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Fear of Intimacy
by Robert W. Firestone, Joyce Catlett
Product Group: Book
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA) (1999-11-15)
ISBN: 1557986053
EAN: 9781557986054
Dewy Decimal #: 158.2
Hardcover: 358 pages
Edition: 1
SKU: 07110471
Condition: New New
Comments: Hardcover. New book. Cover, text and dustjacket all pristine. Book appears never read. Gift quality beautiful book.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Glendon Association, Santa Barbara, CA. Shows how therapists can help couples identify and overcome the messages of the internal 'voice' that foster distortions of the self and loved ones. Related issues such as interpersonal ethics and the role of sterotyping are also discussed.
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Customer Reviews
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Substantive and useful; not pop-psychology
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-10-27
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Too many books on this topic are pop-psychology -- written to be easily consumed without much thought and with promises of quick results. This book is more thorough, but not quite academic, in exploring this issue, its causes and its remedies. It digs beneath the surface of the issues and doesn't gloss over them in breezy, Oprah-style soundbites.
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Live-changing
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-03-08
6 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
If you've ever had someone tell you, "I don't know what you're thinking," and "You never tell me anything," this book is for you. I never knew I was the withholding type (as described by Firestone) but this book hit the nail on the head.
I'm not sure exactly what to do with the information. It seems you may need some pretty specific help with a therapist to undo the negative messages "stuck in your craw" but just the awareness of my problem has helped my relationship in very real ways.
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Most valuable read ever....
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-01-23
8 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
I picked up this book as a way to understand the behavior of someone close to me, and I was amazed at how much of it I could apply to myself. The book offered so much insight into people and their behaviors. I have recommended this book to many people and have even bought it as a gift. This book is written in a more clinical way, perhaps not readily consumed by the masses, but I found it to be much more insightful and "helpful" than any self-help book I've ever read. I recommend this to anyone who has an interest in human behavior.
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vulnerability not viewed as weakness
Rating  (4)
Date: 2006-07-26
8 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
Sexual, emotional or spiritual vulnerability takes considerable courage and the authors make a compelling case for the fear of intimacy. The book starts fast and is very dense but digestable. The authors lighten up on the content about midway into the section on psychodynamics of relationships and the strong theme of the opening chapters seem to fade into generalities. I have often recommended the book to clients based solely on the value of the first few chapters.
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textbook, not for lay persons, some topics relevant to Deida
Rating (4)
Date: 2005-04-20
62 out of 69 customers found this reveiw helpful
Summary - This is a clinical psych textbook. It is designed to introduce new psychotherapists to the array of pathology they will encounter in field practice in couples and relationship counseling. For a general understanding of how, in our pursuit of intimacy, we get sidetracked and sabotaged by our unconscious, for non-therapists, books on Transactional Analysis (TA) and its more mature offshoot, Redecision Therapy are a better bet. This book touches and adds to issues raised by David Deida, who has contributed the most evolved books on relationship as a means of spiritual growth at this time.
Fear of Intimacy
Robert Firestone & Joyce Catlett (both in So. Cal)
David Deida says, "We long for the same fullness of bliss that we never seem to have time to offer. We complain about our lives and blame others, until we realize that right now, we are making love-or we are refusing-right now."
Fear of Intimacy offers several insights that can be used as tools to move towards intimacy with the universe as Deida proposes.
The book has several headlines. One is "our defenses are the illness." The book describes how defenses are formed. Our primary defense [are formed] at a time when the child would be in great danger if he or she was abandoned by the parent. ...[The child] is afraid that if they react with emotional integrity, if they really cry out, if they really ask, if they really scream for help, that it won't come, and they will be in the same panicky, frightened state [forever]" (36). Rather then be frightened forever, the child is forced to go away from the pain of 3D reality and into a fantasy world of some kind. They go into a fiction, into a delusion, hug a teddy bear or puppy, numb out, obsess on substances, etc. "In this [way] people's defenses formed under painful circumstances, become the core of their neurosis..." (35). This is the clearest language I've seen for how unresolved traumas are "put into us" as kids.
The idea of "defenses are our illness" stimulated me to check to see if defendedness could be measured by muscle testing. Sure enuf, it can. As Spirit sees it, Defendedness appears to be on a scale of 1000. John-Roger (msia.org) is the least defended person I know and perhaps one of the least defended persons ever. He measures at zero by my checking. It's possible to measure your own Defendedness.
The book excels on "Why do we defend?" Then it shows how defenses impact relationships. Defenses play into relationships this way, "...people tend to select partners who are like people in their own early lives [because] their defenses are appropriate [to them]"(39) If wife is like birth mother, then "...it leaves a person's defense system intact" (39). Hence the phenomena of the man who marries a woman then complains, "You're just like my mother!" The authors propose that in the unexamined areas of our life, "we "feel relaxed [and familiar] when our defenses are appropriate" (69). People who carry a primarily negative self-image from childhood are a particular focus of the book.
The book makes a nice segue to Deida when it says things like, "Distortions of self, others and the world, inherent in being defended, are introduced into new relationships... Most people end up fighting ghosts [of the past] rather than struggling with [growth:] personal gratification and self-actualization" (63). The early part of the book lays out patterns of psychological defense so that readers can find their own dysfunction and dysfunctional family pattern, if they stumble across a shoe that fits.
Readers are led early on to an insight that 99% of everyone-thruout human history-has, as a child, suffered physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect or some combination of the three. This simply goes with growing up on a planet where the sins of the parents are visited on the children. On this, the book is refreshingly frank. "The ideal conditions favoring a secure attachment [to an early care giver] rarely exist [anywhere]. All children, to varying degrees, suffer emotional pain and anxiety that necessitate the building of defenses" (65). The damaged condition of therapists and clients-that's everyone pretty much- is simply a given, not a cause for blame or for victim pride.
Moving on thru much ground the book covers, the authors say something new to me. "Once a person is damaged, he or she formulates defenses that not only preclude getting hurt again but also ward off loving responses." "...The truth is that mature love-kindness, respect, sensitivity, and affectionate treatment-is not only difficult to find but is [also] difficult to tolerate or accept [if negative self-concepts are held on to]." (310). The idea that we build defenses is old. The idea that we sabotage unconditionally loving gestures directed at us, because it would require us to give up familiar negative self-images, is not a common insight and is one that is conspicuous by its absence in my reading of classic Transactional Analysis literature
The book emphasizes how in childhood we are handed a provisional personality that integrates us into the family system. John Bradshaw used to display a hanging mobile from the ceiling in his televised workshops to show his conception of the family system, how every part has its place, is moving and affects every other part one way or another.
The books says, to the degree our provisional family personality was negative, was accepted by us, and became familiar, to that extent we tend to defend it from loving gestures that would cause us to rethink our view of ourself. The book is highly cognizant of the wisdom of family systems that if we do not review, revise, update and upgrade the personality handed to us early in our life in our family of origin, then we will tend to replicate our family dynamic in relationships, coupling, and marriage.
Much of the rest of the book works in the area where couples transition from being in love and cherishing each other; and then, transition to distance, routinized behavior, loss of passion, complacency or even fighting and violence. The books is good about tracking how couples move out of initial positive bloom of love to a dysfunctional relationships. "In spite of their stated desire for self-affirmation, people seek confirmation for their negative provisional identity, developed in the context of the [early] family" (304).
The book gives a lot of case studies. It proposes a variation of voice dialogue to unearth and expose the negative self-talk and give lots of examples of how they do this. The book embraces the topic of voice dialogue and quotes Christopher Lasch, "The distinguishing character of selfhood...is not rationality; rather, the critical awareness of man's divided nature." The book's take on unearthing negative self talk is more talk-therapy than inner-child related. See TA, Voice Dialogue or the Three Selves for the more solution-oriented approaches to conversing with your inner "parts."
Addictions and dysfunctional fantasy life, including masturbatory behavior, come in for lots of discussion. Addiction is discussed as "...a fundamental choice away from relationships" (41) `The child (and adult) unconsciously rejects real gratification and gives up goal-directed activity to hold on to the safety of a fantasy world over which he or she has complete control."
The unexamined life tends to repeat and recreate early family dynamics, good or ill. Beyond this, the authors point to two existential issues that clearly block us from the kind of intimacy Deida encourages. A radio interview Joyce Catlett gave on KPFK put a better point on this than the book does. She said that two fears block us at the deepest level. One is the fear of being separated and isolated from the ones we love [the Beloved]. The other fear is being overwhelmed and swallowed whole [merged and] losing our identity in our loved one [or the Beloved]. "...being loved challenges core psychological defenses" (311)
I've been checking this out. It does indeed seem to be the case; fear breaks down into two categories, fear of separation-isolation; and, fear of dissolution and loss of identity in merging with the Beloved. Some classical associations arise here. Separation and pain associate with darkness. Converging with ecstasy associates with light and bliss. Acknowledging and backtracking thru these two fears has clarified for me where I got off track navigating towards the undefended loving Deida encourages. These topics, more commonly found in spiritual literature, can be applied productively to couples counseling and self-examination.
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