When you hesitate and find yourself stopping just before sharing something very personal with your spouse, how do you make sense of that? Shouldn’t we be able to share everything with our soul mate?

Fear of Intimacy, Part 1

We all bring some fears to our relationship. Usually, one or more of the six fears of intimacy we’re going to talk about for the next few weeks. So, if you really like digging deep into your stuff, you’ll find this mini-series fascinating!

Before we dive right in, let’s think about fear for a few moments. How do we deal with fear? Usually, we think that avoiding fear takes us away from that fear. But that doesn’t work!

Fear is a valid, normal response in the human body and so avoiding or ignoring fear is invalidating what is real and what is normal. When we acknowledge our fear, talk about our fear, and share our fear then we actually end up disempowering it.

Our fear of fear is often stronger than our fear!

Fear Impedes Intimacy

Descutner and Thelen (1991) found that fear of intimacy is negatively related to comfort with emotional closeness and relationship satisfaction(as my fear of intimacy goes up, my comfort with emotional closeness and my relationship satisfaction goes down) and positively related to loneliness and trait anxiety (as the fear of intimacy goes up, loneliness and trait anxiety increases).

A Visualization of the Research by Descutner & Thelen (1991)

When we move closer to our fear through recognizing, acknowledging and naming it then we actually begin to see that the fear (which we feared) is not as big, nor as powerful, nor as overwhelming as we thought.

This reality is underlined in a brilliant Bible verse in Proverbs 29:25: “The fear of man lays a snare”. So often our fear of others, or our own fears, actually snare us – trap us. In the marriage context, fears of intimacy hold us back (and even trap us) from experiencing deeper intimacy.

Caleb had a funny personal story as a good example of the power of subconscious fear and the greater power of naming it. It’s not in the marriage context at all, but it really illustrates how identifying fear and moving towards it totally takes its power away:

For years of my life (including adult years), I had this recurring nightmare of finding myself suddenly aware that I was out in public with no pants on. I was always a a little boy in these dreams and I awoke from them with incredible feelings of shame.

Well, sometime in the mid 2000’s, I remembered that in Grade 3 I was in a brand new school, and it was my first year there, and I was late coming out of the change room for gym class. I was in rush, and I had gone in and got changed as quick as I could. I ran out in to the gymnasium , in front of my whole class… in my gym shirt, runners, and tighty-whitey’s! The whole class laughed at me. There's enough shame associated with that memory that I remember it not from my perspective, but as if I was watching myself do this (in the psych world we call this a dissociation).

I forgot about that for years, but would regularly have these nightmares at least a few times a year. When I remembered the memory and shared it with Verlynda and some friends, I stopped having the dream. Talking about it undermined the power of that fear. Again: naming it and telling a few people I trusted about it completely disempowered this deeper subconscious mini-trauma and took the nightmares away.

A funny story, but definitely shows the difference in results between avoiding our fears and facing them!

The following six fears (2 this week, more to follow) are based on the research of Dr. Gerald Weeks, Chair of the Department of Counseling at the University of Nevada, and Dr. Stephen Treat, Director and CEO of the Penn Council for Relationship and an Instructor in Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.

Fear #1 – Fear of Exposure

When we first start dating,