Barriers to Relationship Intimacy ...by Jan Maizler

1. Insufficient shared information creates a relationship vacuum and promotes guessing, projection, and suspicion.

Healthy relationship choices are the outcome of thorough relationship evaluations, which are based on the receipt of thorough, accurate information. You must fully know the data that you aim to process.

It is a psychological maxim that data and information hook a person's logic, provides structure, support healthier ego functioning, adaptation, and planning. Conversely, no data isolates you and throws you into an intra-personal world full of hunches, suspicion, and inner mental meandering.
The early experiments of people put in isolation or sensory deprivation chambers caused them to regress, hallucinate, and grow psychotic.

These extreme examples indicate that true interpersonality and the facts attached to it, support reality testing.

What you share with your partner is a germane consideration as well. You best criterion for what is asked and what is answered is that information should be relevant and helpful, but never hurtful and damaging. As an experienced relationship choice maker you soon learn to know what is necessary and essential and what is more than you or your partner need to know.


2. Incomplete pre-relationship work creates a flood of unfinished business.


Nothing complicates a new relationship more than the unfinished business of an individual. As discussed elsewhere in this book, the three major elements that a person needs to finish (in a work-in-progress sense) are:


* a sense of completeness;
* fulfillment of potential;
* ability to take care of oneself.


All of these features are your pre-relationship work. This means that these three areas should be basically taken care of in large measure before entering a relationship.

The personal unhappiness that stems from relative incompletion of these three spheres will cause significant disturbance and will slowly poison an unfolding relationship.
A healthy relationship is not composed of two halves, but rather two wholes.

3. Fear of closeness creates distance and isolation.

The fear of closeness and intimacy has reached epidemic proportions in relationships. Why would someone be so afraid of becoming close to another person? The answer would reveal that the sufferer must be believe that closeness and intimacy must be dangerous and threatening to their well-being. A possible origin of this fear might be that the person may have suffered a traumatic loss of a loved one or someone's love. Alternatively, the person may have witnessed their parents fighting and quarreling so often that they have concluded and believe that closeness is dangerous. While it is understandable that such a conclusion is reached, it is also premature and prejudicial: all relationships are not dangerous.


Fear of closeness is a phobia-driven illness, and its cure lies in progressive attempts to safely and methodically get closer to another person who is capable of doing the same. No relationship can survive in a healthy fashion when the fear of closeness exists in any measure.
Pursuing and attaining closeness with a loved one should proceed while facing the inevitable fact that you will ultimately lose them. It is the reality of impermanence that makes the pursuit and attainment of intimacy and closeness even more meaningful, worthwhile, and necessary.