or controlled and get angry back, give themselves up, withdraw or resist. If one person shuts down, the other may feel rejected and become judgmental, which may trigger the other’s fears of engulfment, and so on. These protective circles exist in one form or another in most relationships. When the fears of rejection and engulfment become too great, a person may decide that it is just too painful to be in a relationship, and they avoid intimacy altogether.

Yet avoiding relationships leads to loneliness and lack of emotional and spiritual growth. Relationships offer us the most powerful arena for personal growth, if we accept this challenge. So what moves us beyond the fear of intimacy?

The fear exists, not because of the experience itself, but because you don’t know how to handle the situations of being rejected or controlled. The secret of moving beyond the fear of intimacy lies in developing a powerful loving adult part of you that learns how to not take rejection personally and learns to set appropriate limits against engulfment.

When you learn how to take personal responsibility for defining your own worth, instead of making others’ love and approval responsible for your feelings of worth, you will no longer take rejection personally. This does not mean that you will ever like rejection – it means you will no longer be afraid of it or have a need to avoid it.

When you learn how to speak up for yourself and not allow others to invade, smother, dominate and control you, you will no longer fear losing yourself in a relationship. Many people, terrified of losing the other person, will give themselves up in the hope of controlling how the other person feels about them. They believe that if they comply with another’s demands, the other will love them. Yet losing oneself is terrifying, so many people stay out of relationships due to this fear. If they were to learn to define their own worth and stand up for themselves, the fear would disappear.

Underneath the fears, there is likely a part of you who is very lonely and deeply wants a relationship. What’s the answer?

The answer is to learn and practice Inner Bonding so that you can develop your loving adult self – the powerful spiritually connected aspect of you who can learn to love another without losing yourself to avoid rejection. When you learn to love yourself, then you will set loving boundaries against being engulfed, controlled, smothered or consumed by a partner. As a loving adult, you would create the safety to freely love another, knowing deeply in each moment that you would rather lose the other person than lose yourself.

When you know this to be true for yourself, then you are free to fully love another person. It has to start with learning how to love yourself, since you cannot love another and share love with another unless you are loving yourself enough to create an inner sense of safety. This is what happens when you practice Inner Bonding.

The practice of Inner Bonding Therapy is designed to create a powerful inner adult self, capable of not taking rejection personally and of setting limits against loss of self. Anyone can learn this six-step process and with practice, heal the fears of rejection and engulfment that lead to relationship avoidance. Through practicing Inner Bonding, you learn to value and cherish who you really are and take full responsibility for your own feelings of worth, lovability, safety, security, pain, and joy. When you deeply value yourself, you do not take rejection personally and you become non-reactive to rejection. When you value yourself, you will not give yourself up to try to control another’s feelings about you. When you value yourself, you are willing to lose another rather than lose yourself.

Moving beyond your fears of intimacy will open you to the deep personal and spiritual growth that relationships can provide, and the profound fulfillment and joy that loving relationships can offer.

I hope you can see that the key to healing the fears of rejection and engulfment that may be keeping you from a loving relationship is to do the Inner Bonding work of developing your loving adult self.

Here is an example. You are in a relationship with someone you really love. One day, out of nowhere, your partner gets angry with you, shuts down to you, or threatens to leave you.

If you are operating from the ego wounded part of yourself, your reactions might be:

“What did I do wrong?” (Taking it personally and feeling rejected).
“What do I have to do to fix this?” (The beginning of losing yourself).

Then you might also get angry or shut down to avoid feeling rejected, or you might scurry around trying to make things right, taking responsibility for your partner’s feelings. Out of your fear, you would try to control your partner.

If you are operating from your loving adult self, your responses might be:

“My partner is closed right now and trying to blame me or punish me for something. My heart hurts from being treated this way, but I know that his or her behavior has nothing to do with me. I cannot cause another person to act this way, nor am I responsible for how he or she chooses to behave. If my partner leaves, I will feel very sad, even heartbroken, but I can manage this feeling with deep compassion and tenderness toward myself. Now, I wonder how I can best take loving care of myself until he or she opens up?”

As a loving adult, you would not take your partner’s behavior personally and feel rejected by it, nor would you give yourself up trying to get your partner to open up. You might ask your partner what’s wrong with an intention to learn, and if he or she opens up, then you can have a productive conversation. If not, then you would compassionately tend to your own heartache and do something loving for yourself – take a walk, call a friend, read a book, and so on. Or, if you know that your partner opens with tenderness and touch, you might hug your partner, reassuring him or her that you are here for them.

You would not fear being left by your partner, as you would not be abandoning yourself. You would know that you will take loving care of yourself.

Developing your loving adult self is a process that takes consistent practice. When you shift your intention from trying to have control over another not rejecting you, to taking loving care of yourself, you gradually develop your loving adult. The more powerful your loving adult self is, the less you fear being in a loving and intimate relationship. You no longer fear rejection because you no longer take others’ behavior personally, and you no longer fear engulfment because you no longer give yourself up to avoid rejection. As a loving adult, you learn how to manage loss so that you don’t have to avoid love.

The Inner Bonding process is a powerful process for developing your loving adult. Practicing the 6 steps of Inner Bonding gradually leads you out of your fears and into the ability to truly love yourself and take loving care of yourself, so that you can share love with others.

You can overcome your fears of being in a committed relationship, as did my client Sam.

Sam, age 42, had never been married. It’s not that Sam had never fallen in love. But every time a relationship had started to move toward commitment, Sam ran.

When Sam’s loneliness became overwhelming to him, he called me for help.

“I want to be in a relationship, yet every time I get close to someone, I run away. I’m not even sure what I’m so afraid of, but I must be terrified of something!”

“Sam, what happens inside you when you like someone?” The following answer and resulting dialogue came out over time, but I’ve condensed it here.

“I think that if this person really knew me, she wouldn’t like me. I do all kinds of nice things for her so she will like me. Then, after a while, I start to feel trapped, and I pull back. She gets upset about my pulling back and I then feel even more trapped. Once she gets mad at me, I stop feeling in love with her. That’s when I decide she is not the right one for me. This has happened over and over.”

“So the first problem is that you believe that she won’t like you when she gets to know you. Out of your fear of rejection, you try to control how she feels about you by doing nice things for her. But then you feel trapped and your fear of engulfment – of being controlled by her and losing yourself in the relationship – kicks in. Then you run. It sounds like your underlying fears of rejection and engulfment are controlling your life and not letting you share love.”

“That’s exactly right! So what do I do about this?”

Sam was operating from core shame – the false belief that there is something basically wrong with him. As long as he believed that he was inherently flawed and unlovable, he would fear rejection. Out of his fear of rejection, he would give himself up until he felt trapped, and then he would run.

The part of Sam that believed that he wasn’t good enough is his wounded self. The basis of the wounded self in all of us is our core shame false belief – the belief that we are inherently flawed. Our wounded self does not know that we are a perfect child of God, an individual expression of Divine love. Because the wounded self operates out of false beliefs, rather than from the truth of who we really are, it wants to control how people feel about us. Sam needed to develop a loving adult part of himself – a part of himself connected to a spiritual source of love and truth – in order to heal his core shame.

Practicing Inner Bonding heals shame. The six-steps of Inner Bonding Therapy is a profound practice for developing the loving adult and for healing the fears and limiting beliefs of the wounded self. As Sam started to practice Inner Bonding, he gradually developed an adult self who loved and valued his true soul self, his essence. As he developed this inner sense of personal power, he lost his fear of rejection. He saw that if a woman rejected him, it was because of her fears rather than because of his inadequacy or unlovability. Because he stopped taking rejection personally, he stopped fearing it.

Once he stopped fearing rejection, he stopped giving himself up in his attempt to control how a woman felt about him. Once he stopped giving himself up, he stopped feel trapped and engulfed in a relationship.

Over time, by consistently practicing Inner Bonding, Sam developed a powerful inner loving adult self and healed his fears of rejection and engulfment. Sam is now happily married with a child on the way.

This did not happen quickly. It took Sam time to heal his false beliefs about his own adequacy and lovability. It took time to develop a personal relationship with a spiritual source of love and truth. It took time to be in truth with a woman rather than being overly nice to try to control how she felt about him. It took time for him to feel safe in being himself. It took a couple of years of devoted Inner Bonding work.

But if you were to ask Sam whether all the time it took was worth it, he would look at you with shining eyes and a huge grin and you would feel the joy within him. You would have no doubt that it was worth whatever time it took.

Despite what some inexperienced coaches and therapists say, healing is never instant. I see many on the Internet who offer a quick process for changing your thoughts to change your beliefs. But true healing is a much deeper process than that. 

Inner Bonding Therapy first came out in 1990 in our book, Healing Your Aloneness, which has been a best-seller in many countries around the world. We developed this process almost 40 years ago and it has stood the test of time. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world heal their limiting beliefs and resulting fears and low self-worth through the practice of Inner Bonding. Please don’t feel discouraged or like a failure by quick-fix processes that don’t work. In our instant-gratification society, you might think there is a quick fix for these deep and ubiquitous fears, but I assure you that there isn’t. I hope you are willing to do the deeply satisfying inner work of Inner Bonding so that you can claim your personal power, create emotional and possibility physical health, create loving relationships, manifest your gifts, and live of life of inner peace and joy. As Sam learned, the time it took him to truly heal was so worth it! 

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership. 

And, I invite you to join me for my 30-Day home study Course that teaches Inner Bonding: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself, creating loving relationships, and healing from my newest book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.