Is Your Fear of Intimacy Leading You To Unavailable Partners?

How Ready Are You To Be Seen?

What if I told you your fear of intimacy was the barrier that was keeping you from finding and sustaining secure partnerships? That despite your conscious wishes for a relationship with mutual respect and commitment, your unconscious mind is guiding you elsewhere?

Many of us pre-occupy ourselves with unavailable people because we fear being seen for who we really are if we were chosen. In this, it’s much easier to dance around someone’s hot and cold behaviours, hoping to be chosen, than to actually be chosen. The games serve almost as a distraction from the real growth work that would need to occur if we truly let someone in.

In a state of cognitive dissonance, it can be both confusing and uncomfortable to fear intimacy and experience it first-hand. To have someone sit across from you and love you for who you are when your internal belief system says otherwise.

As someone with a disorganised attachment style, I can speak from personal experience on this. For much of my dating life, I was hopelessly fawning after people who couldn’t give me what I wanted, only to cower and push them away when/if they did choose me. I soon realised there was more to my dating experience than simply not being able to find the right person.

A part of me feared being chosen.

It’s pretty ironic, right? To say you want something but then feel conflicted when you get it and want to run away.

For today’s article, I wanted to delve into fears of intimacy, and how they propel us towards unhealthy dynamics. To end the article, I’ll share some questions to ask yourself to identify your own fears of intimacy.

Fears Of Intimacy: A Root In Trauma

17% of individuals in Western culture are thought to fear intimacy, according to this Psychology Today post. Such fear can show up in a range of mental and physiological symptoms from avoiding emotionally charged conversations, pushing people away, having a predominantly negative self-view/self-talk, disorganised romantic behaviours such as push/pull dynamics, a strong desire for validation, and low boundaries, amongst other symptoms.

Fears of intimacy have roots in childhood trauma. According to attachment theory, all of us have an innate desire as children for intimacy, as we require a stable relationship with our caregivers to get our needs met. In most cases, a healthy level of what Carl Jung called individuation and authentic development occurs as our personality develops within our environments. In instances of trauma, however, the opposite happens. We learn to hide our authentic parts and done a false self to preserve our relationships instead.

This false self we live through is thought to be an adaptive mechanism of ours to preserve our relationship to an outside world we fear being ourselves within. Gabor Maté, the renowned physician and author known for his work on addiction, ADHD, and relationships speaks of this in his new book, A Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.

“Most people abandon their true selves (authenticity) to please others and keep the relationships (attachments), even if they are ones that are toxic and destructive.” — Gabor Mate, A Myth of Normal: Trauma Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.

This is all to say that many of us grow up not only learning to reject our authentic selves but to live in fear of them, too. “What if someone sees me for who I am?”, we wonder.

Such self-rejection may be the underpinning of why we fawn after unavailable partners.

How Unavailable Dynamics Tie Into Fears of Intimacy

There are many reasons why those of us who fear intimacy have a desire to chase after unavailable partners.

Firstly, when we’re suffering with low self-esteem and fears of intimacy — a by-product of trauma— and the negative mental states that accompany — anxiety, low mood, frustration —, we’re likely to feel a greater pull towards unhealthy relationships.

Like trying to distract yourself from a pack of sweets when you’re really hungry and stressed, our brain’s reward centres go awry trying to find a solution to our unhappiness. If you have a history of having unavailable partnerships — like the one with your caregiver — your brain is even more likely to revert to what it knows to be the “blueprint” of past relationships and repeat familiar patterns.

Secondly, unhealthy dynamics are naturally more addictive than their healthy counterparts due to the stakes at play. The hot/cold, available/unavailable, and conflicting behaviours often rampant in such dynamics are forms of what psychologists call “intermittent rewards” — potently addictive patterns to the mammalian brain. So not only can we potentially feel drawn to unhealthy partnerships due to past trauma and low self-esteem but these partnerships are inherently more addictive; making them more attractive to our brain than healthy relationships.

Thirdly, our desperate search for someone to fix us can lead us into shape-shifting in order to win someone’s affection. In this, even if we do succeed in winning them over — which I would say is unlikely if they’re showing early red flags of disinterest — then we’re unknowingly building the foundation of a relationship based on inauthenticity. How can we then be intimate if we are hiding our true selves? If we’ve self-abandoned in dating, we’re likely to continue self-abandoning in the resulting relationship.

In sum, fears of intimacy are rooted in trauma which can negatively impact our self-esteem. Such low self-esteem, and our historical patterns, may push us into inherently more addictive and unhealthy dynamics. Even if we manage to win someone over, our urge to shape-shift in order to win their affection leaves us disabled in our ability to experience intimacy, even if we wanted to.

Bringing Awareness To An Unconscious Process

The problem with all of the above is that much of this is occurring on an unconscious level — beyond our conscious awareness. Because of this, you may have desires and impulses to chase after unavailability and not even know why.

Unaware your fears of intimacy are guiding you, you may rationally think, “I don’t want these dynamics”, and yet your body says otherwise through a desire to chase. Such inability to recall why we want/do not want to do something is what psychologists call implicit memory.

As opposed to “explicit memories”, implicit memories aren’t easy to recall. Lisa Firestone PhD, a clinical psychologist, and Director of Research and Education for the Glendon Association, describes how trauma influences our memory as follows,

“Trauma memories are often implicit because trauma floods our brain with cortisol, the stress hormone, which shuts down the part of our brain that encodes memories and makes them explicit. Our implicit memories can be like invisible forces in our lives, impacting us in powerful ways.” — Lisa Firestone, PHD.

It’s also worth noting that our brain is thought to be able to store explicit memories only from age 3 — meaning any experiences beforehand are naturally implicit. How can we recall something we could never explicitly remember in the first place?

Final Thoughts and Growth Questions

To close this article, we must bring awareness to a pattern of behaviour that may be causing us harm. If you fear intimacy, it’s likely rooting in some some form childhood trauma that you may or may not be able to recall. Recall isn’t necessarily a big issue as we don’t need to recall something in order to change — but we do need to recognise that a particular behaviour isn’t working for us.

To this, I’ll ask you some of the following questions:

• Do you find discomfort in showing your true self?
• Are you hesitant to let others in?
• Do you experience discomfort when faced with people emotionally and physically available to you?
• Do you seem to have a natural disposition towards unavailable/unhealthy dynamics?
• Can you identify any causes of trauma in your early life?
• Would you describe yourself as having a high/low self-esteem?
• Do you rely on others for validation?
• Do you draw others in only to push them away when they get too close?

All of the above and so many more can be signs of a fear of intimacy. In beginning to expand our awareness as to its causations, our current mental state, and the repercussions of our behaviours, we can be better placed to change. I suggest reading more into this and seeking help from a coach/therapist for trauma work.

Thank you for reading this article. I appreciate the support so give this article a few *claps* if you enjoyed it and follow Above The Middle for more like this. If you want to keep reading, here are some related articles for you to check out.