Fear of intimacy is a social phobia
It can produce anxiety about being emotionally and physically close to another individual. It is defined as ‘the inhibited ability of an individual, due to anxiety, to fulfill a significant relationship with another individual’. Read about social phobia here.
This terror can result in failed relationships and social exclusion. Sufferers experience feelings of isolation and loneliness, and an inability to connect with others.
The fear of intimacy has a number of causes. Experience of abuse or neglect tends to predispose a person to being afraid of allowing themselves to become vulnerable to a new relationship.
The sufferer can inwardly fear abandonment which will bring about a guarded attitude, which will effectively prevent an intimate relationship.
People who are raised in families with little or no emotional intimacy are often afraid of establishing emotional contact with their spouses.
The kind of family in which this occurs is often dysfunctional, with a background of alcoholism or some similar problem. In these families, intimacy is perceived as a threat to the unhealthy yet established behavior operating within the system.
Fear of intimacy can also evolve from the embarrassment resulting from sexual abuse or early exposure to pornography.
Fear of intimacy
The lack of intimacy will often result in individuals feeling lonely, unwanted, unloved, and emotionally deprived. In some cases, no meaningful relationship can take place, which can lead to emotional health problems such as depression and anxiety.
Sufferers are often self-centered or have low self-esteem or perhaps feelings of guilt. If left untreated, fear of intimacy can destroy any meaningful connections and lead to total isolation and loneliness.
The fear of intimacy is totally curable. Here are some of the methods you can use to solve the problem.
1 Always be genuine in your relationships. Always acknowledge your feelings and express them truthfully. If you feel angry or betrayed, or even annoyed, express your feelings openly.
For example, you can use an expression like “I feel annoyed because I was expecting to see you there.” If you feel pleased or elated, express that too. You can say something like “I was delighted that you decided to come after all. I feel good when you are around.”
Instead of allowing fear of intimacy to ake charge of your life, step out and reveal your feelings. You may feel vulnerable or afraid at first but those fears will pass.
2 Learn to communicate about day to day affairs: you can learn intimacy by sharing your personal and everyday experiences. Also learn to discuss your experience of being betrayed in the past, and listen and sympathize with your partner’s experiences. If you do not have total mutual self-disclosure, then your relationship is unbalanced. One partner has opened up, while the other has hidden everything away.
3 Don’t play psychological games, such as expecting your partner to read your mind or dropping hints instead of saying outright what you really mean. Talk about what’s going on in your life and how you feel and think. This way you build trust in your relationship, which helps you get over the problem.
4 Time is of the essence
Don’t forget that the longer your anxiety about intimacy continues, the worse it gets and the more difficult it is to conquer. So it is up to you to face up to the fear of intimacy and go out and get yourself a richer, more fulfilling life.
Overcome Your Fear Of Intimacy
Fear of intimacy is what’s known as a social phobia, a fear of being around people, but it’s a particular form of it. A person with fear of intimacy feels anxiety about having an intimate personal relationship, or fears a close relationship with another person.
So fear of intimacy is basically fear of being emotionally close to another person, with the fear of being physically close often mixed in as well.
Scientifically, for what it’s worth, social phobia is defined as “the inhibited ability of a man or woman, because of anxiety, to reciprocate feelings of personal significance with another man or woman who is highly appreciated or valued”.
In other words, you have put into shadow some aspect of your natural personality because of a traumatic experience earlier in life. The concept of shadow is fully explained in this excellent book, along with the theory of archetypal personality construction.
Fear of intimacy is often caused by past traumas, including sexual, emotional or physical abuse. As a result, fear of intimacy is also often associated with a fear of being touched.
The wider aspects of fear of intimacy
Men and women with the fear of intimacy are – obviously – anxious or afraid of intimate relationships.
They may believe, either consciously or unconsciously, that they do not deserve love or emotional support from other people. The three defining features of this type of fear or phobia (a word which just means a very intense fear) are:
- a lowered willingness to communicate personal information,
- uncertainty about feelings when personal information is exchanged,
- a sense of vulnerability around the person with whom intimacy might be possible.
Video – fear of intimacy
Emotionally confident and secure individuals feel themselves to be lovable and worthy, and feel comfortable with intimacy – and indeed with being alone, too.
By contrast, men and women with a fear of intimacy lack some of the sense of self-worth which would allow them to seek out connection with others. They may, however, see other people very positively and want their love and acceptance.
They somehow can’t accept it, though. And a man or woman who is fearful around people may lack a sense of their own “lovability”; as a result they might tend to avoid others because they fear rejection. Trust is, unsurpisingly, a big issue for people who fear intimacy.
If you have a fear of intimacy, you may well also have little confidence about the dependability of other people and a high level of fear about abandonment. It’s also common for fear of intimacy to be accompanied by a sense of discomfort with closeness.
Fear of Intimacy And Relationships
One study found that women with depression have much more obvious fear of intimacy. Interestingly, the intensity of a woman’s fear of intimacy is a reliable indicator of the longevity of a couple’s relationship. In other words, the more intense a woman’s fear of intimacy, the shorter, on average, a couple’s relationship.
This is probably the best reason of all to deal with your fear of intimacy (and there’s no reason to think that men are any different in this respect). Men who want an insight into their inner psychology can read this book on the archetypes of Warrior Magician Lover and King.
Another study showed that people who fear intimacy generally think there is less intimacy in their dating relationships than their partner – it’s almost as if they can’t face the idea of being intimate.
Sadly, well-meaning but fearful parents can have a massive impact on our confidence as adults: people who, as children, are taught not to trust strangers always almost always have a greater fear of intimacy and report feeling more lonely in adulthood than people who were not taught to distrust strangers when they were young.
Child abuse is a major factor in the development of fear of intimacy – and that’s true for all kinds of abuse during childhood.
When people who were abused as children grow up, they tend to be anxious about allowing others to see them as they really are, and have a lot of fear about being revictimized if they trust others (which is, of course, what happened when they were growing up).
As a result, intimacy can feel very frightening, because to feel close to another person reminds a woman or man that trusting someone may lead to “being taken advantage of”.