Please Stow Your Baggage Away--Permanently

Not long ago I was at the grocery store picking up a few odds and ends. It was one of those hurried I’ve-got-to-get-this-done-right-now-no-matter-what kind of trips to the grocery store because I was providing end-of-life care for my dad, and I had to get back to him as quickly as possible.

Making my way to the check out lane, I saw a friend…and I immediately ducked into a different aisle so I didn’t have to see her (I told myself it was because I was in a hurry, and maybe that was partially true…but I think in reality I didn’t want her to see me in my disheveled state).

Of course she saw me (isn’t that the way it always works?!).

She approached me and before I even had a chance to say hi she said, “Oh my God, Kelly. What. Is. Going. On? You look terrible. Talk to me, something is wrong.”

[Okay. I know I was tired, but I didn’t think I looked that bad.]

Anyway, I told her that my dad was ill and didn’t have much longer to live…and she didn’t buy it. She knew me well enough to know that there was a whole lot more going on than I was telling her.

So she pushed further (like good friends do) and said, “Look, I don’t know what’s going on. But I’m telling you this right now: This is the kind of stress that will bring your cancer back. You either find a way to deal with it, or you won’t live to see your grandbabies.”

I can’t write here what my immediate thoughts were because the thoughts included some very sailor-like language.

But I let her words soak in for a few seconds.

And she was right. My dad’s illness was just the tip of the iceberg. I was dealing with a lot of emotional baggage. A lot.

Trapped emotions—baggage—are emotionally charged events from the past that still haunt you. And, just like trying to schlep a too-heavy bag through the airport weighs you down and slows you down, so do these trapped emotions.

Trapped emotions create lots of problems.

Big

Huge

Problems

Intimacy: Is Your Past Holding You Hostage?

What's keeping you so tied up that you can't be intimate?

Did you know that the fear of intimacy or being rejected by another person is the 7^th most common fear people experience?

Yep—fear of being jilted hurt by a jerk creep is only trumped by being afraid of super creepy things.

Does she look a lot like your ex-girlfriend?

Like snakes.

Yes, you used to date him.

Or spiders.

Understandably, some of you have probably dated your fair share of snakes and spiders, so you have every reason to lump your fear of intimacy right up there with fear of creepy-crawling things and things that go bump in the night (another top-7 common fear).

The problem is, these fears can cause a lot of damage because they set up barriers to ever becoming fully intimate—fully self-disclosing and trustful—with another person.

Fear of intimacy is often the result of a lot of interacting factors. It can be the result of having parents who were not affectionate or tender and warm. It can result from friendships that went wrong or being the victim of bullies.  And it can even result from being burned by someone you once had feelings for.

But it doesn’t have to be permanent. 

The first step of overcoming this fear is to acknowledge that life is full of risks—and relationship life is no different! It’s just that relationships are tougher because we have to put ourselves out there so much, making us feel even more vulnerable.

So, how do you start over?

What's Your Intimacy Phobia Score?

“Our fear of intimacy…inspires ingenious ways of avoiding it.”

Intimacy requires that we unmask ourselves and become vulnerable and risk rejection. Because of this, many people fear intimacy.

Do you find that you’re afraid to establish and maintain close relationships with other people, or that you put up walls that prevent people from getting too emotionally close to you?

Have you ever found yourself having many friendships—but avoiding one close personal relationship with someone?

Do you ever become overly involved in work or use work as an excuse not to hang out with others? Have you ever thought to yourself, “Wow, it’s been ____ days and other than work, I haven’t really had any contact with anyone.”?

If you answer yes to more than two of these, then you may have a fear of intimacy.

But what exactly is it that people are afraid of? Fear of intimacy comes in many forms and can manifest itself in any of the following ways:

Are You Capable of Intimacy? Take Your Intimacy Quiz!

Although intimacy is thought to be an inborn, innate drive and that all of us need intimacy in order to survive, some people are just better at giving and receiving intimacy than others are.

This is because, just as with your love map, your intimacy map develops as a result of your relational life experiences. In other words, who you are as a relational, intimate person is the result of every relationship you’ve ever had in your life—from your parents, to your friends in grade school, to your high school peers and buddies, to your college friends, to every positive and negative hook up or sexual relationship you’ve ever had.

Your intimacy map has been created over time. This is why intimacy doesn’t always come easily to everyone—and why it’s essential that your love partner knows as much about your relational background as you are comfortable sharing.

In fact, most of the time establishing and maintaining a close personal relationship with another person requires a lot of hard work. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that if you find yourself having to work at your relationship, it doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong or that you’ve chosen the wrong partner.

If you desire someone to openly, honestly, and completely share with you, you have to be willing to be open and honest about your needs and desires. This is the only way the seeds of intimacy will have a chance to flourish and thrive!

Do you get it?

When You Say "Intimacy," I Think of.....Create Your Intimacy Pie

What does it mean to have an “intimate” relationship? And what do you think the one factor is that seems to deepen your intimacy experiences with your partner more than anything else? Can you pinpoint intimacy components in your relationship? Do you know if your intimacy map is similar to your love partner’s?  

Because intimacy is so vital to the health and longevity of relationships, researchers have been studying what “intimacy” is for years. Of course, everyone’s definitions of intimacy are different, because just like your love map and sex script, your intimacy map is built over time…as your experiences change, so does your meaning of intimacy.

Are you ready to build your intimacy map? Put the Snuggie on, crank up your Pandora, and settle in…this is a lengthy one, but oh so very well worth the effort you put into it!  

Couple Challenge: Your Intimacy Needs

All forms of intimacy develop over time, and keeping that intimacy once it’s developed requires nurturing attention to the relationship. Print this off and fill in your answers to the questions, have your partner do the same.

Get together in a quiet setting and talk about your answers together.

When we are emotionally close, I feel _____________________________.

I would describe our intellectual closeness as ___________________________.

As far as intimacy in our relationship is concerned, I am most satisfied when ________________________________________________________.

I am least comfortable about our relationship when ______________
_______________________________________________________.

When you express your emotions and feelings, it makes me __________

______________________________________________________________.

When you express physical closeness, it makes me _______________
____________________________________________________________.

Spiritual closeness is ______________________________________________.

When I experience intimacy with you, I feel ____________________________.

When I am with you, my individuality is _________________________________.

Some people resist intimacy. This makes me think _____________________
__________________________________________________________________.

When I reveal my innermost thoughts, feelings, emotions, and fears to you, I expect __________________________________________________.

When you reveal your innermost thoughts, feelings, emotions, and fears to me, it makes me __________________________________________________.

Intimately relating with you might carry a risk of rejection. The possibility of being rejected by you makes me feel ________________________________.

In general, I am trusting of others. This makes me ______________________.

In general, I am not trusting of others. This makes me ____________________.

If I were to sum up the role of intimacy in my life, I would say it is

__________________________________________.

© Kelly J. Welch, Family Life Now (2^nd ed). Boston: Pearson Education.

Photo Credit: Mag3737 (flickr.com)

Everybody's Searchin' for Intimacy

We are relational creatures—we need to be with other people. Even Aristotle once observed that people who don’t want to be emotionally connected to others are either “a beast or a god.”

Yep--everybody's searchin' for intimacy. Everybody's hurtin' for intimacy.

Cover of the Rolling Stone: Intimacy

Cover of the Rolling Stone: "The Unbearable Bradness of Being"

Brad Pitt:  I know all these things are supposed to seem important to us—the car, the condo, our version of success—but if that’s the case, why is the general feeling out there reflecting more impotence and isolation and desperation and loneliness?

If you ask me, I say toss all this—we gotta find something else. Because all I know is that at this point in time, we are heading for a dead-end, a numbing of the soul, a complete atrophy of the [human] being. And I don’t want that.

Rolling Stone:  So if we’re heading toward this kind of…dead-end in society what do you think should happen?

Brad Pitt:  Hey man, I don’t have those answers yet. [My] emphasis now is on success and personal gain. I’m sitting in [success and wealth], and I’m telling you, that’s not it. I’m the guy who’s got everything. I know.

But I’m telling you, once you’ve got everything, then you’re just left with yourself. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it doesn’t help you sleep any better, and you don’t wake up any better because of it.

The Kiss Still Works

I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on.

The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that.

Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.

Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private.

Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily?

The young woman asks, “Will my mouth always be like this?”

“Yes,” I say, “it will. It’s because the nerve was cut.”

She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. “I like it,” he says. “It’s kind of cute.”

Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.

(Source: Selzer, 1978).

What is it that strikes you most about this story? 


Photo Credit: Bob.Fornal (flickr.com)

Author! Author!

Each of us "loves" in certain established ways because past experiences influence present experiences. Who are the authors of your love map?

A critical step in creating a long-lasting, satisfying marriage is exploring the path that guided the development of your love behaviors and patterns. 

Create an instant snapshot of your family's love and relationship history by creating a genogram:

"Please pass the ham."

As recipes and cooking may be passed down from generation to generation, so too are the origins of our capacity to love and to be loved. These family influences ultimately shape our unique, personal love maps.

There is a story that surfaced several years ago about a newly married couple. It makes a strong point concerning the development of love behaviors and interaction patterns within families.

In preparation for their first big dinner with both sets of parents and grandparents, the new husband was puzzled as he watched his bride put the ham in the oven. He inquired of her, “Honey, why did you cut the ham in half and then put it in the pan?”

She replied, “Oh, I don’t know…I suppose because that’s how Mom always did it. It must help it cook faster or something.”

At dinner that evening, the bride asked her mother, “Mom, why do you cut the ham in half before you bake it?”

The mother, baffled by her daughter’s question, thoughtfully replied, “I suppose it’s because that’s always how my mom did it.”  All eyes in the room turned on the bride’s grandmother for an explanation.

The grandmother, quite amused, chuckled and said, “When I was first married I didn’t have a pan large enough for the ham to fit in—so I always cut it into two halves and just kept doing it that way. I guess I just got accustomed to making ham that way!”

As this story illustrates, more often than not we don’t give much thought to our behaviors. We do them simply because that’s how we’ve become accustomed to doing them. We do them because this is what we’ve been taught, because it’s what we’ve so often observed.

So it is with much of what makes up marriage, intimate relationships, and family life—we love others and allow others to love us the way we learned from the families that raised us. We communicate the ways we were taught to. We parent the way we were parented. We argue the ways we were taught to. We manage finances the way we were taught to. We express intimacy the way we were taught to. We cope with stress and crises the way we were taught to.

Experience by experience, your love map is written. And this becomes a part of who you are. It becomes your set of expectations, it becomes your marriage script.

Now, all is fine and dandy if we marry someone who was raised exactly like us. But this isn’t reality, is it?

Are there relationship patterns and behaviors that you want to repeat in your own interpersonal relationships? Are there things you wish to change?

"I thought you had the map?"

No two people in a relationship experience or express their love in exactly the same ways. And to complicate things even more, you can love the same person in different ways at different times. This is because as you grow from infancy through old age, your concept of "love" is under construction, continuously developing over time. Ultimately, you develop your own, unique "definition" of love.

Experience after experience—from the parent-child relationship, to friendships, to boyfriends and girlfriends (and ex's), to sexual hookups, to marriages that work and marriages that don't/didn't—you create a love map, or a playbook. This map is then internalized and made a part of you.   

Your love map is kind of like a mental blueprint. It's your one-of-a-kind image of what love is and isn't. Whether you realize it or not, you use this love map to help you determine who you want to date or to marry. You use it when you begin to question if you're "in love" with someone.

And just as important, you use the love map to determine if a relationship is over, because if elements in your love map are violated (such as trust or respect) or not fulfilled (like humor or sex), you eventually “fall out” of love.  

Because your love map is an integral part of who you are, it almost always directs each and every aspect of your intimate relationships. Your love map also drives the motives behind your relationship patterns and interactions.

For example, a wife could certainly do something for her husband, she can do an unexpected act of kindness like making a cup of coffee for him in the morning—but what if her love map is written in such a way that if she gives something to her partner, she expects something in return?  And what if he doesn’t know what’s written on her love map, that she expects something back?

The first important step in divorce-proofing a marriage is to identify your love map, and to have an understanding of your partner’s love map.    

Big. Huge. Important.

Are you ready to take your marriage to a level that few couples experience?

Create a love list:  Take a few minutes to jot down 10 key attributes that you consider central for a committed love relationship to thrive (such as, trust, respect, humor, support, sex, etc). 

Rank the order of importance of your chosen attributes, with 1 being the most important.

How does your list compare to your partner's?  Do each of you share identical lists with identical rankings? In what ways does this help you to better understand your partner?

"I have a weakness for, adore, worship, am devoted to, have a passion for, am fond of you!"

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment. (Matthew 22:37-38)

Wife. Mom. Daughter. Sister. Aunt. Friend. Teacher. Mentor. Author. Volunteer.  Like you, I have a number of roles that I carry out every day, and each role comes with expectations that almost always make it difficult (impossible?) to balance everything, to get everything done that really has to be done. Sometimes the Lord gets pushed to the end of my day...and, because of my fatigue and stress from the day's events, He sometimes gets the "worst" of me. He gets Martha--anxious, worried, harried, irritated, feverishly serving, aggravated Martha (Luke 10:38-42).     

After having just finished a couple of two huge projects, I was excited that I had some down time, and I began to ask the Lord what I should do next (I know, I know. Sit, Martha, sit).  Almost immediately, the above scripture came to mind. I read and re-read and re-read Jesus' greatest commandment to me--to love God with absolutely everything I am, with everything I have. My calling is to love God. Love Him. With everything.  All.  Holding nothing back. 

At first I thought the scripture was laid on my heart because I had been so busy.  Because of my neglect.  Because of too many Martha moments.  But as I allowed myself to settle in, to be quiet, to be still, I realized the Lord wanted me to focus on loving Him. To focus on what it means to love--God, my husband, my children, my family, my friends, my students--the way He calls me to love. The way He loves.     

Everything That Comes with It

I admit it---I was the little girl who used to create Barbie doll wedding dresses out of toilet paper.  I was the little girl who pinned a pillow case "wedding veil" to her pony tail, and I was the little girl who, when asked by her ice skating instructor what she wanted to practice, said, "Let's practice walking down the aisle!"  

Falling in love.  Marriage.  Babies.  I had my entire life planned out by the time I was six years old.  Is it any wonder I had to have the wedding of the century (second only to Princess Diana, of course)?  My winter wedding day, complete with snow, was spectacular.  Perfect.  Flawless.  I was locked arm in arm with my dad, and the wedding planner was making sure my gown would make its magnificent statement (actually, in 1981 we didn't have wedding planners....but I'm fairly certain he would have been a wedding planner if there were such a thing back then).

The music was just about to cue my entrance, and   <about here is where we would insert the sound effects of a needle screeching across a record>.

It.  Happened.