Acquaintances and friends? I have many. But if you want to get any closer, I won’t let you…
When I first heard that Gina*, a writer for The MindReset Blog, was going to be writing about intimacy disorders, I felt an immediate sense of connection. I am somebody who loathes the idea of letting anyone get “close-close” to me, and I was curious to know whether our aversions towards intimacy came from the exact same or similar sources.
As I read Gina’s article, I gathered from her writing that she was initially someone who didn’t understand her relationship with intimacy well, but now she is attempting to gain a deeper understanding of her emotions by abstaining from shallow attachments and building more meaningful connections. Kudos Gina! The MindReset community appreciates you sharing your experience and I feel connected to you by having a very similar goal as yours.
After reading Love Addiction, I was struck by the strength, vulnerability, and candidness of Gina’s writing. I was aware that humans naturally desire and thrive on social connections, but I did not achieve the level of understanding about how intimacy can evolve into an addiction until I read her piece.
While I have experienced similar emotions as those described in Kathryn’s article, such as desperation and suicidal ideation, I reflect on how my feelings were initiated by different causes and developed less intensely. I cannot say that I believe I’ve ever had a love addiction, but I likely had periods where I desired social connections more than others, especially when I felt abandoned.
From the time when I woke up in the neuro-ICU to where I am today, I experienced people and situations which made me believe in humanity and its necessity. On the other hand, there were other people and circumstances that made the walls around my mind and heart grow insidiously. Even though I was aware of how detrimental my slight behavioral shifts in response to interpersonal harm were to my spiritual, social, and psychological well-being, I felt too overwhelmed and distracted by what was happening in my daily life to fight back. In the past, letting the walls build up around me was a coping strategy I could manage; one where I figured I would be able to deal with the toxic effects on my soul later. Whether that “later” is now, I am still uncertain.
Before I wrote this response to Kathryn’s article, I decided to make a list of the reasons why I do not want to be intimate. In less than a minute, I was able to come up with 25 reasons: (Note: Some of the reasons I elaborated on further per the recommendations of the TMR editors, but most of them I did not, because I wanted this list to be as authentic as possible. The point of this list isn’t for readers to understand my thought process exactly, it’s to show where my thoughts are about engaging with intimacy right now. I hope it is clear how immediate my thoughts are about the number of barriers I perceive).
Reasons I Don’t Want To Be Intimate
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- I was bullied by someone I loved and trusted
- Guilt – I feel like a burden
- Pain – mirror neurons, people who care about me will hurt with me & you can’t hurt me if I don’t let you inside
- Complicated – My identity, my situation, my journey, my lifestyle, my mind
- Overwhelming
- Scary – my condition
- Unreliability – myself, other people (leading to disappointment)
- Fast-paced
- Impatient
- Robotic
- Emotionally Aberrant
- Don’t want to be missed by other people when I’m gone
- Other people lose themselves in my world
- Very different life goals
- Sacrifice – if you get close to me, you will need to make sacrifices for me
- High need at times
- Over-critical
- Super high standards
- Honest
- Intense
- Driven
- Torture
- Super strong, endurance
- Incredible trust issues – the classic guards of a trauma victim.
- I don’t need it.
From this brain dump, you can see a combination of environmental factors, some qualities I self-identify with, and some qualities I would require, or rather desire, of anyone who wants to get “close-close” to me. Being bullied in the past by someone I really cared about (combination of ghosting, gaslighting, mean girl behavior, etc.), feeling guilty, and experiencing pain contribute to the top three reasons why I don’t enjoy building intimate relationships.
What do I identify as intimate? It means I feel safe letting my guards down and showing you the tortured side of me. It means I am comfortable enough to beg you to let me go (die) when I’m in excruciating pain with the expectation that you understand enough about suicide to get me through an episode. It means I will count on you to understand what to do when I’m losing my identity to trauma. It means I will be okay with succumbing to my neuropathy in front of you and letting you adjust my body when I can’t move (like I will try less hard to resist neuropathy so I can rest, and I will let you take care of me by allowing actions such as repositioning me in a safer space or manner without feeling violated). It means I won’t refuse your love (this sentence may seem strange, but it was Michael Ballard who told me that I needed to let others love me if they wanted to and that rejecting others’ love is not good for me). And once I trust you emotionally, we can work on being physically intimate. While I know many people in their mid-late twenties like doing the naughty business for pleasure or satisfaction, I’m extremely difficult to “get with” in that way. If I don’t trust you with emotional intimacy, there is no way I’m going to be physically intimate with you.
I am aware of the behaviors I have developed that prevent others from entering my world. Save the boyfriends I had during my healing journey after my severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) on July 3rd, 2013, there aren’t too many people who KNOW me and what I’ve been through on a deeper level.
In the beginning of my healing journey, my identity was warped because I didn’t know myself enough for anyone else to know me. For lack of a better word, I was all around really f*cked up with so many comorbid conditions that every moment of my life was occupied with survival. For many, many days, my one and only goal was to make it to tomorrow. After a long stretch of day-to-day survival, this pattern became miserable. At some point, I stopped wanting to make it to the next. In that time frame, I spent a portion of each day convincing myself that enduring pain and struggling like no other was worth it.
A majority of the five years after my brain-injury felt like torture. Pain and trauma penetrated the fabric of my mind and wove themselves into the conscious of my everyday life. I fought with these emotions for hundreds of days and had to make quite a few sacrifices to get to the armistice I feel like we are in today. They stand at bay at all times, but I’ve dealt with them with such high frequency and for so long that I’m prepared for their attacks. The most incredible feeling is relief from pain and trauma. Imagine the most painful thing that has ever happened to you – how hard was it for you to function when you were in pain? How amazing did it feel once the pain was over? I learned to relish every moment free from pain and I am grateful that most of my days are no longer plagued by agony.
I have alluded to how difficult being a TBI survivor with chronic pain is in some of the Mental Health Motivation and Mindfulness Monday (MHMMM) videos, but the only people who actually saw how it disabled me were my past boyfriends. Otherwise, I spread venting my struggles between my brain injury support groups and my peers. I found it was tiring for others to hear about this seemingly never-ending pain, and I was even more tired of living it. While having chronic pain was a large part of my reality, I didn’t want to share it with anyone else.
I feel like pain is tricky because it is so personal and it comes from so many directions. For the purpose of this piece, I will elaborate on how a lot of my intimacy aversion is due to socially-induced pain.
I still remember the day my heart broke,💔 maybe literally, because I still sometimes feel a ghost heartache to this day. We were in my bedroom when he told me he wasn’t going to stand up for me, that he wouldn’t advocate for me on my behalf. He told me he had talked to two of his best friends and they advised him to stay out of it. (Note: Now that I have interacted with many other people, I recognize this was a more socially challenging group of friends to be involved with during my level of social development at that time. During that era of my life I hadn’t developed a personality yet (it was first recognized in August of 2016), nor did I understand sarcasm or how people bond with each other through being mean to others. He was the first person I fell in love with in my life after waking up. I loved him and my friends, but I didn’t understand how they felt comfortable putting each other down in front of and behind each other’s backs, accepting infidelity and domestic violence, and disrespecting women like they were toys.) I remember that sinking feeling when I looked out the window and my heart felt like it had been sliced by an ax. I remember I could hardly breathe, my chest hurt so bad. At that time, my life was so challenging… I was still exploring my identity, grieving my old self before brain injury, learning coping mechanisms, adapting to my disabilities, attempting to be healthy, trying to get good grades in my second year of pharmacy school, diving into my dual master degree program…but it was my social well-being that was taking the biggest hit and draining me, hurting me, the most. All I wanted was to belong and to be accepted and supported by the people I loved.
I had been begging for weeks for him to stand up to my bully. He said he would. He said that what she was doing was wrong and f*cked up. He felt bad for me, but he wouldn’t do anything. I remember one evening, he stood outside our apartment door while my bully called me profanities and threatened to sue me because I didn’t want to extend our lease for her moving convenience.
She was constantly rubbing in my face all the social things I couldn’t participate in because of school and my health. She also contacted my incoming roommate to try and convince her that I was irrational, but my incoming roommate luckily recognized her shady behavior and had the guts to stand up to her. I remember begging her to stop being so mean and I asked her, “Why would I want to live with someone who is emotionally abusing me if I don’t have to?”
I felt so messed up. I remember telling her how much it hurt my feelings that she was purposefully telling lies about me to our other friends (On a walk back early from playing Chandelier at the Kollege Klub, a person I don’t know that well told me: “Oh, I heard you and [my boyfriend at the time] f*ck like rabbits”; what? Why would she say something like that?), inviting me to events at different times on purpose (for example, there was a time when we were planning to meet at Pasqual’s with some of our other friends and she wouldn’t respond to my texts to confirm the time. When she finally did give me a time, I waited at that restaurant for one hour before she arrived with our other friends where she unapologetically said, “Ugh, don’t get mad at us because we were picking up [another friend I thought was my best friend].” She gave me an early time on purpose, chose not to communicate that she invited someone else, and made it seem like I had no right to be upset), and taking advantage of my post-TBI disabilities for her own reputation and feelings. Of course, I was blind-sided. She was the last person I expected to treat me as she did. I was still learning social behaviors, I didn’t even know people could treat each other like she treated me.
I think the part that hurt the most about that time in my life is that the two people I loved and trusted the most let me down. He was my boyfriend and she was my best friend. They both let their own prevailing emotions (his fear, her jealousy) dictate their actions, regardless of how much I was in pain. I am sad I wasn’t emotionally developed enough to understand well, but I tried.
I tried to empathize with his past trauma and the methods he used to overcome his. He was encouraged to “f*ck the world” and to only care about and be loyal to a specific group, which would take care of him in return. He encouraged me to use that same strategy, but it didn’t feel right for me. He was willing to keep to himself and close off his heart to only certain people to overcome his trauma. Obviously, there was more to it, and he definitely wasn’t a bad person, at that time I just needed someone to be brave for me when I didn’t have the strength to be brave on my own.
I tried to empathize with my old best friend’s mid-life crisis because I loved her. I knew she was depressed, I knew she was generally anxious, I knew she was struggling with transitions, and I knew that she was jealous. I’m not making any assumptions about that last statement; she told me, which I think takes a lot for a person to do. I wish that at that time I understood envy more and had the emotional capacity where I could have acted upon her confession. In hindsight, when I was trying to gain a greater understanding by saying she was jealous of me out loud to another friend of ours, I realize now that I may have sounded really pompous; but at the time it just seemed matter-of-fact – hello, I was a confused, recovering, brain-dead robot.
Either way, I was in doctorate school and prestige/being called a “doctor” really mattered to her. When she didn’t get into a medical school she was very upset and I encouraged her to pursue a PhD. She also had a very unhealthy relationship with her boyfriend at that time (I can’t even share what sort of difficult situations I was put into when having to support her through some of their episodes; I think it would have been hard for an average person without brain injury-induced social disabilities to navigate) and she was jealous of how well my boyfriend and I got along. It probably was very painful for her to see us spending almost every evening with each other (it was really one of the only times we could spend with each other because I was very busy with school and healing. I also had trauma-influenced insomnia and anxiety so it was super comforting to have another person sleep with me).
I believe my attempts at empathy are why I didn’t choose to purposefully return malicious behavior back. I wanted her to be accountable, but I didn’t want to hurt her because I understood pain so well. Shame was definitely one of the more difficult feelings to learn. People are so uncomfortable with this emotion, but I have found that sometimes it’s part of holding oneself responsible for their actions. There are things we should be ashamed of doing! I believe as a society we should acknowledge and accept shame, but focus the majority of our efforts on remediation. It took me some time to gather this understanding, too late for that time in my life. She painted me to be a villain in her own eyes, and I tried to keep her as a human I loved.
Honestly, I don’t really feel like re-hashing emotions about how awful being disappointed by my loved ones was like, but the damage of that era still persists to this day. If you want to know what I ended up doing, I dealt with my hopeless and helpless feelings by filling my time with building new and more shallow attachments, and pretending like everything was fine. Sound like a pretty familiar strategy? Nonetheless, if there are two lessons I learned from that experience, they are: 1) include other people, especially those you call your friends; 2) stand up for someone when you know they are being wronged. Imagine if you were the one that was being pushed out of a friend group for a horrible reason; wouldn’t you wish that your friend group would be strong enough to reject harmful behaviors and foster support for everyone? You can read about the detrimental effects of “ghosting” HERE.
In my experience, being ostracized by the people I cared about was one of the worst experiences of my life – I know suicide prevention advocates don’t like to emphasize the influence of environmental triggers for suicide (I understand why, because it is usually over-emphasized and it is usually not the only cause), but I think it took the environmental trigger of being bullied to fire the gun that was holding the potential of all the other triggers.
Now in reflection, I am amazed by how sensitive I was in my formative years and how ignorant I was to how cruel we as humans can be. But isn’t that something that we all experienced when we were children? I just got to re-live it because of my retrograde amnesia. Here is an example of how my thinking changed after experiencing interpersonal hardship, which some might say is more “adult-like”: One positive take away from that awful experience was that it showed me the current reality; it showed how every person has the potential to be self-centered, heartless, and reputation-driven with no sense of accountability; including myself if I’m not careful. Harsh, right? But it makes sense. As every person has the ability to be kind, every person has the ability to be cruel. Our physical and social environments can be extremely influential, but I believe that at the end of the day, especially if you are an average privileged citizen of the United States, we have many choices in which we can exert control, sometimes more than we’d like to admit. It’s our decision to make adjustments for what we can control.
Overcoming suicidal ideation was something I felt like I had control over, but it still was definitely the most difficult trial of my life. I had to come to terms about who I was before the accident, who I associate myself with, who I wanted to be, what values I was unwilling to compromise…This experience of overcoming suicide was extremely hard to share with other people, especially my boyfriends. It was hard for me to see another person, a person who chose to get close to me, hurt because I was constantly being tormented by thoughts of escaping pain.
After I heard that forgiveness might help me relieve pain, I dedicated a lot of time towards overcoming that experiencing by practicing forgiveness. I think it did help. I do feel as though if I came across any of the individuals who hurt me in the past, I would be able to make peace. It wasn’t an easy journey for me to feel the confidence I do today in my ability to forgive. However, I know I’m putting forth an effort, I’ve practiced and assessed my own reactions to socially challenging situations, and I know that equanimity is a state I am increasingly getting better at being in. Sometimes I wonder if I’m forgiving to a fault, but overall I do think it makes my life more peaceful.
Another point worth mentioning is that I was consistently seeking respite through those hard times. I learned to find and appreciate every act of kindness.
Since a lot of the issues I was experiencing were not visible, it added another layer of difficulty to my healing process. I had the option of choosing to hide my struggles, but it also meant that if I wanted help or empathy, I would have to go out of my way to ask and I would have to rely on others to be empathic enough to believe my pain. And if people didn’t understand me, it felt akin to rejection (redirecting to this article again about how painful rejection can be). A large part of why I do what I do through The MindReset is because it bothers me that I know there are people who are still in this situation, a situation that I have since now escaped for the most part.
In those days, an offer to help with school, cleaning, making a meal, even a kind smile meant everything to me. During school, I made this “Awesome Box” to remind myself of the importance of gratitude and as an attempt to encourage other people to engage in positivity.
At this point of writing this article, I don’t really feel like elaborating more. Just writing about this subject makes me feel overly sensitive and tears open wounds to a raw state once again. While I do feel like I’ve moved past a lot of the pain I experienced in the past, I am aware of how it lingers in my present life. At times, I have no desire to be in an intimate relationship, I have no desire to explain myself, and I have no desire to be heard.
Yet, I know how important it is for me to share my story and to encourage others to tell their stories of endurance because stories are powerful. Even when we get tired of telling them, even when they fall on deaf ears, even when our hearts no longer feel like they belong to the words we speak; we must stay invigorated – because there is a version of ourselves out there in someone else of when we were in that hard place or still may be.
I say we, because on your own it is hard, and it is easier to lose faith. I say we, because we are never truly alone.
Every time I want to turn my back on the world, every time I want to give up, I think back to a promise I made on my way out of the darkness: “I promise I will find a way to take you with me. I promise that every good you’ve done for me I will return the favor two-fold.” And at the time I probably didn’t think I was going to live this long or I didn’t believe I had the tenacity to overcome the many obstacles in front of me…but apparently, I did. Apparently, I do. Apparently, I made a really difficult promise that at times I’m almost annoyed at myself for making such a difficult promise and caring so much about keeping it.
Nonetheless, my promise gives me purpose. It reminds me that small acts of support, inclusion, compassion, and kindness can do incredible good. It reminds me why I shouldn’t be selfish. It reminds me how the journey is hard, but I have the ability to overcome. It reminds me to stay focused and not worry too much about what others think of me. I know why I do what I do. I am aware I am imperfect and don’t always execute or behave in ways that I want to or am proud of. I know I am willing to put forth the effort and make adjustments towards being better and doing better. In the context of intimacy – right now it’s not my thing. I’m not looking and I’m not trying terribly hard to be too close to anyone. But when it feels right, when the timing is right, and the souls that can handle all the 25 reasons listed above come along – I’m sure the walls will come down.
*Name Changed.
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