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When Your Love Language is Fear — and How to Counter It
Fear underpins many relationship struggles
Fear comes up a lot in therapy.
It makes sense: Fear is a basic human emotion. In its many different disguises, it lies at the base of most, if not all, problems. Including those we have in love.
Gary Chapman’s classic book The Five Love Languages outlined five key ways we communicate with our partners. Quality time. Words of affirmation. Gifts of Service. Physical Touch. Acts of Service.
Those are helpful in figuring out how you love — and want to be loved. But in therapy we frequently end up talking about a sixth love language — the one most likely to mess things up: Fear.
Fear underpins many relationship struggles. Obviously being with a toxic partner ignites fear, so does having your trust broken by the one you’re with.
But I’m also talking about the fears we carry into our relationships, those embedded in us from a difficult “love history.”
The Love Language of Fear
I was working with a woman whose marriage had just broken up. She was struggling with two of the most common fears in love — abandonment and rejection.
She had a painful history of loss — the death of loved family members but also betrayal in her relationships — and it had left her hypersensitive in love.
She had developed a pattern of getting close to someone then pulling back, finding ways to critique her partner or pick the relationship apart before she could be rejected. She’d lost some potentially good partners along the way.
“I’m aware of what I’m doing,” she said, “but it’s almost like if I’m going to be dumped I want it to be because of the way I behaved rather than who I am.”
Ouch. You can see why love was both difficult and painful for her — and why her best intentions ended unhappily.
What to do?
Hurt in love can have a long tail. But it’s important to note when it might be impacting your current relationships — to know how much of your struggle in love is not them, but you.
