What is relationship anxiety? Relationship anxiety can take many forms. Maybe you’re anxious about getting into a relationship because you’re afraid you’ll be hurt. Maybe you’re anxious about not being in a relationship because you’re afraid of being alone. Of course, many anxieties come up in relationships themselves. You could worry about whether your partner really loves you, whether your partner is cheating on you, and so on.Where does relationship anxiety come from?You can usually trace anxieties about intimate relationships to experiences earlier in life. Your early relationships with parents, teachers, relatives, and others create a kind of template for what you expect from your adult relationships. Early neglect can make you anxious that no one will really care about you. Early abuse can make you anxious that you’ll be mistreated.How can relationship anxiety affect you as an adult? More often than not, the expectations you bring to your current relationships are based on experiences you had earlier in life. If you don’t recognize this, it’s very easy for you to believe that your anxiety is giving you accurate information about what’s happening in the present. If that’s the case, you can easily make bad decisions. The fear of finding yourself in a neglectful or abusive relationship can lead you to steer clear of relationships altogether. On the other hand, interestingly enough, the very same anxieties can unconsciously drive you into exactly the kind of relationship you fear.It’s possible to blame yourself for the painful experiences you had in childhood. If that’s the case, you may be drawn to people who mistreat you in exactly the way your family did. This can seem completely counterintuitive, but it actually makes sense. If you believe that you were responsible for your suffering, you may also believe that, if you were just a better person, your partner won’t abuse or neglect you the way your parents did. So you choose someone exactly like your neglectful or abusive parent because you’re convinced that, this time, you’ll be able to make the relationship right.Unconscious relationship anxieties can also lead people to engage in self-sabotaging behaviors like not answering texts, picking fights or being overly critical of their partners. If you’re afraid that you’re going to be hurt, you may do things to undermine the relationship before your worst fears come true. This becomes a vicious cycle. Since you don’t give yourself a chance to see whether your anxieties will be confirmed, you deprive yourself of the possibility of having a good relationship, and you reinforce your fears that relationships will be harmful to you.What can you do to make it better? It’s really important to be aware of the actual sources of your anxiety. Let’s say you have a partner who travels frequently for business. Every time he leaves, you’re consumed with anxiety that he’s having affairs while he’s away. There’s no actual evidence that this is happening. In fact, all evidence points out that he is a loyal, committed partner. But you’re miserable when he’s away, and his increasing irritation with your inability to trust him is creating distance in your relationship.If you can make the connection between your current anxieties, and the fact that your parents’ relationship collapsed because of your father’s frequent cheating, you’ll be in a better position to realize that your husband isn’t your father. You’ll be able to talk to him about the reasons for your anxiety, and he’ll be able to understand it instead of just feeling unfairly accused by you. You won’t be left in the impossible position of feeling either that your fears are real and your relationship can’t work, or that your fears are irrational and you’re crazy for having them.Of course, if you’re in the opposite situation—if your anxiety has driven you into a relationship that confirms your worst fears—the most important thing is to be able to recognize that you were not the cause of the mistreatment you experienced earlier in your life, and that no amount of self-improvement on your part is going to make your partner treat you better. Learning to understand and accept yourself is essential to being able to get out of a bad relationship that’s not going to get any better.Click to learn more about anxiety therapy and treatment with Dr. Jane Rubin.
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