Part 1 of 3

Let me paint a picture for you:
You are lying in bed, mid conversation with your partner, laughing about the neighbour’s cat that
hisses at you (and you hiss back because this is war) every time you walk past their garden as you
return from work. Your partner eventually falls asleep. As you start to drift off, you feel happy and
can’t help thinking how much you love this wonderful person who makes you feel so safe. Just as
you finish that last thought, a series of very different thoughts force their way into your mind:
Do they love me as much as I love them?
They haven’t told me they love me in a few days… are they angry at me?
I wonder if they felt overwhelmed by me crying after that bad day at work a few months ago.
I could tell they were annoyed with me yesterday. They probably don’t want to be with me
anymore. I wouldn’t want to be with me either.
They’re going to leave me. I just know they’re going to leave me!
Those who have never had an experience of consistent or significant anxiety will likely struggle to
understand how someone’s mind can be so fearful and unsettled after what was clearly a very loving
interaction. For those who have known these types of thoughts intimately, what you’re experiencing
is relationship anxiety.
This is a 3-part series where we’ll be unpacking anxiety in romantic relationships – how it looks, its
origins in your attachment style, and how we can navigate it healthily in our relationships.
Let’s take it back to basics. What is anxiety?
Anxiety is the brain’s response to perceived danger. When our brains perceive danger,
they send signals to our bodies to respond to the situation. These signals activate us to act
in a manner that keeps us safe.
Now consider experiencing anxiety in your relationship: whenever something happens in your
relationship that triggers that feeling of being unsafe, your brain activates you to behave in a way
that moves you towards feeling safe again. The tricky part is that when we’ve experienced
relationship trauma early in life, our perception of what is unsafe in relationships is drastically
influenced by what happened in those early experiences and unconscious triggers are created.
Let me give you an example: relationship trauma around abandonment can create a trigger that
mobilizes you to protect yourself from perceived abandonment. If you and your partner have an
argument and they need to take a moment to clear their mind before you discuss the issue again,
the fear of your partner leaving you will trigger an internal alarm that tells you to find a way to
protect yourself from abandonment. Your behavioural response may be to end the relationship
before they end it, or you may emotionally withdraw when they return.
Does that sound familiar?

I believe that one of the most torturous parts of anxiety is feeling like you can’t trust your own mind.
Is what I fear in my head or is it real? In the (paraphrased) words of an author I enjoyed at one point:
why should something being in your head mean that it’s not real?
Anxiety in relationships also shows up in how we behave in our relationships. Here are some of the
ways you can spot it:
 The need to know where your partner is
 Being overly emotionally dependent on your partner (e.g., staring at your phone all day,
waiting for their responses to your texts)
 Need for constant reassurance of your partner’s love and commitment to you
 Going through your partner’s phone or belongings because you fear they may be cheating
 Overthinking what your partner says and does
 Assigning blame to yourself for any disagreement you may have
 Probing about their past relationships because you are internally comparing yourself to their
ex-partners
 Being overly critical of your partner (as a projection of being overly critical of yourself)
 Perceiving issues between you as larger than they are
 Wanting to please your partner too and avoiding any kind of conflict
 Fear that the relationship will end despite there being no indication of that
I’ve outlined some key points here that I want us to think about until the next blog post where we
will be unpacking how attachment styles influence how we experience anxiety in relationships.
Tell us below if any of these points sound familiar and what you have noticed in yourself