"The worst thing about fear is what it does to you when you try to hide it."
NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER
"Close relationships arouse fear. We fear intimacy because we fear what may happen if we show the five A’s and allow ourselves to get truly close to a partner. Intimacy fears are normal in an uncertain world like ours. Fears are even useful as long as we are not driven or stopped by them. Though fear may follow me, it never has to lead me. We fear the perilous givens of relating: betrayal, hurt, love, confrontation of egos, self-disclosure, abandonment, and engulfment. The last two of these are the central fears in relationships."
Engulfment or Abandonment
"To fear engulfment means to fear that if someone gets too close to us physically or emotionally, we will feel smothered or lose our freedom. This is the equivalent of too much attention or affection and not enough acceptance and allowing. If we feel engulfment, we say, “Let me be.”
"To fear abandonment means to fear that if someone leaves us, we may be so bereft that we will not survive emotionally. This is the equivalent of a loss of attention, appreciation, or affection. If we fear abandonment, we say, “Stay with me.”
" A healthy person may feel both abandonment and engulfment fears, though one or the other tends to predominate in any one person or relationship."
" We continually alternate between our need for closeness and our fear of closeness. In infancy and early childhood, we may have felt our identity endangered if one or both of our parents smothered us with attention, appreciation, or affection. As a result, we felt the fear of losing our identity and learned to set rigid boundaries. We rejected the hugs, said no to the demands, and hid from the attention. Thus we built a wall that keeps out the dangerous love but also, sadly, almost any love."
"If closeness was associated with danger in the past, it may remain so as a post-traumatic stress reaction. The fear of closeness and engulfment is subtle and long-lived; we are only released from it when we work through it and practice overriding it again and again."
"We men have been taught to concentrate on being brave and strong. But the fear that gets in the way of our being strong doesn’t matter as much as the fear that gets in the way of loving, because love is the most precious strength a man can have. May we care about becoming loving more than anything else in life."
Learning from Our Fears
"The worm likes the apple only when it is ripe. Likewise, fear usually rears its ugly head exactly when we are ripe for a change. The fact that fear pops up when we are ready to address, process, and resolve it makes it a friendly stowaway."
"Fear follows us all our lives; that is our human condition.
Fear sometimes catches up with us; that is our occasional predicament.
Fear never has to stop us; that is the purpose of our work."
Jealousy
"Milton calls jealousy “the injured lover’s hell.” But we can turn it into something a little better—a purgatory, say—when we work with it as grief. Jealousy is a combination of three feelings: hurt, anger, and fear. We are hurt and angered by a perceived betrayal. We are scared by the possibility of losing a source of nurturance and of never being able thereafter to find another—the paranoid belief that makes jealousy so poignant. Jealousy stands at the threshold of grief, which our ego does not let us cross. Instead of weeping in sadness and fear, our arrogant, affronted, possessive ego enters the fray and we lash out and blame, engaging in abuse instead of healthy anger as we declare our indignation about the perceived betrayal."
"Ego-driven jealousy exposes our possessiveness, our dependency, our resentment of another’s freedom, our refusal to be vulnerable."
" Jealousy challenges our power to stay open and centered, without blame or withdrawal, in the midst of rejection. To go through it rather than simply bolster our ego shows us a path to maturity and liberation."
Infidelity
"The conventional paradigm has been “If you play by the rules, then you deserve a faithful spouse and a stable relationship.” Such a promise engenders a sense of entitlement. Someone who was always faithful will have an especially hard time dealing with abandonment or infidelity."
"Infidelity is always a couple’s issue, not an individual issue. One partner is not the victim, nor is the other the persecutor. The affair is not the disturbance but a symptom of disturbance. The “other man” does not cause distance but is being used to achieve distance."
"it’s important to point out that fidelity is more than just monogamy. Fidelity also means a commitment to work problems out. This includes not reacting to one infidelity with finality and separation but by exploring the implications of what happened and working it out, with amends given and received. When the affair ends, fidelity can begin again, and partners can go on together with forgiveness and new energy for a better life together. This takes egolessness."
Dealing with Disappointment
"Psychological health does not mean having no expectations; it means not being possessed by them."
"Disappointment is as crucial to our inner life as reliability, the same way that cold is as necessary to the life of a lilac bush as is the sun." " Beings like us could never stay in bloom in a tropical world of uninterrupted satisfactions. We need all seasons for a fully realized human experience. Only in a world with shadows can our inner life flourish."
"Disappointment can lead to despair, the illusion that there is no alternative. But to experience disappointment consciously is to embrace it, learn from it, and go on loving, to accept that all humans are a combination of contradictions. Anyone can please and displease, come through and fail, satisfy and disappoint. No one pleases all the time, yet we do not give up on others"
" Disappointment empowers us when it helps us learn to locate and trust ourselves while still relating to a partner. But it can also disempower us when it leads only to regret about how foolish we were to love our partner or when it leads us to blame her for failing us. Such a sense of betrayal puts us in the role of the victim. Regret as a reaction to disappointment further disempowers us: “If only I had not gotten into this to begin with” or “If only I had done it all differently, maybe he would not have betrayed me.” Regret becomes shame, and shame prevents us from experiencing the full career of our disappointment: realizing it, grieving it, growing because of it."
Practices
DEALING WITH ABANDONMENT AND ENGULFMENT-figure out if you have Fear of Abandonment (“The Pursuer”) or Fear of Engulfment (“The Distancer”)
USING THE “TRIPLE-A APPROACH” TO FEAR- Admit, Allow. Act As If. ADMIT you fear abandonment or engulfment or both when appropriate.
ALLOW the fears, feeling them fully and not judging them by calling them bad. Become intimate with your feelings, allowing yourself to feel them fully as your own.
ACT AS IF you have no fear. If you fear abandonment, risk allowing the other to go away for one minute more than you can stand. Cling one minute less than you feel you need to. If you fear engulfment, allow the other to get one inch closer than you can stand. Stay away one minute less than you feel you need to. By acting in these ways, you are playing with your pain, a healing device too often neglected by those of us who take things too seriously.
WELCOMING CLOSENESS • We don’t fear physical closeness because we fear proximity itself. Most of us earnestly want physical contact with those who love us. Rather we fear what we will feel when we get too close. The real fear, then, is of ourselves. This fear is not something to rebuke ourselves for. It is our deepest vulnerability, the very quality that makes us most lovable.
BEING ALONE • To leave our family home and enter another home on our wedding day deprives the psyche of the solitude it needs for its full development. Beings as complex as ourselves need retreats from others to explore the depths of our character and our destiny. We need regular periods of solitude to replenish ourselves, to locate new sources of creativity and self knowledge, and to discover possibilities in our souls that are invisible when we are with others. This is how we find our central evolutionary opportunity whether we are introverts or extroverts.
HANDLING THREAT AND JEALOUSY IN YOUR PARTNER • Your partner may feel threatened by the friendship you have with someone else. Within the context of an intimate bond with someone, the statement “I am free to pursue relationships” becomes “I am free to pursue relationships, but I have to design them carefully and appropriately in relation to the reactions of my partner.”
If you are interested in this book, you can email me (kh.nebulishvili@gmail.com) and I'll send the PDF version of this book :)
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