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

perfect imperfect moment

3 Steps to Experience the Perfect Imperfect Moment

…psychologist and my co-author on Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice, Robert Firestone, recently pointed out that living in the moment isn’t always as joyful as the saying would suggest. Life is filled with a wide array of emotions including pain. However, living in the moment does ensure us a more lively existence. We can’t experience the past or the future, yet we spend much of our time lost in regretting the past and worrying about the future. Th…

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relationship fix

The Key to Healthy Relationships: It’s All in Your Head

…s or property. They don’t regard a child as an extension of themselves, or feed off of his or her achievements. Doing so prohibits children from ever discovering who or what they could have become. This is not to say that the connection between a couple or a parent and child does not involve a special feeling of love, care, or concern. However, loving implies an enjoyment of the other person’s emergence as an individual and sensitivity to his or h…

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Six Tips to Keep Long-Term Relationships Exciting

…It means challenging our own defenses and facing our, often subconscious, fears about intimacy. Fighting for a relationship means being stubborn about not getting in our own way of staying close to someone else. Here are six tips that I have found to help couples stand the test of time. 1) Make Sure to Have Joyful Time Together The ability to laugh with one another is a true sign of vitality in a relationship. It’s important to be able to share i…

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Are You the Pursuer or the Distancer in Your Relationship?

…eate in our romantic relationships and in our degree of tolerance for true intimacy. In the process of growing up, we develop fears and defenses that keep us at a simultaneously frustrating, yet safe-feeling, distance from our partner. That is often why even when things shift, and the distancer starts to seek closeness, the pursuer will often recoil, and the roles will seem to shift. For example, for years a man I worked with in therapy struggled…

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Forgiveness: The Secret to a Healthy Relationship

…nner critic and act in ways that lead us toward our goals. Be aware of any fears of intimacy – If we find ourselves all of a sudden picking apart our partner or stubbornly unwilling to forgive a character flaw that was there from the beginning, we may want to consider that our own fears of intimacy are driving us to push our partner away. Most of us can easily see certain fears or hesitancies around closeness in our partner, but we often fail to r…

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How to Build Healthy Relationships

Ever wish you could laugh and talk more easily with others? When you try to share your feelings and get closer to someone, what happens? Do you freeze and say nothing? Does too much spill out? Do you have a short, awkward conversation? Do you end up feeling bad about yourself? People learn early in childhood whether to expect to feel safe or unsafe opening up to others in life. If you felt unseen, rejected, or criticized growing up, you may strug…

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expecting too much in relationship

Are You Expecting Too Much from Your Partner?

These 7 ways we over-rely on our partner can seriously hurt our relationship. When a couple comes to therapy, they tend to each arrive with a laundry list of complaints about the other. While neither person may claim to be perfect themselves, they find it much easier to talk about their partner. “She never picks up after herself.” “He hardly notices when I’m feeling down.” “She cares more about seeing her friends than spending time with me and th…

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Why Do We Keep Ending Up in the Same Kinds of Relationships? The Answer Lies in Our Attachment Styles

…quently looking to their partner to rescue or complete them. Adults with a fearful avoidant attachment style in their romantic relationships live in an ambivalent state, afraid of being too close to others but also afraid of being too distant. They are trapped in a defensive reaction to love: they go toward love, but when they get close to someone, they pull away for fear that they will be hurt. They may cling to their partner when they feel rejec…

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Are We Still Condemning Women for Their Sexuality?

…e tend to mimic these tendencies when we become mothers ourselves. Society feeds into this notion, indicating to women that now that they are a mother, it’s no longer appropriate to be sexual. Being free is deemed irresponsible, and being spontaneous is shunned as immature. The same can be said of work. Being overly focused on a career or parenthood disconnects a woman from her sexuality, allowing her life to get out of balance in a way that fails…

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Just Be Kind: The Only Relationship Advice You’ll Ever Need

…at makes up what we refer to as romantic love. Many of us have unconscious fears around intimacy that cause us to want to keep our partner at a certain emotional distance. We resist getting too close in many, often unconscious, ways in order to maintain old, familiar defenses that may keep us feeling safe and self-protected but that actually limit us in our lives. When we are in this mode, being kind to our partner is experienced as a threat to ou…

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