People naturally seek intimacy with others. It helps to feel connected and form meaningful relationships. But some people fear intimacy and push others away. They keep people and relationships at a distance. Maintaining surface-level relationships helps you feel like you’re in control of your life. But what you’re terrified to confront is your fear of intimacy.
Intimacy issues can stem from a variety of fears and traumas. But fearing intimacy isn’t a life sentence to being alone, as long as you’re willing to confront and overcome your fears.
What is a Fear of Intimacy?
A fear of intimacy is when you’re afraid to share a close relationship with another person. You have walls around your heart that prevent you from forming meaningful and lasting bonds. This barrier restricts you from being vulnerable and emotionally close to someone else.
Pushing people away isn’t always a conscious decision. If you fear intimacy, you likely want to feel understood and have lasting bonds with others. Your fear is rooted deep within you and is a way to protect yourself.
Your fear may cause you to realize you’ve sabotaged your previous relationships. Keeping people at arm’s length means they can’t reject you. The safety is in not trying, rather than the possibility of rejection.
Intimacy disorders prevent you from forming long-term, meaningful relationships with others. While your defense mechanism of pushing people away may seem protective, it hurts you more in the long run. You feel like you can’t fully be yourself around others or feel close to someone.
Intimacy looks different for every person. If you fear intimacy, you may long for one or more types of intimacy.
The 5 types of intimacy are:
- Physical. Physical intimacy is about holding hands, hugging, and providing caring touch to another person.
- Emotional. The ability to be fully yourself without fear of rejection.
- Intellectual. The ability to connect about and discuss academic topics, like books, political opinions, or social views, without fear.
- Spiritual. Sometimes religious, but often the willingness and openness to share special, unique, and meaningful moments with another person.
- Experiential. The willingness to try new and exciting things with another person.
Past experiences inform current relationships. If you’ve felt abandoned, rejected, or abused in the past, these fears seep into your life and make you question if you can achieve successful relationships.
Common Signs of Intimacy Issues
Intimacy issues aren’t the same for everyone, and they don’t just affect people in relationships. You can also struggle to get close to friends or family. If you fear intimacy, you likely avoid group or relationship-building activities with others.
Signs you may fear intimacy include:
- Debilitating trust issues
- Lack of self-confidence
- Dating many people in a short amount of time
- Avoiding physical or sexual contact
- Lack of communication in your relationship
- Difficulty expressing your feelings
- Sabotaging relationships
- A history of short relationships or no relationships
- Perfectionism or obsession with how people view you
If these things sound familiar, you may fear intimacy. But where did this fear originate? Trauma may be the answer.
What Causes Intimacy Issues or a Fear of Intimacy?
You likely fear intimacy because you’re a survivor of trauma.
Trauma impacts everyone differently. Some people can recover quicker if they have the tools to help them do so. For others, the symptoms and repercussions of the traumatic circumstances stick with them. These memories create invisible cracks in your mental foundation.
Trauma comes in many forms and types. What one person considers a pivotal and life-changing event may not feel that way to others.
Examples of trauma include:
- Verbal and physical abuse
- Emotional neglect
- Lack of parental guidance
- Conflicts with past relationships
- Bullying or teasing
Having trauma in your past doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll fear intimacy. But it’s a pervasive underlying factor for many people with this fear.
Fear of intimacy can be caused by:
- Fear of Rejection. Approaching intimacy with someone new means stepping into the unknown. You’re scared of getting hurt, so you refuse to take the first steps.
- Fear of Abandonment. Losing a parent or loved one at a young age can lead to abandonment issues. You fear someone will leave if you get too close, so you avoid vulnerability entirely.
- Depression and Anxiety. Mental health issues can make you fear judgment from others or manifest in social anxiety. It can keep you from starting new relationships or finding connections with others.
- Low Self-Esteem. When you overly criticize your flaws, it tends to push other people away. Some people feel they must reach high standards before they can be loved. This “perfect” standard is never actually achievable. It only furthers self-loathing.
- Lack of Communication. When you’re scared to get close to someone, you may struggle to communicate your needs. You don’t know how to express your insecurities or feelings, so you can come off as aloof or distant. The other person feels pushed away.
- Childhood Trauma. Various traumas in childhood can lead to a fear of intimacy. Experiencing the death of a parent, neglect, divorce, or sexual, physical, or emotional abuse can cause intimacy issues. If negative behavior was exhibited to you at an impressionable age, it’s difficult to rewire that teaching. You may withdraw from others as a defense mechanism against the trauma.
How Is Fear of Intimacy Related to Sex Addiction?
Not everyone who experiences trauma develops a fear of intimacy. Likewise, not everyone who fears intimacy develops an addiction. But some people do. Isolation doesn’t feel good. Your brain wants to make you feel better by seeking out sources of dopamine. There are many sources of dopamine, but the most readily accessible one is sexual pleasure.
You deepen a unique neural pathway as you continue to turn to sexual pleasure to feel better. This pathway links suffering, stress, and apathy to sex and intimacy. Using sex or watching porn as a coping mechanism becomes an addiction.
Sex addiction and porn addiction are unique because they’re intimacy disorders. You use sexual outlets to rely on yourself and keep others at bay. At the same time, it’s also a way to feel better when you’re alone. The two activities — sexual pleasure and loneliness — become linked.
As you isolate yourself, your behaviors become more problematic. Watching porn or engaging in sexual activity may start as a habit, but soon turns into an uncontrollable compulsion. It can lead to many other issues down the road with relationships and in your life, in general.
Overcoming a Fear of Intimacy
Overcoming your fear isn’t easy. To do so, you need to make mindful choices about your behaviors in daily life. As you continue to make choices that open you up, you’ll start to overcome your fear.
Strategies to overcome fear of intimacy include:
- Start on Small Things. Do little things you would usually avoid doing with other people. Try telling them about your feelings or sharing a special moment. Starting with small tasks means the bigger things will become easier with time and experience.
- Confront Your Fear. While it will be uncomfortable at first, start expressing your feelings more. It could be just to yourself at first, then to a partner or therapist later. Accept the uncertainty. It is inevitable, but it doesn’t control you. Speaking and naming what you’re afraid of can take the power away from it and give you the power of choice back.
- Revisit Your Past. Your primary caregivers modeled what relationships looked like to you. Think back to your relationships with them. Try to understand what types of relationships they modeled to you. Consider whether you’ve recreated negative relationships in your adult life as a result.
- Seek Help. Fearing intimacy means it isn’t easy for you to trust others. Still, working one-on-one with a mental health professional can help you get on the fast track to overcoming your fear. To truly heal, you need to address the root cause of your fear and any behaviors that result from it.
- Value Yourself. Give yourself time to process. It’s emotionally exhausting to recognize you’re experiencing an intimacy disorder, work through past trauma, and look at your relationships with a new perspective. Have compassion for yourself and work on cultivating self-love.
Treatment for Intimacy Issues at Begin Again Institute
Overcoming a fear of intimacy is possible. With professional intimacy disorder treatment, you can work through the traumas of your past and develop healthy relationships with yourself and others.
At Begin Again Institute, we help people with intimacy disorders and sex addictions. During our 14-Day Men’s Intensive, you can be around others who understand what you’re going through. Experiencing genuine empathy with them means you’ll feel heard and understood, which opens the door to your healing.
Contact us today if you’re ready to overcome your fear of intimacy.
Like many people, Ryan walked many paths before becoming a therapist. He wrote for a music magazine, worked as head-roaster for a coffee company, made live and recorded music, and worked in libraries. But it wasn’t until he discovered his own mental health struggles that he found his true calling. Through trauma work and psychotherapy he came to understand that many dysfunctions are deeply embedded in our culture, and that long term healing requires courage, resilience, and a supportive community.
