Understanding Our Fears of Physical Intimacy

In The Inner Child Workbook, Cathryn Taylor says that many of us are still deeply affected by unmet needs from our infancy; a time when we were totally dependent on our caregivers. She points to five potential issues from infancy that we may face difficulty with as adults: 

     1.    Fear of intimacy, because it could lead to abandonment

     2.    Needing physical affection, but being afraid to receive it

     3.    The need for oral gratification (eating, drinking, smoking, etc.)

     4.    Fear of acknowledging our needs because others may not meet them

     5.    The inability to trust

It seems to me that these five areas of concern are all deeply intertwined. Most every codependent I’ve ever talked with has a fear of intimacy that is tied to a fear of abandonment. We want physical affection and we want people to meet the needs that we can’t meet for ourselves, but fear gets in the way. And behind the fear are the guilt and shame we feel over never having been good enough even for our parents to love us. As a result, we can’t seem to trust anyone to truly love us and when we can’t take the pain of it all any longer, we often turn to oral fixations to medicate away our pain: alcohol, sugary or salty foods, tobacco and drugs.

Unfortunately, we are sometimes paralyzed in our adult relationships because these areas of need weren’t met by our caregivers when we were infants. We may have had parents who didn’t even know how to hold a baby, or who felt uncomfortable feeling forced to hold a newborn and hear it cry. Some of us may have had our basic needs met, meaning we were fed, or diapered or bathed properly; but we may not have had our emotional needs or our needs for intimacy met. Maybe we were never held, or comforted beyond what was absolutely necessary. Maybe we never had lullabies sung to us or comforting words whispered into our ears.

Sadly, some of us never even had basic human needs met by our caregivers. There were those of us who, as babies, were almost never held, whose needs for affection, feeding and diapering fell on deaf ears and who then waited hours (or days) for our needs to be met. It’s no wonder then that we never developed an ability to feel safe, wanted or loved. And this explains a lot about why, as adults, we still suffer from fear of intimacy and abandonment as well as an inability to feel physically safe with or trust anyone.

The good news is that it’s never too late to change all of this. We can re-parent ourselves by working to take proper care of our own needs. This requires that we listen to the voices of the scared children who are still crying for help inside of us. It requires identifying those areas where we feel stunted and then working to free ourselves from being stuck in our fears. 

For example, maybe we have a fear of being physically touched by others. This could be the result of our having suffered from touch-depravation as children, or it could be because we were sexually abused when we were very small and unable to protect ourselves. We need to do our work to find out what the real cause of our fear of physical touch is connected to from our past. Once we understand, we can do things to move ourselves forward.

Maybe we were touch-depraved for reasons other than what we have assumed. We may have spent years viewing ourselves as an ugly, repulsive, gross and untouchable person. So this way of seeing ourselves has heightened our fears of physical touch. It may even have forced us to project our personal disgust with our physical selves onto everyone else. As a result, people have kept their distance and refused to touch us. If we do some research, however, we may discover that our parents were so physically frozen themselves that they didn’t have the ability to touch us. So the touch-depravation we suffered had nothing to do with us being physically disgusting or untouchable and everything to do with our parents own neurosis.

Understanding this can help us to stop beating ourselves up, to start seeing ourselves as touchable and can help us to get more comfortable in our own skin. This in turn can then help us to be less afraid of physical touch—especially since our fear of rejection should be greatly lessened once we stop seeing ourselves as repulsive. We can then better open-up to people we feel some level of safety with and we can give ourselves permission to gradually be vulnerable; and to ask for things we need that we can’t provide for ourselves—like the warmth of someone else’s hand holding ours.

So there’s a lot of work to be done. I highly recommend Taylor’s workbook. And no one can do the work but you, so if you’re wanting to have your needs met through being able to participate in good healthy relationships, get to work right now. I am!