Has this ever happened to you – you started dating, and soon when things go smooth between you two, you seem to turn cold and detached? You tend to move away from any scope of physical intimacy beyond a point! While holding hands might seem comfortable for you, you develop cold feet, tension, and anxiety when the relationship demands deeper sharing and increased physical proximity. You bring your past in front of you, procrastinate and rule out all the chances of you having a wholesome relationship with your current partner. From here, growing distant and breaking up are the only things that are inevitable until you address your physical intimacy issues and resolve them.
Fear of intimacy – What exactly does this mean?
When a person fears intimacy, they undergo ample inner struggle in developing and maintaining meaningful relationships. It is because they find it challenging to express their vulnerability. Usually, these people appear to be emotionally open and will have a few friends, but everything will stop beyond a point. Their boundaries are in excess, and that makes them aloof.
A person with intimacy issues has the desire to connect deeper with another person, but they feel intense grief and sadness for their past, which surfaces the moment they start liking someone. At times, this makes them respond in a passive-aggressive way that confuses their partner. They might completely deny making love and might limit daily contact through texts and calls.
The truth is these people suffer more than the suffering their partner undergoes. The only way out here is to delve within, address the fears and the emotional scars, and heal them. Walking into this journey is scary and complex. For this, life counseling and relationship coaches offer in-depth therapy sessions to help people with physical intimacy issues feel better. To know more about this, you can check out Ray of Solace.
Physical intimacy issues and personal confidence
There’s no denying that love and care are the two most essential abstractions in the world. When you are aware that someone loves and cares for you, it will make you feel elated. At a personal level, you will feel supported and validated as well. According to several research, people who express that they have a partner who supports them or adores them feel much more confident and secure about life than the ones who lack one.
That doesn’t mean commitment is the key to happiness only! What it means is that you could be polyamorous and have the decision to stay single all your life. But when you block the channels of love and intimacy in your life, that’s when life gets stunted, and you feel less confident. People with physical intimacy issues often feel that they have a faulty body along with other personal image issues. And this makes them fall prey to self-esteem issues which can stunt their growth in the professional sphere.
People who have reportedly worked on themselves and have healed their physical intimacy issues feel more confident and hopeful about life. They get comfortable meeting the opposite gender and walking into other avenues of life that they previously walked away from.
Causes of physical intimacy issues
There are several reasons for people to have or develop physical intimacy issues. Some of the crucial causes include:
- Watching parents or authority members of the family fight more than staying in harmony
- A series of a toxic relationship
- Feeling anxious and nervous more than usual from an early childhood
- Witnessing physical or emotional abuse or molestation at some point of time in life
How to remedy physical intimacy issues?
There’s no one template solution for physical intimacy problems. Different people are affected differently and will recover in their own time. However, once detected and realized, the person must get in touch with an expert therapist. Usually, these therapists and coaches use Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to manage the issue at hand. They start by knowing the root cause or the event that resulted in this problem. After that, they delve into each emotional block that the person has developed and move through that to resolve the problem.
Even though the treatment modality will always differ, most coaches treat their patients with intimacy issues by asking them to embrace vulnerability. Usually, these people hide the real feelings and don’t communicate when they need to, thinking that the world will consider them weak and powerless. Several authors, such as Brene Brown, say that once people take the courage to be vulnerable, they can remove the limiting beliefs inside their mind and step into a beautiful, expansive, and the positive world within that will help them create a similar world outside of them.
By taking baby steps and getting healed of physical intimacy, problems is possible. Hence, if you or anyone you know suffers from this, it is worthwhile to work on the self with the help of an expert coach.