Fear Of Intimacy Is Doubly Difficult for Sexual Abuse Survivors

Everyone I know, everyone I read about, talks about having a 'fear of intimacy'. It's hardly an unusual phenomenon. Getting emotionally close to another human being is difficult, in the best of circumstances. Each person brings to a relationship their own 'emotional baggage' -- familial upbringing, cultural assumptions and expectations, personal hopes and longings, media images of 'what a good relationship looks like', body-type preferences, sexual and financial desires, experiences with past relationships, good or bad, and a whole host of other life challenges. To say that it's difficult, 'in the best of all possible worlds', to find a compatible partner is to put it mildly. Even people with relatively positive life experiences have a struggle finding someone with whom they want to spend time, someone with whom they share 'chemistry', and finding someone to spend a lifetime with -- well, the chances of that happening are statistically quite rare.

But for survivors of sexual (and physical, emotional, or religious) trauma, the fear of intimacy is doubly difficult. They are not simply butting up against run-of-the-mill fears, of 'losing oneself' in an intimate relationship, but of being able to trust another human being not to abuse them in the same [or a similar] way they were abused as children. As children, they were molested and/or raped by 'caregivers' who 'said' they loved them, even as the 'caregivers' violated every shred of the child's trust. After a childhood of being told that love was being 'disciplined' by being beaten senseless ["I wouldn't beat you if I didn't love you"], or that love was submitting to the sexual predation of mentally diseased adults, or that love was being the object of another's violent outbursts or unreasonable religious demands, one's 'sense' of 'love' has been rather corrupted. And it becomes necessary as an adult, through positive mental health intervention, to re-learn what love can be whole-cloth, from the ground up.

And that lack of trust tends to be projected upon an individual who most looks like the child's abuser. If you were a boy child and your father molested you, you tend to distrust most men and be fearful of male supervisors; or if your mother molested you, you tend to distrust women generally and be fearful of female authority figures. The same is true for girls (distrust of men if your father molested you, fear of other women if your mother did the sexual abuse). If both your parents engaged in the sexual abuse or if the parent who abused you took pleasure in gender cross-dressing when they engaged in the sexual molestation, your struggle to trust much of anyone, of either gender, is greatly compromised. It might take a lifetime of searching, going through one relationship after another -- via serial promiscuity or serial monogamy -- before finding someone who is compatible. Even then, with the best of mental health intervention (assuming the survivor has access to such assistance, which especially for boys is rare), finding a compatible partner with whom one has 'positive chemistry' and whom one can trust, is rare. Not impossible, but rare.

The sexual abuse survivor fears, with good reason, that they might 'go to their grave' never finding a partner who cares about them personally. One of the 'trauma messages' that is learned by many survivors is that their only value is in being sexual, primarily being 'sexually available' for the pleasure of someone else, or for being able to 'sexually service' their abuser. [For some sexual trauma survivors, not being in a sexual relationship, as an adult, for an extended period of time sets the stage for suicidal thoughts -- precisely because they believe their only value in the world is in 'servicing the sexual needs of others'. Not having that opportunity for a long time essentially means, by way of this dysfunctional logic, that they no longer have 'human value' in this world.] That the other person could, possibly, be concerned with the survivor's sexual pleasure or emotional care is so far from consideration as to be viewed as 'fantasyland' -- maybe desired, but utterly and completely unexpected.

Many survivors, at least until they learn better mating techniques [and the underlying emotional dynamics], tend to be attracted to people who are 'similar' to their abusers (even if they say to themselves that they are looking for someone quite different from their abuser), simply because that 'kind of person' is familiar to them. It's not that people want to be abused again (for most victims, the last thing they consciously want is a reenactment of their trauma), rather that they tend to be attracted to people who have characteristics that reenforce their underlying trauma dynamics. As a therapist noted to me one time: "If a survivor is in a room with 100 people and 99 of them have relatively healthy behaviors, but there is one person in the room who exhibits the underlying inappropriate behaviors that a survivor is 'familiar with', that is the person with whom the survivor will try to connect."

This pattern will continue for years until and unless the survivor has the opportunity and resources to obtain constructive mental health intervention and a provider who can lay out the underlying dynamics. Only by showing the survivor how he is reenacting the trauma and point out a more effective approach to finding a healthy relationship will anything begin to change. As was pointed out to me in the course of my own recovery "the best way to find a suitable partner is to be the kind of person you are seeking." It was only by engaging in a lifetime of really difficult mental health recovery that I finally gained sufficient mental health to be able to 'attract' a relatively healthy intimate partner/friend into my life. And, indeed, I have found someone with whom I now have a long-term relationship, but it took 38 years of 'dating'. [This is not to fail to acknowledge some delightful short-term relationships -- and some resultant long-term friendships -- with women in the interim, but to note that this is the first time anyone has been willing to 'invest' in a mutual long-term emotionally caring and sexually pleasurable interaction with this survivor.]

For so very long, it was as though there was an infinitely strong plexiglas wall between myself and other people. I could 'see' other people engaging in what appeared to be emotionally and sexually caring relationships, but my access to those kinds of interactions was impossible. It was as though that was available to other people, but surely not to me. When I would discuss such a possibility with female partners, their behavioral reaction (if not their actual words) was "That's a really funny joke; do you have any more humor like that?" It was extraordinarily painful to be rejected for a long-term invested relationship time-after-time, even when I felt deeply loving toward the women. Finally, a couple of years ago, I met someone who, due to their own trauma recovery and positive relational intervention, was seeking someone like me.

It has taken a 'a lifetime' [I'm now 59] to find someone with whom I'm compatible, but I know now, personally, that it is possible. And I extend that 'acknowledgement of possibility' to other survivors of profound sexual trauma. I'm not talking about perfection (what would that even look or be like?) nor am I saying there are any guarantees of it's longevity; I'm talking about hard relationship work that has the chance to lead to a positive relationship outcome. At least now I have an 'envelope' in which to generate such a mutually caring - and trusting - relationship. I'm finally on the other side of that plexiglas wall.