Remembering is good if you don't let it be the fear of you.

Remembering is good if you don't let it be the fear of you. -Erykah Badu

One of the reasons I'm doing this is to understand, process, and (hopefully) move forward with my life from all of the ish that I've been through. Glaring is the only word I can think of to describe how my habits are showing through in my relationships with others. 

Since I've been going to counseling (and group for my eating disorders), my issues with my lack of a proper amount of self-esteem (which feeds my codependency and fear of intimacy) has been so obvious to me. A recent failed very short-term dating relationship fell apart before it even had a chance to start due to my glaring issues with my ish.

This being said, I've started reading that Codependent No More book from Melody Beattie. But, I bought the updated version which doesn't have all of the info I need. Back to le Amazon!

It seems my codependency is related to my fear of intimacy, which I didn't realize was a problem. Wrong-o! (More on that later.) I googled this term. (Yes I said that.)

This was interesting to me...

Fear of Intimacy...

Sharing who we are is a problem for codependents because at the core of our relationship with ourselves is the feeling that we are somehow defective, unlovable and unworthy - because of our childhood emotional trauma.

I was sexually abused when I was 7 and/or 8. And/or because I don't know how long or how many times it happened. After this initial abuse, I was put in sexually compromising situations way beyond my years, at 9 or 10 with people that were supposed to be taking care of me (Never my parents, thankfully.).  So, the above makes sense to me.

As long as we are reacting unconsciously to our childhood emotional wounds and intellectual programming, we keep repeating the patterns.  We keep getting involved with unavailable people.  We keep setting ourselves up to be abandoned, betrayed and rejected.  We keep looking for love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong faces.  Is it any wonder we have a fear of intimacy?

Apparently, I LOVE unavailable men. While my dad and I have been building a pretty awesome relationship in the last six or so years, he was mainly absent in my youth. I was very resentful of him because I thought he resented me. That started my need to "win" over emotionally unavailable men. A blog that I found called baggagereclaim.co.uk is helping me understand why I am attracted to these types of men.

Codependency is a vicious form of Delayed Stress Syndrome, of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. (Codependence as Delayed Stress Syndrome)  The emotional trauma caused us to disassociate - to not be present in our own skin in a conscious way - and to rationalize and deny our emotional experience of life.  We built up a dishonest self image to try to convince ourselves that we had worth based upon some comparative external factors:  looks, success, independence (the counterdependent rebel), popularity (people pleasers), righteousness (better than others, right to their wrong), or whatever. 

I've done ALL of this one way or another in my life. Disassociation is my go-to protection mechanism. The easiest way to explain it is thinking of our primal selves and reaction to threat. Most people say "fight or flight" but the third "option" is often overlooked, which is "freeze". I'm a freezer. Ha. You don't get to choose your primal response as it is just that.

That false self image, the masks we learned to wear, is something we invested a lot of energy into convincing ourselves was the truth.  But deep inside, in our moments of insight and clarity, we knew we were hiding a shameful secret.  Often we got that toxic shame about our being confused in our memories with some behavior in our childhood that felt shameful.  It is very common for us to have a secret that involves a way in which we were abused - physically, sexually, etc. - that we go to great pains to avoid because we associate the feeling of toxic shame with that incident and think it was our fault. 

We do not want other people to see in to us, because then they will learn our shameful secret.  We have a fear of intimacy because of the false belief that our relationship with our self is based upon. 

Here's the thing about this "shameful secret" thing, I definitely identify with it. I've learned that talking about all of these things out loud helps me recognize that was has happened to me when I was a child (and teenager) were not my fault. I can't seem to get past it though. I am still afraid, in a romantic relationship, to have someone really know how these things have affected me. I have a definite fear of rejection because I am "damaged goods".

Because of the feeling that we were somehow shameful, were unworthy and unlovable, we adapted defenses to protect us.  Those defenses caused us to keep recreating the emotional dynamics of our childhood. 

My counselor says I react this way because I wasn't able to protect myself as a child, so I'm trying to set boundaries now. My boundaries are 12-foot tall cinder-block freeway walls.

Here's more:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/love-doc/200911/fear-real-intimacy