Identifying symptoms
Few people know what the panic fear of love is called. Experts have given it the name philophobia. The problem occurs in both men and women. However, depending on the character of a person, it manifests itself in different ways:
- The first group includes closed philophobes. These people consciously or unconsciously avoid contact with people of the opposite sex. In some cases, a person is afraid of strong attachments even to members of his own sex. He tries to avoid communicating with relatives and does not strive to make friends.
- The second group includes sociable philophobes. People around them often call them the life of the party, not knowing that they have a strong fear of serious relationships. It is very difficult to suspect philophobia in representatives of the second group: at first glance there will be no noticeable symptoms. However, if the behavior of such a person is assessed by a professional psychologist, he will immediately be able to determine the presence of a problem. Philophobes of the second group hide their fears under a cynical attitude towards others. They try to convince themselves that people are not worthy of love. You can communicate with them only for your own pleasure and benefit. The philophobe makes acquaintances and marries for convenience. At the same time, he tries to break up first, without giving friends or loved ones the opportunity to do this earlier.
Love challenges subconscious attitudes
Many people consider themselves unattractive and have an inferiority complex. We have problems with self-esteem, we are afraid that no one will really care about us. We all have what we call a critical inner voice that acts like a cruel coach that tells us that we are worthless or undeserving of happiness. This “coach” is formed from the painful experiences of childhood and critical attitudes to which we were exposed in early adulthood, as well as the feelings that our parents had for each other.
Of course, such an initial attitude towards the situation slows us down, but these attitudes are already firmly ingrained in our heads. When we become adults, it’s time to get rid of such thoughts, to work on our mistakes, so to speak, but instead we accept such a destructive point of view as our own. These critical thoughts (or inner voices) are often harmful and unpleasant, and can destroy relationships at a very early stage. When a person sees us completely differently, loves our voice, simply appreciates us, we begin to feel uncomfortable and defensive.
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Causes
The fear of love haunts many people on the planet. However, the reason for its occurrence is different for everyone:
- Reluctance to lose personal freedom. Modern women are especially susceptible to this fear. Today's representatives of the fair sex no longer consider having a family an essential component of success. They dream of self-development, a successful career and travel. A love relationship or marriage should, in the opinion of a lady suffering from philophobia, turn her into a powerless housewife.
- Fear of the collapse of a serious relationship. Love phobia may be associated with fear of the future. A person (most often a woman) suffers from the fear of being rejected. Fear of possible separation prevents him from building relationships.
- Formation of an ideal image. Women are much more likely than men to idealize their future partner. Guys are usually satisfied with the attractive appearance of their chosen one and her ability to run a household. A girl dreams of starting a serious relationship with a handsome, strong, intelligent man. Among the mandatory qualities of the future chosen one should be high income and loyalty to the woman he loves. Over the years, new details are added to the ideal image. The inability to find compliance with the ideal in real life leads to philophobia.
- Disappointment with previous relationships. An unreasonable fear of love can be the result of a bad experience, sometimes someone else's. If the parents constantly quarreled and noisily sorted things out in front of the child, the daughter or son grows up in fear of repeating the fate of the father and mother. An unsuccessful marriage or an unhappy first love experience also causes philophobia.
- Fear of unrequited affection. A person who is afraid to fill his heart with love believes that he will not receive reciprocal feelings from the object of his adoration. He is sure that he will suffer from unrequited love. It is with these fears that the fear of falling in love is associated.
- Misunderstanding of your desires. If a person is not able to answer questions about what love is and what a partner should be like, he is susceptible to fear of relationships with the opposite sex. For fear of making the wrong choice, the philophobe refuses to communicate and withdraws into himself.
The past influences new relationships
When we enter into a relationship, we are completely unaware, unaware of how much the past can affect it. How we've been hurt in previous relationships, dating back to childhood, has a strong impact on how we see the people we allow close to us, as well as how we will behave in those romantic relationships.
Past negative experiences can make us wary, afraid to open our souls to someone new. We may shy away from intimacy because it brings up old feelings from a painful relationship, loss, anger, or abandonment. When you strive to experience love again, and it is associated with pain you felt in the past, it is difficult to build a relationship.
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How to get rid of the problem?
The fear of falling in love should not be underestimated. It can be compared to a serious disease, the treatment of which requires a lot of time. The first step on the path to healing is recognizing the presence of the disease. For more thorough treatment, you should contact a psychologist who can identify the problem by the most minor symptoms. If you are afraid to contact a specialist, feel embarrassed or don’t trust him, try:
- Give up the fear of losing personal freedom. A truly loving person will not demand complete submission or dependence. He will rejoice at the success in the other’s career, give him the opportunity to engage in self-development and travel.
- Live for today. Don't be afraid of being rejected. Perhaps the initiator of the separation will not be the partner.
- Don't create perfect images. This, of course, does not mean that you need to call a random person your one and only. Nobody is perfect. Every person has weaknesses. A real sincere feeling will allow you to ignore your partner’s shortcomings.
- Don't live in the past. If you have already had an unpleasant experience in your personal life, it does not follow that all men (women) are like the recently loved one. A negative attitude will bring into life an already lived situation. We need to free ourselves from the unpleasant past for a more prosperous future.
- Get rid of the fears of unrequited love, enjoy a wonderful feeling without expecting anything in return. If you meet true love, it will definitely be mutual. A temporary hobby only prepares you for true happiness.
- Decide what your relationship with your loved one should be like and who you want to meet: serious or cheerful, a successful businessman or a simple worker. You can imagine living together. You should not copy other people's relationships (for example, parents). It's better to create your own love story.
Many philophobes do not know the name of the fear of strong feelings that they experience. But even without knowing the name of your fear, it is necessary to fight phobias. The fear of falling in love dooms you to loneliness and deprives you of the most vivid impressions of life.
We become vulnerable when we truly love
Any beginning relationship can be compared to a walk through a dark forest. This is uncharted territory, and many people have natural, normal, justifiable fears of the unknown. Love is a kind of risk. We begin to faithfully trust our partner, thereby allowing him to influence us.
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In such a situation we feel vulnerable. The main subconscious defense becomes dull. All the habits that were there before this connection allowed me to feel focused or self-sufficient, but then they begin to fade into the background. We tend to believe that the more we care about a person, the more we may suffer.
Love. Fear of love
Fear of love - what is behind it? Why do people seem to want love, but there are those who want it with their minds, but are afraid to let it in with their hearts? Or they are so afraid that even with their minds they don’t want this feeling to come into life, to happen. Source - Esoterics. Living Knowledge
In science, this type of fear has even been given its own name - philophobia. A huge number of people deal with it, they just don’t consider it a problem and therefore they usually don’t try to “treat” it. The idea that “I’m missing something in life” can only emerge from time to time in consciousness, in feelings, or when a person sees happy lovers, or when someone asks him for love and reproaches him for not receives. In a word, this is what I remember from time to time. The fear of love takes on a panicky and literally phobic form extremely rarely. This is due to the fact that with it there is no object of fear as such - love, there is no beloved. Both the source of fear (object) and fear itself exist in the mind of the person himself.
And when love comes, there is no longer any place for fear itself, since everything has already happened, the very thing that was feared, and the person already lives in this new reality. This combines the fear of love with the fear of death - when it is not yet there, there is fear, when it has come, the person is no longer there - the one who was afraid. In general, love and death have a lot in common - it’s not for nothing that there is even an expression: “Two things irrevocably change a person - love and death.” Indeed, having fallen in love or “after love” no one remains the same; love greatly changes us, our life in general.
And not only in the sweetest bouquet and candy period, the period of limerence, as it is called in psychology - when “rose-colored glasses”, you want to sing, fly, scream from the overflow of feelings, “butterflies in the stomach”, when unimaginable lightness, pure happiness, and euphoria around the clock, and creativity, and so on and so on). Not only does this somewhat altered state of consciousness make a person different, but the very experience of opening the heart, the experience of devotion to another, readiness for self-giving, the experience of intense happiness and a sense of inner integrity changes a person. Of course, both the pain of love and the personal tragedies associated with it leave their mark, often trauma, deep enough that it changes a person, his perception of life, and sometimes his fate.
Why are people afraid of love, avoid it consciously and subconsciously?
The reasons most often lie in the past - in an already accomplished experience, in a personal drama in the past, that is, the person himself once suffered from love or before his eyes someone (usually very close and dear) experienced severe pain from love or its consequences .
The memory of this can be either explicit or repressed - that is, you don’t want to love in life, you perceive love as a disease, but you can’t remember anything like that in the past. The experience itself was there, but the psyche repressed it as traumatic and interfering with normal life.
In rare cases, a person gained this “experience” from literature/cinema about the suffering and troubles of love; our consciousness is especially sensitive to such information in adolescence, in early youth.
R. J. Sternberg, a Yale University psychologist who has deeply studied the issue, proposed such a model - a triangle of states that make up love: intimacy, passion, commitment. In love, all three of these states are active. Intimacy is a feeling of deep closeness, a perfect relationship with this particular person, trust, mutual penetration. Passion is a component of desire - to be together, to possess, to give oneself, the desire to merge and experience unity in this merger, a strong physical attraction. Commitment (responsibility) is an internal choice - a sincere and free decision to be with a person, to maintain love, to cherish, to create relationships.
So, with fear of love, attention must first be paid to the anxieties and fears that exist in these three areas. For some, the topic of obligations is difficult - it is perceived as a deprivation of freedom, for example, or the person does not trust himself to be able to fulfill these obligations. Since philophobia exists precisely in life “without love” or “before love,” then in this aspect it is more likely to talk about your illusions, about your fears and fantasies about how it will be for me when I fall in love. When a person falls deeply in love in reality, with a specific Other, this aspect, as a rule, does not cause any difficulties at all and is perceived as a desired good. But while a person is not in love, not, as they say, “head over heels” in love, the topic of obligations can really cause a lot of tension inside and hinder the creation or development of relationships.
Is it possible, because of this fear, not to create a long-term loving relationship in your entire life? Yes, you can. Defensive reactions of the psyche can overpower the desire for development and transformation in love. There is no problem in this if the person himself does not consider it a problem. Not all people come for the experience of love, not for everyone it is a mandatory “part of the program” of life. However, people who choose this for themselves still at times feel that they are missing out on something in life, as if something is passing them by.
On the other hand, love is not something that can be earned in life. I mean now working on myself. You can change your attitude towards obligations and thereby ease the path of love, the path of its coming into life. But, however, life shows that love more often just comes, happens, bursts in, covers, whatever you call it), and this does not depend on how much a person has “worked through” his fears at the level of consciousness. Love destroys internal barriers, does not ask a person whether he is “ready or not,” and frees him from the fear of obligations by the fact that this responsibility becomes desirable, as part of happiness in love.
When the root of philophobia is in the sphere of intimacy, the main anxieties are associated with trust, with the fear of mental pain and rejection. The deeper aspects of this are often rooted in our relationship with the very first person in our life, in our first love - in our relationship with our mother. Also, this area is most vulnerable to experiences - first love that ended in pain, unrequited love and others, from which we learned that love is a misfortune and a disease.
This is the time and place for another term - intimophobia: fear of intimacy, closeness, depth and trust. A very common phenomenon now, one of the reasons why people “go” to work, virtual life, and addictions. This is the desire to avoid relationships with the world of a significant Other, to have these relationships only in the form of formal, friendly or purely sexual ones. The desire to not allow anything in them that can change or transform the person himself. With intimate phobia, a completely healthy desire to preserve one’s integrity, boundaries, and self-identity takes on the character of avoiding everything that could violate this integrity. A person then hinders his development through relationships, through the world of feelings, believing that this way he will preserve himself. From my professional experience I know that a person always has reasons and meaning for this. It also happens that at one time the choice in favor of closure literally saved a person’s life. At the same time - biologically, psychologically, even economically - it is open systems that flourish in our human world. Whether through a crisis of this closedness or through an internal desire for development and greater freedom, people sometimes strive to overcome intimate phobia and allow changes into their lives.
In the sphere of passion - the physical aspect of love - the experience of merging, losing oneself, giving oneself and the fears associated with this are also of great importance. This layer is usually the least conscious of us. Except in cases where real events took place - rape, incest, other sexual trauma and abuse. When this has not happened in personal history, but there is tension, it is more difficult to realize the origins, but you need to look especially sensitively at the topic of physicality - how we perceive our body, how the merger feels - like heaven on earth or like the loss of oneself. This aspect is associated with sexuality, with taboos in this area, with the experience taken from the parental family. If there is a blockage or difficulties in this area, the greatest benefit will come from body-oriented practices, which in modern psychology certainly affect the aspect of relationships with the mother - physical relationships (affection, caring for your body in childhood, care and physical punishment). Also, the causes of tension in the topic of passion, the reluctance of it in life, must be sought in the experience of previous “passions”, addictions. If it was painful, the person will subconsciously strive to avoid everything that in one way or another resembles passion, any form of “loss of self.”
For all three areas, one common fear may manifest itself: for example, the fear of losing control - over oneself, over one’s life. It is especially strong in people for whom this type of injury is primary. A common fear may be pain, rejection, abandonment. Which also depends more on the type of trauma we have, rather than on love itself. And in a global sense, our suffering in love is connected not so much with it as such, but with the fact that it intensifies and aggravates our main problem area - the trauma of experiencing misfortune “in love”, in early childhood, as a rule.
What else do all types of resistance to love have in common? What they have in common is that almost all of them are fantasies - they are ideas, decisions and memories of the past that we mentally transfer to the future. We think “since it was like this (for me or others), it means it will be like this” - it’s painful, or difficult, or with consequences.
The irony is that it will be somehow different - in real love. Commitment can be fun, intimacy can be a pleasure and an experience of maturity, sexuality can be more open than before, and passion for a person can be different from passion for a game, for example, and not ruin your life. There will also be pain, but in relation to something different than before, because you are already different in some ways over time.
Since we are afraid not so much of love as of the exacerbation of the previous wound, we are afraid of our own internal trauma, that it will make itself felt again, then we must heal the best of it, our soul as a whole. Not with the goal of even opening up to love, or intimacy, or sexuality, not with the goal of “doing something to yourself that will allow you to fall in love,” no. More like a manifestation of love for oneself, with the desire for oneself to have a holistic experience of being. It doesn’t matter whether love as such comes - like a romance or a family, what matters is that you allow it to yourself, as the luxury of being in this life, as your generosity - to love, as your kindness - to accept the love of people, as the courage to open up and be loved ones, as a passion to live and create.
Through the experience of a loving attitude towards ourselves, we learn that it can be somehow different), that not only “loss of consciousness” and illness is love, but there is also something else in it, and that love the real one may be very different from what we thought or assumed about it.
With respect and best wishes,
Ekaterina Dashkova, psychologist
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Read the Love section on the esoteric portal naturalworld.guru.
