Love Shyness and Shamed Affection Needs in Men, Examined
Posted: Tuesday, July 27, 2010
by Mike Pilinski
Kipling Kat Publishing Co.
Most of us men know all too well that horrible moment of quiet terror when we're steeling ourselves to "spring the question" on some girl at work or school and ask her out on a date! Our heart races and our throat tightens as the moment approaches -- and we begin desperately trying to talk ourselves out of it: "she won't say yes, it's impossible... she's got a boyfriend... she's got exams coming up, she's way too busy, she's out of my league...". Sort of comical I suppose, but disturbing nonetheless.
So the real question is this: how do you distinguish between the common and quite rational fear of being rejected by a woman, and the more complex issue of chronic love shyness?
Here's a little test: do you find it's impossible to engage a woman with romantic intent even when she's sending you "GO" signals all over the place with obvious body language cues, or unmistakable flirtatious behavior? If she's making it so perfectly clear that she's NOT going to reject you, then what's there to be afraid of?
Well, what you could be afraid of is revealing to her your very secretly shamed need for affection. See, at some point in your life you were made to feel ashamed whenever you expressed a desire for love and affection, and it caused this very basic (and normal) human desire to become shame-bound, i.e., linked to the sensation of shame so that you could not experience one without feeling the other along with it. A shamed emotion is perceived as painful, alien and strange -- and therefore must always be kept hidden from view of others!
Shame like this can become so overwhelming that it becomes known as toxic.
Now sometimes the misery of shame-induced love shyness can be temporarily suppressed with the use of drugs, food or alcohol. This is the reason people become deeply addicted: because focus on the addictive behavior allows them distraction from the underlying pain, as well as creating some degree of freedom to experience the emotion shamelessly for awhile. Think of how YOU act when you get too drunk or high. Pawing every girl in sight at the bar? That's because the emotion we most often seek to express when uninhibited by drugs is the one which is the most tightly bound by shame when sober.
The first thing that you need to understand insofar as turning this situation around for yourself is that knowledge is power. Simply having your eyes opened to the mechanics of love shyness and how it has been adversely affecting your life can become a powerful tool for dismantling it. Knowing and understanding that your shame-bound emotions are something that was done TO you, and is not really YOU (i.e. an permanent aspect of your personality) is an enormous revelation in itself... one that holds vast potential for jump-starting your personal growth almost immediately.
A second weapon you should have in your arsenal against love shyness is what psychologists call desensitization. This idea makes use of the natural tenancy of the mind to adapt to anything after a while and become bored with it. What bores us becomes psychologically invisible and eventually gets taken for granted, and when that happens the emotion in question loses its potential to generate any kind of strong response within us, either good or bad. I mean, an event or experience that provokes no emotion is the very definition of boring, right?
So how do we turn an intense fear of rejection into something that actually bores us? Try this experiment in personal growth (and mind-over-matter) for yourself: next time you have an opportunity to talk to an attractive woman, even in some non-romantic situation (like work or school), begin to think about asking her out on a date. Really try to do this seriously and not just as a joke in your own mind. You're REALLY going to ask her out in five more seconds and reveal to her your shameful need for affection by blushing like a five year old. Yikes!
If you can do this mental exercise with the sort of intense focus that makes it real within your consciousness, you should begin to feel that familiar fear begin to swell in your chest and choke your throat closed. Now you're getting it!
Now here's the important part: try to HOLD yourself in this uncomfortable state for as long as you can before you excuse yourself and slip away. Make your retreat calm and sociable and with good humor... don't just bolt away in panic to the nearest john and start puking! Relax, no one knows what's going on inside your head except you. This is the important 'inner work' of self-change and personal growth that you are now undertaking.
The trick now becomes to repeat these "near-shame approaches" as often as you can find the opportunity to do so in order for the desensitization to really begin to take effect. You should push yourself a little closer to opening your mouth and actually speaking the terrifying words "...would you like to have dinner with me tomorrow night?..." in order to provoke those feelings of intense fear and "shy guy" paralysis that normally haunt you. By raising the psychological bar like this one small but significant notch at a time, you are slowly making it more and more difficult for the love shyness to take over and set off all those humiliating physical anxiety reactions that you hate so much... things like sweating, nervousness, the squeaky little-kid voice, etc.
Keep this self-restructuring process up for several weeks at least -- just whenever you can manage to run a mentally-simulated "approach". In essence what you're doing is toying with your love shyness now... poking and teasing it by deliberately getting close to performing the frightening activity that draws the shameful feelings up out of where they hide deep within your unconscious mind, and forcing them to run their routine for you on demand.
What will happen is that the feelings of shyness will begin to exhaust themselves after a while -- especially if you stay determined and keep "false-alarming" them regularly whenever possible. Each time there will be some degree of mental discomfort to suffer through, and that's good! The amazing magic starts to become apparent when after a while, you find that you have to keep getting closer and closer to the edge of actually speaking the words before you can get the fear to bubble up inside your gut.
Now you're beginning to cripple your love shyness!
Each time that you drag the fearful feelings up it's like using mental sandpaper to scratch them down to a smaller and smaller nub. With such frequent and repeated "sanding" your despised veneer of shyness will soon become thinner and less powerful in its grip over you. One day you'll find that you can actually go right through the entire routine FOR REAL and ask a girl out on a real date... and without hardly feeling any nervousness about it in the least!
I know that caught in the grip of your fears right now this may all seem impossible to conceive of even as you are reading this... but the techniques of desensitization DO work wonders. They are commonly used by psychotherapists everywhere to cure seriously anxious people of some very strong phobias, such as a pathological fear of flying, leaving the safety of their home, driving across tall bridges, etc. So you can surely do this with a "lightweight" phobia such as fear of rejection without much help beyond your own determination and by using the techniques that I just showed you.
Your defeated love shyness will simply give up and go away before long... too exhausted to torment you any longer.
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