A child can feel managed in a situation where an older couple has a child out of duty, but really didn’t want the child, or in a large family where there is no connecting to the parents. Another example is the intimacy anorexic couple that got pregnant one of the rare times they had sex.
A child growing up with one or both intimacy anorexic parents can become intimacy anorexic because of their exposure to the lack of care between parents, or any real connectedness or closeness. Growing up with no connection, the child begins to see not connecting as normal. They may be growing up in a home where children are to “be seen but not heard,” or worse yet, “not to be seen or heard.”
Regardless of the cause, there is hope if someone really wants to work on their recovery and has a willing spouse to do their exercises with when it is safe to do so. Each start of the journey to becoming an intimacy anorexic is unique. Each intimacy anorexic has their own story of becoming an intimacy anorexic. At some point while working through the workbooks for intimacy anorexia, many of these pieces can be put together and movement starts along a different road—the road to recovery.