Everyone Gets Scared: A Translation

This is for you ... you know who you are. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert. I'm guilty of all the same behaviors I'm about to explain ... I learned by doing everything wrong. So this is meant to help you.
A year or two ago (forgive me for this!) a friend of mine was struggling. The most unusual thing had happened. She was in this seemingly perfect, awesome, mind-blowing relationship and then suddenly POOF! Just like that, the guy backed away. The first thing she did was like most of our instincts tell us to do, was to try and figure out "what was going wrong." But that seemingly awesome move towards reconnection was actually managing to push the guy away. Okay, so let me see if I can translate.
Let's take a look at what happens when an animal is afraid-what does it do? It runs and hides! It's scared and so either fight or flight mode takes over. For most people, the flight instinct takes over and they turn tails and run.
Now, let's take the most courageous, daring, adventurous person and put them in a situation they've never been in before and see how they react the first time. They aren't going to know how to handle the situation, no, they're going to be scared out of their minds, and they are going to freak out. Almost no one I know (or have ever heard about) can gracefully handle or tackle a NEW scary situation without reacting in a negative way (i.e. running away). It's like if you were suddenly to be put in a cage with a lion you've been told has eaten 10 people. Would you be afraid? You bet you would. Now, what if they continually put you in that cage? After a while, you wouldn't be afraid anymore. Make sense? But the first time you're there, whether the trouble is real or imagined, you're going to freak out and try to run away.
So let's translate that in terms of relationships. I don't mean to stereotype, as that is not the goal here. While I have found that this "fight or flight" mode to clearly exist in both women and men, as I am a woman, I see it more often in men. Therefore, I'm going to approach it from that standpoint. Not stereotyping, just perspective.
So there are a few different "types" of this fight or flight behavior. When you understand its nature, and look at it a different way, you might just save your relationship or save your sanity (or both).
The first type is the kind of person I like to call The Pressured. This person is the one in the relationship with someone because they feel pressured to do something or get with someone, either by family or friends or both. OR it could also be the person who gets into the relationship after getting pressured into dating the person by friends. This sort of implies the person can't think for themselves, but that is a whole different topic… somehow or another, so many of us find ourselves in this kind of relationship. Let's face it, so many people today are ruled by what their friends think. Oh dear. No sense of autonomy. All right, I'm not going to judge. Anyway …
So to give an example of this …Imagine a guy who is in an amazing relationship with a girl. Now, let's get a little background. Perhaps the guy was set up with this girl by his friends (this opens a whole new can of worms, by the way). So he meets the girl and she seems pretty cool. So they start dating and yada yada yada. The next thing he knows, she's not exactly what he expected. The more time he spends with her, the more he realizes that she's not his type and she's not making him happy. But the thing is, he's already in the relationship! So at this point, his fight or flight mode takes over. He doesn't know what to do. He's faced with a question. "Am I in this relationship because it's something I want, or am I in this relationship because my friends pushed me into it?" He can then do one of two things, stay with the girl and hope it gets better, or make the decision to end it. If he stays, his FIGHT instincts eventually take over. So guess what happens? You guessed it, they start to fight. At first, it's just over small things until pretty soon, they are always fighting. If he decides to leave the relationship, his FLIGHT mode instincts have taken over, and he retreats to lick his wounds and regroup to find his center.
In the above instance, you have a person who is torn between two things: staying or going. But it's easy to see in the above example how he would be brought to these conclusions because you (the reader) are aware that she's not his type and that he's not happy. So unless he actually admits his unhappiness to her, she has absolutely no idea that he's secretly considering all of these things in his head. All she knows is that he's suddenly distant, suddenly not communicative, and suddenly backs away.
Let me give another case, one that's quite separate from this. This is the person I'll call The Commitment Phobic. Let's imagine you have a relationship where you feel as though you're totally in sync with one another. You have what appears to be a mind-blowing unbelieveable relationship. Everything is going smoothly. He's talking about getting married to you or he's talking about having you move in or meet his parents or whatever … All of a sudden, for no explicable reason, something happens. Suddenly, the guy who was calling you every single day stops calling! The guy who brought you flowers once a week stops bringing them! The guy who treated you like a princess is suddenly ignoring you and you can't figure out ANYTHING that has gone wrong. You ask him if everything's all right, and he says yes. Or, worse, he completely ignores you and leaves you wondering what in the world is going on! In this case, unbeknownst to you, the guy has gone into FIGHT or FLIGHT mode.
Let me take a moment to decode what is going on and how you can help it and save yourself from getting hurt (as much).
In both situations above, there is that moment before the guy (or girl or whomever) enters FIGHT or FLIGHT mode and that is the time I call the CAVE moment. Let me explain the cave moments. We all have cave moments-those are those times when we go to our caves when things go wrong or when we're having a bad day; it's the place we go when we want to be left alone. Perhaps we go and watch a movie alone or we read a book or we bake some cookies (me!), or we write, or whatever it is that makes us feel good again.
Those moments are often forgotten and overlooked in relationships (but that's another blog for another time). But it's those moments we have to pay attention to and respect especially in our relationships.
Okay, so that moment when your "partner" starts to back away, the WORST thing you could possibly do is to push them for answers. "What's going on?" "Where is our relationship at?" "Why aren't you as loving as you used to be?" "How come you want to spend time by yourself?"
All those questions do is push them right into FIGHT or FLIGHT mode. You are asking for an answer to a question they don't want to think about. So if you force them to come up with an answer, they will! It just won't always be the one you want …
Let me also add that so many people I've talked to also do other crazy behavior when their "partner" goes to their cave including:
Checking their cell phonesCalling them excessively Following them aroundBecoming demandingBecoming possessive or jealousBecoming needy, whiny, complaining, etc.
All the behavior above seems completely crazy when you really stop to look at it. Crazy. This is crazy behavior. Period. Who would want to be with someone who does any of those things? Really?
(Also, I want to interject a good point here. If you become demanding, possessive, and jealous (i.e. CRAZY) do you think you are giving your partner the trust he or she deserves? I'll touch on the issue of the importance of trust tomorrow) ...
Okay, so if you find that your partner begins to back away … stop and let them! You see, they need time to figure out what they want for themselves. Perhaps they got into the relationship too fast or perhaps they just need time away to figure things out … and perhaps, and this happens a lot, they start to get scared.
If ithe relationship is great and then inexplicably poor, I chalk it up to fear. It could be fear of commitment (the most common), fear of abandonment, fear of smothering, fear of who knows. It's still fear. >The guy needs time to get away and figure out what he wants. If you engage in the needy behavior I listed above, you'll only make the decision that much easier for them to make. But that's not who you are, that's the person you've become. For some reason, people think that they have to push harder or demand answers when someone backs away or demands their own space! But people need to have their own space and sometimes, they get so wrapped up into things, they don't stop to take a look at whether or not it's really healthy for them!
So if you start to see behaviors like he stops calling you as much or he doesn't ask you out as much, don't become needy and clingy. Back away, give him space. Give him CAVE time. It takes time for people to get to know one another; it takes time to process feelings and decide whether what you have in the relationship is real or not. Honestly, guys tend to take longer in this process than women. You are asking the guy to spend the rest of his life (well he looks at it that way) with one person-YOU. You have to give them time to figure out if that's what they want.Everyone feels pressure of some sort. If you're the woman, you are pressured to get married, wear the white dress, have the 2.5 children, have the house and you're expected to do all those things when you're young. If you the man, you get pressured by your friends to find the youngest, most attractive mate you can! Guys get pressured from other guys about being "whipped" because the guy spends less time with his friends. Suddenly, all this pressure is being put on something that was in the beginning, supposed to be fun! Now, it suddenly becomes a chore!
Yet, at the same time, eventually we do figure out what we want. We do figure out whether the person we're with is the right person for us. If the person decides to go into FLIGHT mode and run away, and you use the tips I've given you, you won't end things on a bad note. You have too much self worth to let that happen. Instead, you let them go the way they wanted to. Perhaps they will figure things out and come back. But perhaps they won't. Either way, you won't find yourself doing self-sacrificing behaviors that will result in CRAZINESS or in your feeling bad about yourself. You still might be hurt, but getting hurt is a part of life. It's better to realize the person isn't the one for you anyways, don't you think? And you didn't even have to do it by getting possessive, jealous, or crazy.
In my humble opinion, everyone goes through these moments. We all have to decide what we want and we sometimes put ourselves into relationships before we take the time to figure it all out. It's sort of like people who jump into the ocean and then realize how cold it is. Sometimes, they jump in and realize "It's cold!" so they get out quickly. But they slowly wade their way back into the water. Or, they decide they don't want to swim and they leave. Sometimes, a person seems like that's who or what we want, but they're not. Maybe we find someone who fits us better or maybe we discover what we thought we wanted really isn't. It just sucks when the person who isn't wanted turns out to be you.
I think we all need our own cave time, no matter what we try and convince ourselves. That need to have our own lives, our own time, and our own interests preserves our autonomy and keeps things fresh. Relationships become stale after a while when you don't have anything new to talk about.
So don't look at a retreat as always being a bad thing. Remember: everyone gets scared. Sometimes it is necessary to lose the battle but win the war. Just some thoughts … Hope it helps.