21 - HOW TO OVERCOME THE FEAR OF RELATIONSHIPS - INTIMACY ISSUES

Hi, I'm Dr. Carol Darza, author, trauma psychologist, and founder of Reconnect Integrative Trauma Treatment center in Los Angeles. Today we're going to talk about how to overcome your fear about relationships, intimacy. Now, I know I'm a trauma specialist, and all my videos have been about trauma. And so you might say, why am I talking about relationships today? Because it actually has a lot to do with trauma, a lot to do with childhood trauma. And I say that because I tend to find most people are much more aware of sexual abuse, domestic violence, maybe war kind of trauma. But when it comes to relationship traumas, that's where I find that a lot of people are missing this information. So let's start there. Who is your first love affair? Think about it. Now, you might be thinking a boyfriend, a girlfriend. I'm actually referring to your parents or your caregivers, whoever first raised you, that person or these people are your first love affairs. So whatever you learn from that relationship, good or bad, tends to create some sort of a platform, a foundation for how you are in the relationship. Let's look at current stuff. Are you struggling with any fears about being abandoned, being hurt, being rejected? Are you avoiding getting closer to someone? Or quite the opposite. Are you wanting so much closeness, so much love and affection, but you're not really getting. So there's sort of a spectrum that could happen in a relationship between the fear of abandonment or the fear of engulfment. So we're gonna talk about all of that and. And of course, at the end, I'm always going to give you some tools of what to do, how to overcome some of those fears. Although it takes time, it is definitely a possibility. So let's talk about what kind of parenting might leave you in a difficult situation growing up that you find yourself really struggling as an adult. First, if you had sexual abuse, if you had physical abuse, if you had a very controlling parent. Right. So now we're getting a little bit into more subtle things. So, yes, they're not abusive. They seem to be present and caring. But are they overly controlling? Are they very critical? What kind of messages are they? Were they telling you, are they too scared, too overbearing? They feel like they have to protect you every second, everything that you do. They have to make sure that you are protected and nothing bad is happening. So there's sort of this anxious thing, or they are there, but they're not really there. So it's almost like they're physically there. Yes, you are fed, you get good clothing, your house, but are they emotionally available? Are they in tune with your feelings? Were they ever soothing for you when you were growing up? Did you feel like you could go to them to get your needs met? Did you feel like you had a right to even express your needs? That's a very common thing with a lot of people. Or did you just sort of learn to depend on yourself? Of course it's good to be self dependent and self reliant. But before you get there, you have to first actually learn that dependent on an adult, as when you're a child, it's a normal thing. And then you learn then to take that in and make it your own. You must have heard the word attachment, which is very common when we talk about relationship issues and relational trauma. So I have a good definition for what attachment is and then I'm going to talk about attachment styles. So attachment is a deep and enduring connection established between an individual, usually between an adult and a child. Right. So that's your first caregiver. Again, it affects actually how you perceive the world, how you deal with people, how much closeness and separateness you can tolerate, how you deal with emotional intimacy in general. It affects your ability to communicate your needs and your wants, your modes of responding to conflict. Right. When there's a fight, when there's an argument with someone, do you freak out? Do you find that this normal part of life, it also affects your expectation about the relationship and or your partner in general. So if you Google this, there are great books by the way, about attachment styles. It was talked about first. John Balby, a very famous psychologist and I read, I have to read just some very good examples of what they mean and see which one you relate to. So the most healthy one is the secure attachment. This is when especially your first early years have been really good secure base. Your parents were physically emotionally available, you had a consistency stability in your life and you are securely attached. So when you're an adult, you say things like, it's easy for me to get close to other people, I'm comfortable depending on them, I'm comfortable on having them depend on me. I don't worry about being abandoned or about anyone getting close to me. There are not too many of those, by the way. But this attachment style, which is again called secure style, is definitely there for people who grew up in a secure home. So if you fit in that category, you have nothing else to worry about. But let's talk about the other three. So the second one is dismissive, avoidant. That's when a person is not comfortable with emotional intimacy. So you might say stuff like, I'm really uncomfortable getting close to others. I find it difficult to trust and depend on them. And I worry I will be hurt if I get too close to my partner. So if you relate to this one dismissive, avoidant, the third one, anxious, preoccupied. So this type of people are needing a lot of reassurance from their partner. They want to be really close, extremely close, almost sort of merge with their partner and. But the other people are kind of reluctant to get to them as close as they want to be. Right. So they often worry about, does my partner love me, does does he, she value me or will I get abandoned? And my need for closeness might scare the other people. So that's again the anxious, preoccupied. And then we have a combination style. The fourth one that years later they actually came up with is called fearful, avoidant. Again, the avoidant and anxious, the combination of them. So if you say things like, I'm uncomfortable being close to others, I find it difficult to trust and depend on others. And I prefer that other people don't depend on me. It's important that I feel independent, self sufficient, and my partner wants to be more intimate than I am comfortable with. So you can see the difficulty of really finding the right amount of closeness and separation in order to create a healthy relationship. So those people who are often afraid of abandonment will find themselves quite anxious in that state and constantly asking for more and more, which can create then for the partner to feel sort of a sense of engulfment where the more one person wants, the more the other person wants to go away. So you might fall in one or two categories. And some people are actually a combination of both. Sometimes there's a bit of a dance between couples. Again, these all come from a lot of childhood trauma of feeling neglected, feeling abandoned, feeling hurt. It could also be if you had addict parents because. Or caregivers again. Right. If parents were again physically there, but they were very much in their addiction, alcohol or substance abuse, they are not really present for you. Right. So all of that create a sense of I'm not taken care of, I'm not valuable, and therefore I expect that from my adult relationships. Oh, by the way, another thing, this could be parent being ill, mentally or physically. I had a client whose parent had a chronic cancer and another one with a chronic heart disease. So about 10, 15 years long, where the child was in constant fear, fear of wondering when the parent is going to die. So living in that state of hyper vigilant and fear can eventually create really an unsecure base where then you can transfer that, that childhood fear into your adult relationship and think, okay, this can happen with my spouse. If your parent had a mental health issue, right, they were depressed, depressed or they're anxious or they could have borderline personality, they could have narcissistic personality disorders. I'm not going to get into the details of that. But these personality disorders make the parent really unavailable emotionally and very much self focused so that it becomes about the needs of the parents. So that could have been another area of trauma for you. And of course there's the verbal abuse. So abuse doesn't always show up in physical or sexual term, but it could be sort of constant critic, criticism of you saying you are bad, you are ugly, you are fat, you are, you know, fill in the blank or why do I have to take care of you kind of statements from the parents where you feel like a burden. Again, these are all childhood traumas that, that can highly affect a person's attachment style as, as they grow. So well, let's a little bit talk about what to do, right? Attachment issues. Of course I'm biased because I'm a therapist, but I think they are worked best in a therapeutic setting. But for the sake of this video, I'm going to still give you some tools if you're not able to actually reach a professional who's really specialized in attachment disorder so they can help you with that. So what can you do on your own? First is education, self education, really understanding where your symptoms, where your reactions, where your fears are coming from, from your childhood. So really understanding, sort of doing maybe a little bit of an inventory of okay, I react this way to my partner. Partner, right. Rather than seeing right away what is my partner doing wrong. Because that's the first and easy thing to do to really ask yourself how is that reflecting back to me how I was raised. So when my partner doesn't call me at a, at a time that he, she was supposed to call me, what comes up in me? What kind of sentences I say to myself? Am I feeling like I'm not lovable or am I saying oh, see, I knew it because I'm not good enough anyway, like what are those messages? What are those words that you say to yourself? Write those down. Because those are not coming from your partner. Yes, he, she is triggering them, is bringing them up to the surface. But they're coming from early messages from early experiences. So if you can start with really exploration, almost doing like a detective work, right? Understanding the connection to one on one, making the list where it's coming from. Finding the origin is a very good first step. Now be careful that you don't find yourself overwhelmed because digging and finding this, this kind of memories and information could be emotionally overwhelming. If you do elicit the help of either a professional or a friend that you know, that you know they can help you and they can stay non judgment, judgmental with you. So after you do this understanding of where it's coming from, then you can do a little bit of what's called a repair work. What does repair work look like? Well, first, whatever you didn't receive is what you want to receive now. So if you haven't received acknowledgment, if you haven't received understanding, if you haven't received empathy, if you haven't received attention, affection, it's sort of where you want to start. Well, it'll be great if your partner can do that work at the same time with you because then it could be a couple's repair. But if that's not in your cards, then you can start seeing how you can give this to yourself. Can you be empathic or are you going to get angry at yourself for having needs? Right? So that's already an important thing. Can you be gentle towards yourself? Can you treat yourself in a good way? So if you're feeling abandoned, can you make sure you are not abandoning yourself when you get in touch with these early memories? This is a bit of a complicated thing. I'm trying to make it sort of easier for you to understand via video. But it's almost like you have different ages and different parts that get frozen in, in, in certain parts of you like in your whole life. And they need to be contacted and they need to be having a sense of sort of connecting back to yourself. So if you have a memory, okay, let's go with that example. Your partner said you're stupid and then you remember. Now at five years old your parents used to call you stupid, right? So you have this five year old now. You can actually connect to that part of you, to your inner 5 year old either, right? Him her a letter, talk to him her directly and really just change this message that you received at that age. So self talk in that time can be very, very helpful. You can really just approach yourself as if you're approaching a five year old to say I'm sorry that you heard that. But you know what, you are not stupid. Your parents were having a hard time and that's why they said that. But you are actually a very lovable person. And just really connect to see if, if that five year old part of you can hear that you can almost make an eye contact sometimes you can see yourself. You can get a picture of yourself when you were young and kind of have a communication this way, really connecting it and see if you're able to just really hear yourself the words of I am not stupid or whatever else as the, the message that you have received at the time. As you continue this communication with your five year old, this could be just ongoingly how you practice self love and self care. Just like you've experienced this as a 5 year old, you might find that you have other parts and other times where you've experienced a lot of different, other negative memories and such. I want to remind you, because this is a relationship oriented trauma, often finding someone who can actually be in a positive relationship with you, such as sometimes could be a friend, sometimes ideally of course a professional who knows how to talk to those different parts of you. You can really enlist help in our clinic in Reconnect Trauma Treatment center in Los Angeles. We, we are actually 30 different therapists working together. We are specialized in helping you to get in touch with different parts of yourself so you can really heal these things and really find a way to reconnect back to yourself. In fact, my book the Trauma Map talks a little bit about that too. The main philosophy being how the trauma, you know, creating disconnect and how you can help yourself to reconnect to yourself. So the most important thing is accepting different parts, different feelings, everything so that you are really welcoming all parts of yourself. I say that because a lot of people really hate certain parts of themselves, right? So if you're needy in a relationship and you find yourself really angry at your partner because you felt abandoned or you felt engulfed and you might find yourself sort of judging and saying, well, I should be more like an adult, I shouldn't react this way and therefore just put that side, you know, that part of you aside. But in therapy, when you learn that every part of you is welcome, there's a different kind of healing that happens. And that's really a crucial part of how you can start your work. And of course other things you'll find in my book the Trauma Map about the mindfulness and focusing in the present and the grounding exercises and the body connections are huge contributors to this relationship healing as well. Well, I hope that you found this video helpful because my goal is to really help you overcome the fears that stop you from getting into healthy relationship. Please always remember to reach us at Reconnect Treatment Center. And you can write down below, or you can email us or call us as well. And remember, trauma equals disconnect, and healing equals reconnect, so stay connected.