"Our deep-seated fears are elusive enemies, harder to recognize, understand, and come to terms with, thereby making them all the more powerful and treacherous obstacles to our striving for intimacy."
Dr. Jeffrey Title
|
FEAR OF REJECTION
Will my partner fall out of love with me? If he/she really knew me would he/she still love me?
This very litany sets you up to create negative feelings and actions that push your partners away. You start walking on eggshells, bending over backwards to please, looking and behaving the way you think your partner expects — all actions designed to counteract the possibility of your partner falling out of love with you.
Ironically, these efforts often prove to be your downfall. You can put your best foot forward only so long. What you don’t realize is that your best foot is really your worst. And it’s not stepping forward, it’s stomping all over the relationship. Eventually the strain of pretense and subterfuge gets to you and you start to develop feelings of resentment, anger, and dependency related states like depression and regression. Your partner ends up with hard feelings because of your negative attitude, not for anything to do with what you were afraid of in the first place.
The fear of rejection escalates your inappropriate dependency behavior which in turn gets you rejected. The hurt, depression, and loss of self–respect you experience from this rejection only serves to heighten your dependency needs and make you more desperate and more afraid of rejection the next time.
FEAR OF FIGHTING
If I don’t object, don’t dispute, don’t disagree, don’t get too deep I won't end up in a fight that will destroy my relationship.
This fear is near and dear to my heart because I come from a family where fighting between my parents virtually never took place. The crippling lesson I took away from their example was that there is something terribly wrong with couples fighting.
Sadly, in your effort to avoid fighting you settle for avoiding or denying conflict at all costs—even though the cost could be the relationship itself. Denial is where your mind literally doesn’t tell itself something so you can’t do anything about it. It’s like the adage of burying your head in the sand to avoid danger but even more dangerous, because your mind won’t even alert you to the danger.
FEAR OF CHANGE
If it ain’t broke, why fix it? and Why upset the apple cart? Why rock the boat? Why go looking for trouble? Amazing, isn’t it, all the clichés that support the fear of change?
The fear of change in your relationship often means you won’t see the changes when they come. The fear of change often results in putting an invisible wedge between yourself and your partner. The relationship itself starts to stagnate. The energy dissipates. And what happens? You struggle desperately to get things back to the way they were. You try to pull the relationship back instead of propelling it forward. The fear of change can incapacitate you, preventing you from providing input or influencing the changes that are taking place. The fear of change prevents you from working cooperatively with your partner to fashion a closer relationship which evolves from the two of you coping successfully with change.
|
In our sessions I will help you overcome your fears which then takes
you a giant step closer to examining and evaluating your relationships
honestly. Serious conversation for understanding is a conduit for
examining the changes, deciding what they mean to you, and what you
want to do about them once you’ve faced their existence.
|
|