Why You Keep Screwing Up Your Relationships

Photo by Claudio Büttler on Unsplash

A cliche in the self-help/therapy/relationship sphere is “a fear of intimacy.” It’s at the heart of pretty much every insecure, codependent coupling. I think it’s worth looking at what intimacy is, why we might fear it, and the ways in which we block it.

I call these blocks intimacy defense mechanisms.

What is intimacy?

Healthy intimacy requires the trusting offer of our true self to another and our trusting acceptance of the other’s true self in return. — Pia Melody

Or as the venerable John Bradshaw puts it in Homecoming:

It is impossible to be intimate if you have no sense of self. How can you share yourself with another if you do not really know who you are? How can anyone know you if you do not know who you really are?

A lot of what blocks intimacy is not, as most people think, forms of self-sabotage.

It’s self-protection.

Why?

Because intimacy feels unsafe to those who come from childhood trauma — enmeshment, abandonment, abuse, neglect, etc. So who would want to engage in something that feels unsafe…