Connection Anxiety…it’s a real thing!!

Connection anxiety is my new term meant to cover the entire emotional unavailability field, including commitment phobia and intimacy fear.

Obviously the counterpart to Separation Anxiety, it aptly describes an ever-increasing worldwide phenomena, for though there’s always been phobias and fear when it comes to true, vulnerable, hearty connection, with the increasing absorption into tech devices, we’re currently reaching an all-time disconnection high.
   
When sex and love meet

Connection anxiety gets brilliantly amplified when it comes to connecting love with sex. It’s partly why that early-meeting sexual rush fades when love enters the picture. Partly why passion dissolves even in high-functioning long-term relationship. Of course, this dissipating passion business is complicated, so this is only one element, however, it’s a biggie.

How come?

Connection anxiety is linked to a profound fear of surrender and all the angst that comes with that pesky notion.

Surrender, we suppose, brings us to the brink of complete devastation:

• The more we surrender, more we’re threatened with pain of loss.

• The more we surrender, the more personal history jumps up to bite us in the butt.

• The more we surrender, the more we risk being found out as unlovable.

• The more we surrender, the closer we get to embracing powerlessness.

When it comes to ideas of surrender, personal history joins with the prehistoric workings of our Reptilian Brain to spin us out. Back in the primitive day there was little but instinct to stand between us and complete annihilation.

Still feels that way.

Even in the concrete jungles, pastoral settings, or idling suburbs of modern times, our provocative instincts abide.

We think surrender means abandoning self; capitulation; submission; and forfeiting power. Innate and automatic self-preserving behavior patterns, meant to ensure our survival while defending self, family, and personal property kick in.

We fight and we flight.

Fear-driven inner whispers
   
When sex and love feud it’s a bad deal. Secret, anxious voices gnaw at us. The psyche gets dizzy, leaving us in a fear-driven whirl. There’s inner whispers, though mostly spoken in an alien language we never clearly sort out:

if I don’t know you well or care about you deeply, I can allow you to see my mess, feel my urgent desire, unravel in your hands. But when wild love upsurges too you might smell my deep, unrelenting fear, or wind your clammy fingers around my fragile heart or claim me! What if I can not return from that dissolve?

Though we’re not really on the verge of capture, the fears abide. Entrapment is just around the corner, fear mumbles. You won’t survive outcome, fear insists.

Tempted to give up!

Most of us now and again imagine the solution to be giving up and shutting down.

Really?

How would that serve?

Remember, the heart is an organ and like any other organ, the unused heart atrophies. Then we’re stuck with an ugly, shriveled up little thing. Our ability to experience compassion, empathy and real vulnerability can’t be far behind. That’s the end not just of partnership intimacy, but of all intimacy.

Seems like a bad plan.

Ask yourself:

What happens if I 100% give up on love?

What’s the gain and what’s the pain?

How would it actually look to give up?        

Alternatively, how would it look to go all in––to make a 100% commitment to love?

Commitment -- which I’m defining as intentional, focused presence -- need not be person-specific and can be practiced every day, all the time. It’s the way we approach work; friendship; cooking; listening; generosity; love.

It’s a way of walking through the world.

The real fear
       
What we fight most against is often the very thing we crave, though we seldom know that. Thought of that way, it’s easy to see how individuals in the grip of connection anxiety are actually fighting like hell against their unconscious, potent urge for connection! This connection desire is organic.

By avoiding this deep need we’re actually creating the biggest betrayal infraction of all:

Self-betrayal.