How to move through the fear of intimacy with dance movement therapy
By Orit Krug | May 19th, 2020
You’re ready to learn how to move through the fear of intimacy so you can enjoy a loving, intimate relationship with your partner instead of pushing them away.
Before we get into the how, let’s talk about why you have this fear of intimacy. Being emotionally, physically, and sexually intimate with our partners requires us to be highly vulnerable. We have to let our guard down to allow ourselves to get THAT close with another person.
Take sex, for example. You are literally naked, fully exposed, and touching skin to skin as you look deep into each other’s eyes. That’s a pretty damn vulnerable thing to do with another human being.
When you’re holding onto past trauma that ended in hurt or abandonment, your body doesn’t believe it’s safe to experience intimacy. Your nervous system does whatever it takes to prevent you from getting hurt again, even if your trauma happened over 10 years ago.
Your body automatically assumes that any level of intimacy will play out exactly like the times your father rejected you when you asked for love. Or how your ex started out being sweet but ended up being emotionally abusive out of nowhere.
The first step is believing in your BODY that it’s safe to move through the fear of intimacy with your partner.
“My partner is amazing, supportive and loving. They’re NOTHING like the ones who used to hurt me in the past!” You try to tell yourself over and over again in your mind.
But your body calls bullshit on your mind, because you’re not storing the trauma in your mind. It’s trapped in your body and nervous system.
In those moments of intimacy where you get really, really close (or you’re about to), red signals go off and your nervous system instinctually pushes your partner away by reacting in fight, flight, freeze or shutdown.
That’s the old story getting triggered from deeeep inside your survival system that makes you believe that intimacy is NOT safe. There’s no amount of talking that can shift this because you can’t out-talk your hardwiring that keeps you alive and protected yourself from pain.
Dance/movement therapy releases body-stored trauma that’s currently fueling your fear of intimacy.
It’s not enough to talk to a counselor or repeat affirmations to try to release your fear of intimacy. People spend decades talking about how they want to let their guard down but stay stuck in the same negative behaviors anyway.
When you work with a dance/movement therapist, you work with an expert to help you reconnect safely to your body, so you can access your trauma and release it for good.
As you start to gently connect to your body, you inevitably stir up old trauma that’s been stored in there for ages. This causes you to feel the very same fear that comes up in moments of intimacy with your partner.
Right now, you’re wired to protect yourself against this fear by reacting in a survival response, but a dance therapist will help you safely feel this fear in your body WITHOUT it hijacking your entire system and going into overprotection mode.
Then, you learn how to get in command of your feelings and actions because you know how to literally move your body through the fear.
This is the exact tolerance your body and nervous system need when you’re about to have sex with your partner. As you’re getting closer to each other, you start to feel this fear stir up. Instead of freaking out, you’re like, “Okay, this feels a little bit scary, but I can tolerate it. I feel this fear in my body and I can move through it.”
Rewiring your nervous system from fear to love only works in a therapeutic relationship.
Yoga classes aren’t the same. DIY courses on your computer in the dark won’t cut it.
The reason why dance/movement therapy works to heal your trauma is because you’re doing the work IN a safe relationship with a professional. When your old trauma gets stirred up in the moment, we support you to do exactly what you need in order to NOT react in the same old ways.
You’re not gonna get that personalized healing on a yoga mat amongst 12 other students. Actually, our yoga-loving clients have repeatedly said that dance therapy brought them a whole new level of deep healing that they never could’ve experienced even in a private class.
In dance therapy, we help you regulate and stay present & connected within OUR relationship so that you can do the same in your romantic relationship.
This teaches your body and system to stay connected, close, and intimate EVEN when you feel fear coming up. And as you rewire from fear to love & connection, that fear doesn’t even exist anymore. You just feel excited and alive again in your body and in your relationship.
Dance and movement brings on a whole new level of transformation.
Breaking old patterns is difficult and sometimes impossible when you’re repeatedly telling a counselor how you want to change. All the new ways you want to behave in your relationship can be achieved with much more ease and grace through dance and movement.
Whether you want to open up, flow in connection with your partner, be spontaneous, or become free in your relationship, you can practice ALL of that in movement first.
Picture it right now: how would your body move differently if you were more open and in flow? More spontaneous? More open?
We can literally feel a taste of this shift as we envision ourselves doing these movements. Imagine the relief you’d feel once your body gets comfortable being more free, open, and loose. Imagine how easy it would be to let it in your partner’s intimacy!
Right now you’re tensing up and closing off against your partner at the first sign of intimacy. That’s all your body has known since your trauma. You don’t know yet how to act differently. But you totally can.
Sign up for my online course (ranges from free to $20 USD) to begin a unique, body-based learning experience that will teach you:
- Science-backed education about how trauma is stored in your body and nervous system. You’ll gain an understanding why it has NOT been your fault you haven’t healed yet from past trauma.
- Gentle, guided body-based movement that is necessary for integrated healing. This is crucial if you want your mind’s intentions to match your body’s behaviors in relationships.
- An embodied approach to healing that has helped hundreds of clients break unhealthy relationship patterns and let in healthy, lasting love.
