7 Signs You Have a Fear of Intimacy—and How To Overcome It
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Medically reviewed by Elle Markman, PsyD
Fear of intimacy is an intense fear of being physically, intellectually, or emotionally close to another person. Also called intimacy avoidance or avoidance anxiety, a fear of intimacy is often caused by anxiety or childhood trauma.
People with a fear of intimacy may desire to have close relationships with others or wish they didn't fear intimacy. However, their fear often causes them to push people away, continuously date, or sabotage relationships.
If a person with a fear of intimacy doesn't address it, they may have difficulty maintaining close friendships, working relationships, and romantic partnerships. This can increase your risk of social isolation and mental health issues. Seeing a licensed therapist can help address your fear of intimacy to help you learn to heal and reconnect with others.
Types of Intimacy Fears
Intimacy doesn't just refer to sexual or romantic relationships. Someone with a fear of intimacy can struggle with both romantic and platonic intimacy. Different types of intimacy people can fear include:
Physical: Sharing physical touch with others through sex, hugging, cuddling, kissing, or casually touching
Emotional: Sharing your vulnerable feelings and emotions with others and being able to discuss past relationships, fears, or trauma
Intellectual: Sharing your knowledge and ideas with others, such as your interests, goals, and opinions on issues
Spiritual: Sharing philosophical beliefs or personal values with others, including ethics, life purpose, and religion
Experiential: Sharing common interests or activities with others that create bonds, like traveling or sports
Signs of Fear of Intimacy
A fear of intimacy can manifest differently depending on the person and if the relationship is romantic, platonic, or familial. The common signs of a fear of intimacy include:
Self-sabotage: You may become overly critical of your friends or partners, accusing them of made-up problems or acting wary of their actions. This often happens when someone gets too close.
Perfectionism: You may feel like you need to be perfect to be worthy of deep connections or love with others. These feelings can cause workaholic tendencies that help you avoid intimate interactions.
Low self-esteem: You may feel that you are not good enough or don't contribute to loving relationships or friendships. You may also not trust yourself to create meaningful relationships.
Trust issues: You may have trouble trusting friends, loved ones, or co-workers and think people will betray or reject you. As a result, you may feel jealous or threatened by your partner or friends' other relationships—causing you to push away loved ones and pick fights.
Difficulty expressing needs: You may have trouble communicating with others about your feelings, or you may completely avoid expressing yourself. You may not tell partners and friends what you need from your relationships and feel unsatisfied.
Serial dating: You may be unable to commit to long-term romantic relationships. When a relationship becomes more serious, you may feel that it's time to end things. This causes your relationships to continually end and begin without feeling fulfilled.
Difficulty with physical contact: You may avoid physical intimacy like sex, hugs, or just being near others. You may also constantly crave physical contact, but your fear makes you act in a way that pushes people away.
Fear of intimacy is different from asexuality, which is typically characterized by a lack of sexual attraction, as well as schizoid personality disorder, which is a disinterest in personal relationships. Many people with a fear of intimacy still experience physical attraction and desire close relationships despite their fears.
What Causes Fear of Intimacy?
Fearing abandonment, control, and rejection often fuels a fear of intimacy. Typically, childhood experiences or trauma trigger these fears, making it challenging to build and maintain relationships. Anxiety disorders can also cause someone to develop a fear of intimacy due to immense worry and low self-esteem.
Some potential reasons you may develop a fear of intimacy include:
Fear of engulfment: You fear being in a relationship will allow you to be controlled or dominated. You may also feel like you lose your identity if you're in an intimate relationship. These fears can originate from growing up in an enmeshed family—a family structure that lacks boundaries and is overly close emotionally or overly dependent.
Fear of abandonment: You may worry that your friends and partners will abandon you. These feelings often stem from a parent, guardian, or role model abandoning you emotionally or physically as a child.
Fear of rejection: Past rejection experiences may make you afraid that no one will like or accept you. This fear can stem from a parent not accepting you or a romantic partner rejecting or denying your needs.
Anxiety disorders: Having a social anxiety disorder can make you afraid of judgment and rejection in relationships. You may also have a social phobia, like fearing touch or interaction, that makes you severely anxious and fearful of intimacy.
Risk Factors
Childhood experiences and traumas that cause a lack of trust in parental guardians or adults put people at risk of developing a fear of intimacy. Some specific childhood situations associated with developing a fear of intimacy include:
Experiencing emotional and physical neglect: Guardians and parents who don't emotionally connect with their children can make them feel like they are not worthy. Parents who do not physically take care of their children—due to negligence, mental health, or substance use—can also lead to trust issues and feelings of inadequacy.
Growing up in an enmeshed family: These families appear supportive and emotionally connected but lack boundaries or defined roles. This dynamic can cause attachment and independence issues that affect intimacy.
Losing a parent: Parental abandonment due to death, divorce, imprisonment, or other loss can trigger a fear of abandonment. As adults, this can lead to anxiety and trouble sustaining romantic relationships.
Having a parent with a mental health condition: Children of parents with mental health conditions, like narcissistic personality disorder, often struggle to form healthy attachments to relationships as their parents' moods change.
Experiencing abuse: Children who are emotionally and verbally abused often fear being berated as adults—leading them to fear vulnerability with others. Physical and sexual abuse as a child can also make adults fear emotional and sexual intimacy.
How Does This Affect Relationships?
People who fear intimacy often push other people away and sabotage existing relationships. This can ultimately end platonic and romantic relationships or make it difficult to establish them in the first place. This can be harmful as people need healthy relationships to sustain their mental and physical health.
Being unable to show affection or connect emotionally with those around you can make people think you don't care about them or want them in your life. It may even make people believe you dislike them. Creating emotional or physical barriers with people around you can make it challenging to maintain friendships and work well with others at your place of employment.
In romantic relationships, further avoiding emotional and sexual intimacy can end relationships you may have wanted to keep. Romantic relationships become stronger and thrive on building intimacy. You may abandon a romantic relationship that starts to become serious because you fear closeness. A fear of intimacy can also lead someone to continuously date as a way to avoid getting too close to one particular person on an emotional or sexual level.
When To See a Healthcare Provider
If your fears around intimacy are affecting your quality of life, reach out to a mental health provider for help. For instance, you may socially isolate yourself as you constantly avoid or sabotage relationships, which can make it difficult to function in society. A licensed therapist, counselor, or psychiatrist can help you identify ways to cope and heal from past traumas or experiences that lead to a fear of intimacy.
Healthcare professionals may use a fear of intimacy test called the Fear of Intimacy Scale (FIS) to assess the severity of someone's fear of intimacy. This scale helps providers objectively evaluate your thoughts and behaviors related to intimacy. During the test, you'll take a self-reported assessment that asks you to rank how certain situations or feelings apply to you.
For example, you may be asked to rank statements about how you would feel in a close romantic relationship such as:
"I would probably feel nervous showing [person] strong feelings of affection."
"A part of me would be afraid to make a long-term commitment to [person]."
"I would feel uneasy talking with [person] about something that hurt me deeply."
Treatment
Working with a mental health provider—like a therapist—is often the best way to address a fear of intimacy and work on strategies that help you work through your fears. Depending on what's causing your intimacy fears, your provider may suggest cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or couples therapy.
CBT can help you address negative thoughts around intimacy and learn to overcome them—essentially, learning how to cope and face your fears. Couples therapy can help you address emotional and sexual intimacy issues with your partner and work through your fears together.
People with a fear of intimacy often experience other mental health conditions related to depression, anxiety, or substance use. Mental health professionals like licensed therapists and psychiatrists can also help people manage these conditions along with a fear of intimacy.
How To Cope
In addition to therapy, self-exploration can help you work on facing negative self-attitudes related to your fear of intimacy. Some coping strategies that may help people living with a fear of intimacy include:
Understand that relationships have some risk: You never know if a relationship will last, and that's okay. It's ultimately part of the human experience to try and fail, and having more positive experiences can make you less likely to fear intimacy.
Value your self-worth: Work on feeling comfortable in your own skin and valuing your worth. This may help you set boundaries to avoid dependence and cope with rejection.
Reframe negative thoughts: Are you your worst critic? If you find your thoughts are plagued by negative self-talk, see if you can identify what makes you think those thoughts. Once you identify them, try to redirect those thoughts into something positive.
Set goals: Do you want meaningful friendships or a long-term romantic relationship? If you do, how have your thoughts and actions pushed people away? Is there anything you can do to help stop the fear that is keeping you from building relationships?
If your partner fears intimacy, letting them know you care about them and are there to help can help them on their journey. Try not to take their lack of intimacy personally, even though it can feel like you're being rejected rather than avoided due to fear. It may take time for them to open up about their intimacy issues, mainly if they stem from traumatic experiences. You can also encourage them to seek therapy and ask how you can help them feel safe.
A Quick Review
People who fear intimacy are afraid of becoming close to other people. You can fear emotional, physical, intellectual, spiritual, or experiential intimacy. Past experiences related to neglect, abuse, or abandonment often lead to a fear of intimacy. As a result, you may be so worried someone will leave you that you push them away or are afraid to build relationships.
Seeing a mental health professional can help you determine what's causing your fear of intimacy, find ways to work through your fears, and build meaningful relationships.
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