People who are closed to love: what are they like and how to help them?

Let's take a look at the characteristics of people who are closed to love and tips on how to support them.

Loving and being loved is, according to many, the most beautiful thing in the world. Whether it's a family member, a friend or, of course, a partner, the truth is that most of the human race feels love for someone and wants to be loved back.

However, there are more than a few people who are closed to love.. It seems that they do not want to know anything about this emotion. They are cold, insensitive, emotionally distant. Why are they like that? Are they incapable of feeling? Are they afraid to love?

We are going to try to understand why some people are closed to love, finding out also what we can do to break their armor of coldness and emotional distance.

What are people who close themselves off to love like?

Emotional ignorance manifests itself not only in an inability to connect with feelings, both our own and those of others, but also in fear of feeling certain emotions. Whether due to low emotional intelligence or a manifest inexperience about certain feelings, there are people who are closed to love, something that undoubtedly hinders the creation of solid, healthy and lasting bonds.

Emotional inaccessibility is a very notorious trait of people who close themselves to love. They are not only closed to this feeling, but to any other emotion that involves establishing a relationship of deep intimacy with others. They are people who erect all kinds of invisible barriers that are so thick that they seem to be impassable.. They prevent us from getting close to them. They are emotionally distant people.

The profile of people who are closed to love denotes a great emotional immaturity, product of both ignorance and inexperience when it comes to managing their feelings. This means that, far from seeing it as something pleasant and that they would like to have in their lives, they perceive love as a threat. They fear that feeling it exposes them to a situation of great vulnerability. They interpret that falling in love and showing their feelings will allow malicious people to take advantage of them.

This does not mean that they do not have relationships.. People who are closed to love have, like anyone else, friends, relatives or even partners, human relationships in which some emotionality is exhibited. However, these types of people tend to abandon them or simply close themselves off when too many emotions surface. They carry a hard shell on their backs to take refuge in whenever they need it, especially when minimal emotional contact is required of them.

Why are they like this?

As emotionally distant people they tend to be, those who are closed to love are so because something happened to them in the past. That something is usually a failed affective relationship, a love that went wrong, that did not meet their expectations or that even involved mistreatment by their ex-partner.. It may also have happened that they had a bad relationship with their parents, siblings or other people in their most intimate environment in their early years of life or childhood, and since then they have been dragging a trauma.

This first experience with love, traumatic and extremely painful, leaves its mark on his heart, which will make the person close himself off so as not to be hurt again and even behave in appearance as a cold individual devoid of any kind of feelings.

Naturally, he does have emotions, but he does not want to show them for fear of being harmed again.. For this reason they do not share their feelings and try to hide as best they can all their emotions under a hard shell, a wall of containment and protection.

How to help this type of person

As we have commented, people who are closed to love are emotionally distant individuals who are cold. They take refuge under a shield of apparent hardness and insensitivity, but underneath they hide fear, fear of showing themselves vulnerable in case they experience such a beautiful feeling as that of loving. Their fear of being hurt by someone they might love is greater than the human desire to love and be loved. Many experiences are lost in the fear of something they are not sure will happen.

Knowing how to help a person who is closed to love requires gentleness.. Talking to such an individual can be complicated, but not impossible. Let's take a look at some tips to get this type of person to come out of their shell and show what they really feel. It is important that we gain their trust and show ourselves as understanding and well-meaning people.

The purpose of the tips we are going to see is not to get someone who is closed to love to fall in love with us. Love does not work like that, we cannot force anyone to love us just because. The objective of what we are going to see is to help a person, be it a relative, a friend or even our own partner to open up, not to give up such a beautiful feeling as love.

1. Start from their comfort zone

If we want to talk openly with a person who is closed to love, it is important not to be intrusive. You have to start in their comfort zone, in a stealthy way and without upsetting them. It is not advisable to start by going straight to the point. It is preferable to start with conversation topics that we know make him/her feel comfortable and secure..

As the conversation flows and the person feels more confident in you, it will be time to start talking about the real issue we want to address, which is basically how they feel, why they are afraid to love and if they need anything from us that can help them.

2. Be empathetic

Empathy is fundamental in every human relationship. This is the best tool to get a person to trust us and reveal his or her inner world to us.. We must put ourselves in the place of the people who close themselves to love, to understand that if they are like that it will be, most probably, for some unpleasant experience of their past, a great disappointment with love or bad relations with people for whom they felt something.

3. No pressure

The last thing that an emotionally distant person who shows barriers to love and to be loved wants is to be pressured.. If she does not normally show her emotions, less will she do so if she is self-conscious and overwhelmed by our pressure. We must respect her time and her own limits, let her be the one in control of the situation. We cannot force her to be the way we want her to be, it simply will not work. We must respect her and try to improve the relationship from her reality.