Search Results for: lisa firestone/feed/2009/11/fear-of-intimacy

Fear of Intimacy: Understanding Why People Fear Intimacy

What is Fear of Intimacy? Fear of intimacy is an often subconscious fear of closeness that frequently affects people’s personal relationships. This fear of physical and/or emotional intimacy tends to show up in people’s closest and most meaningful relationships. Where Does This Fear of Intimacy Come From? While there are times when we are aware of actually being apprehensive and distrusting of love, we are more likely to identify these fears as c…

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fear of abandonment

Fear of Abandonment

…create more distance. Catching on to these patterns, which Drs. Robert and Lisa Firestone call “selection, distortion, and provocation” can help people who have a fear of abandonment make better choices that can help them create more security. How can we overcome fear of abandonment and change our attachment patterns? Fortunately, a person’s style of attachment is not fixed. We can develop earned secure attachment as adults in several ways. As Dr….

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finding love

Finding Love: Empowering Tools to Help You Find the Relationship You Want

…Firestone, psychologist and author of Fear of Intimacy (also father to Dr. Lisa Firestone), has presented a case for why most people are, to varying degrees, afraid of closeness. “Most people say that they want love and positive acknowledgment, but relatively few people can tolerate real love and respect from another person, because it threatens their defenses’” said Dr. Firestone. “They tend to retreat, pass over it and sometimes react with actua…

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Beyond Fear

…ld Men and There Will be Blood, are, at their core, horror films. Face it, fear sells. In 2003, we were fearful of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction reaching our shores; today, terrorism threat levels are part of a new post-9/11 norm, and some days, more than we’d like to admit, we are frightened by nothing more than the cast of our own shadows. These are scary times. In the face of bad economies, terrorism threats and our own existential angst, w…

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Falling Out of Love

…ggles, to some degree, to stay connected to our loving feelings,” said Dr. Lisa Firestone, co-author of Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships. “Early experiences of feeling hurt or rejected can injure our ability to connect with and sustain our loving feelings. Giving and receiving love actually challenges our core defenses, early adaptations we formed to protect ourselves against the ways we were hurt.” While none of us choose to fall out of lov…

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secure attachment covid

Can Secure Attachment Make Us Less Afraid During the Coronavirus Crisis?

…ocesses and the Facilitating Environment. Madison CT: International Universities Press 1994/1965. Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. **** PsychAlive E-course Making Sense of your Life to Empower your Future: with Dan Siegel and Lisa Firestone. Through guided writing exercises and integrative activities, you will get to know yourself on a deep level. Additionally, this E-Course provides tools for ongoing growth,…

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Why Are You Avoiding Intimacy?

…from people or connections that could make them happy.   2. You may have a fear of intimacy.   In addition to whatever attachment pattern we experience, we all have varying degrees of fear around intimacy, also usually shaped by our past. For most of us, when we fall in love, our guard is down. We’re being open and vulnerable to another person, and while that may feel amazing on one level, on another level our defenses are being threatened. Accord…

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Commitment Issues: Why Some People Have Them and Others Don’t

…oven ways to become more secure: Coherent Narrative Drs. Daniel Siegel and Lisa Firestone are strong proponents of the coherent narrative. This is a process of writing about childhood experiences, in order to make connections to current behavior. Writing a coherent narrative is a tool that can literally rewire the brain and help people develop a more secure attachment style. This article outlines the process and links to an e-Course led by Drs. Fi…

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fear of intimacy

3 Ways to Tell You’re Afraid of Intimacy

…periencing old, painful emotions. As my father, psychologist and author of Fear of Intimacy Robert Firestone wrote, “Most people have a fear of intimacy and at the same time are terrified of being alone.” This can create a lot of confusion, as a person’s ambivalence can cause a real push and pull in their behavior. So, how can you identify if your own fear of intimacy is getting in the way of love? 1. Your Actions Don’t Match Your Intentions For s…

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The Critical Inner Voice Defined

…er Voice with your father, Dr. Robert W. Firestone, and Joyce Catlett? Dr. Lisa Firestone: After years of therapy practice, we could see how much our patientsgained from a deeper understanding of their critical inner voice, and we wanted to make it available to the general public. The goal is to help individuals gain an awareness of the critical inner voice that causes us to fall short of our capabilities and prevents us from living the life we wa…

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