Thought is not reality; yet it is through Thought that our realities are created.

Sydney Banks

Relationships can be a beautiful journey, but they often bring out our deepest fears and anxieties. If you’ve ever found yourself overthinking, feeling insecure, or constantly worrying about your partner’s actions, you’re not alone. This article delves into six signs of relationship anxiety, offering my stories and insights to help you recognise and address relationship anxiety. By understanding the roots of our anxiety, we can begin to heal and create healthier, more fulfilling relationships.

1. Attachment Anxiety

12 years ago, I fell head over heels in love with a guy who I’ll name Mr. Big AKA Sex and The City.

While dating Big I became aware that I had attachment anxiety. Until becoming a therapist I’d never heard of the term attachment anxiety or attachment styles. Yet understanding them helped give me insight into my behaviour and past relationship patterns.

An anxious attachment pattern means you do a LOT of anxious thinking about the relationship! Anxious attachment style people crave emotional and physical closeness and are more likely to hold onto a relationship even if they’re unhappy in it. The anxiety is heightened when our needs aren’t being met. In the case of Big, when I knew I was seeing him, I wasn’t so preoccupied with my thinking. My mind was calmer, and therefore I felt more relaxed.

Part of the problem came from the fact I never knew when I was going to see him. Friends would ask me when I was next seeing Big, and I could barely answer them, which created a lot of shame and embarrassment within me.

Unfortunately, Big had an avoidant relationship style. He enjoyed being in a relationship, but when things were getting intimate, he’d pull back. You may have experienced this in the form of blowing hot and cold.

While I didn’t want to be seen as clingy or needy, my mind would start to wander if I didn’t hear from him. He didn’t feel the need to be in constant communication via text, and he wasn’t big on phone conversations. With an anxious attachment style, I needed (or so I thought) more reassurance and contact as a source of validation that all was well.

While he told me he loved our relationship and what we had, he couldn’t commit more than a month in advance. And living at opposite ends of the country didn’t help.

After doing inner work on my identity, sense of value and fear of walking away I did end the relationship a year later. I am grateful for that relationship because it taught me so much about myself and where I needed to heal and upgrade my identity so that I could behave differently in the next relationship. I believe every relationship if we allow it, provides us with the opportunity to grow and evolve.

Anxious Attachment – Some Helpful Ways to Deal With It

• The first step towards dealing with an anxious attachment style is to learn about them. There’s a great book called Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller which I recommend you check out to see what attachment style you have.
• I used to believe that my anxiety was coming from the relationship or Bigs actions. While it seemed that way at the time, I now know that 100% of the anxiety was coming from my thinking, and lots of it. Start to become aware of the thoughts you’re thinking, and what stories you’re telling yourself about the relationship. Journaling is a great place to begin to do this. Over time, you can see how repetitive and habitual your thinking is, which helps you to realise when it comes to anxiety, we’re thinking our feelings.
• Meditate. When you’re thinking at 200 miles per hour, overthinking and obsessing about the relationship, you don’t have any clarity. You’re trapped in a thought storm unable to separate fact from fiction. Daily meditation, even 10 minutes a day, can help to calm the mind helping you to gain clarity and perspective.

2. Jealousy and Possessiveness

The fact is that jealousy and possessiveness are simply lots and lots of insecure thinking, which leads to insecure behaviour.

A big part of this is a lack of self-esteem or feeling not worthy or valuable.  I was the green-eyed monster in my early relationships.  And those jealous thoughts would distort reality, and I’d end the relationship.

But I always went back. Why? Because I’d wake up the next day in a blind panic about what I’d done and try to get them back.

Now I understand that the anxious attachment pattern mixed in with limiting beliefs about my value, or rather not feeling valuable was the culprit. And if you have an insecure mind, you’ll see situations through the eyes of an insecurity.

This is why awareness is key. The mind sees what it wants to see, and if you are seeing a situation through jealous thought patterns, you won’t have clarity on what’s true and what assumptions your thinking has brought you to.

Thoughts themselves are neutral. But when you have a landslide of thoughts on a subject and an identity that you’re not enough, that combination creates a story, and that story looks like it’s real!

3. Overthinking and Catastrophising

I remember a coach saying to me that the only battle we are in is the one with ourselves. How true that is.

Here’s something to reflect on. All the feelings you want to feel such as calm, happiness, peace, security and similar, are all there within you. Infact, these feelings reflect your true nature, your true state of being.

Therefore, if you want to feel calm, peaceful and secure within a relationship, you need to recognise what you’re doing which takes you away from your natural state – which is your thinking.

Analysing everything they’ve said or even every message you’ve received will keep you stuck in your head going around in circles.

I recognise the amount of time I’d spend thinking, overthinking, analysing and ruminating about my relationships, instead of being in the present moment.

I’ve worked with hundreds of clients over the years who recognise the amount of time they spend thinking, overthinking, analysing and ruminating, instead of being in the present moment.

Somewhere along the line, we’ve been led to believe that we need to ‘think’ about things to resolve them. Worrying about a relationship is somehow going to help us. When in truth, worry gives you nothing but takes everything away from you.

Journaling has helped me to recognise my habitual thinking and to see it as exactly that – habits of thought. These thoughts give me no information about reality and it’s only if I give these thoughts my attention or believe in them, that they have the power to create a drama.

4. Trying to Control The Relationship

A healthy relationship is one where the couple allows the relationship to naturally unfold. They don’t try to force the relationship to develop. They take time to get to know one another.

Being anxious about where the relationship is going and trying to make things happen is more likely to destroy the relationship, as I discovered. I was the ‘chaser’ in relationships. I was looking to meet the parents, or friends of my partner. Suggest weekends away that in my mind equated commitment. In my twenties, I tried to get a boyfriend to sign up for a National Trust joint membership in a bid to prove he was committed to me and had a complete meltdown when he wouldn’t!

When you feel anxious in a relationship, you’re looking for security, but trying to control the relationship in a bid to feel secure is more likely to push the other person away.

Security is a feeling. Security doesn’t come from anything outside of you. What creates insecurity is lots of insecure thinking.

5. Compromising on What You Want

During my twenties, I was together with someone for six years. The last few years of the relationship I was desperately unhappy and felt very alone, despite being in a relationship. Yet I was too scared to walk away.

I kept trying to convince myself that things would get better.  But the spark was gone. The whole time we were together we had plans to emigrate to Australia. He had secured a visa, and the plan was to apply for a defacto visa for me. However, it was never the right time to apply for it in his mind.  He’d come up with excuses which ebbed away at my self-esteem.

Eventually, I had enough. I left him and booked a flight to Australia and spent three months there. I tried to get sponsored, but it seemed the Universe had different plans for me. I returned to the UK and saw an advert for a life coaching course. There was one place left and I took it.  I had a sense that this was meant to happen. That move paved the way for a brand-new career path as a hypnotherapist, coach and employee wellbeing trainer.

Life is short and you deserve to be with someone who rocks your world! Relationships aren’t all plain sailing and there will be stormy patches at times, but what matters is you feel you’re with someone for all the right reasons.

Everything you want is on the other side of fear. Fear is the ego trying to keep everything the same, no matter how unhappy you are. 

One of my first clients was a wonderful young woman who came for help with anxiety. As part of our time together, it stuck with me that the marriage she was in was a very controlling one. As we worked together, her anxiety subsided and she grew stronger and more confident in herself. As a result, she became more assertive in her marriage. She started to see her partner’s behaviour as controlling and manipulative. Long story short, but thanks to the deep changes she’d made through working with me, she left her marriage, and her job and landed a brilliant new job and met a wonderful new man – and they are still together.

6. The Fear of Vulnerability

At the time I was dating Big, I celebrated my birthday. He came down from Edinburgh and a big group of us went out for dinner and pretty much drank the restaurant dry of red wine. At the end of the evening, feeling half-cut and wearing very high heels, I fell over, landed straight on my face and broke my front tooth. I was traumatised.

I’d gone from having a great night to looking like a pirate with grazes and blood all over my face. There’s nothing like an accident to suddenly sober you up and I decided I needed to go to A&E. Big said he’d come with me, and I refused. All I kept thinking was that he’d come all the way down from Scotland for my birthday and that he hadn’t signed up for this. Looking back, I was already vulnerable because I was a mess, but I couldn’t bear for him to see me like this. I didn’t want to rock the boat by dragging him across town in the early hours of the morning to sit in A&E.

Ironically sitting there on my own in A&E all I wanted was him.

My anxious attachment style meant I was scared to be vulnerable, to show vulnerability. I was trying to project an image that I was perfect and sorted.

Being vulnerable is something a lot of people struggle with.  I’ve learnt that to have healthy relationships I needed to let those guards down and allow people in. As Brene Brown speaks about, there is great power in being vulnerable because it leads to deeper and more beautiful connections.

Conclusion

Dealing with relationship anxiety is a journey, but it’s a crucial one towards building stronger, more loving connections with others and with yourself. By becoming aware of our anxious thoughts and behaviours, we can start to change them.

Relationship anxiety is an area I’ve done huge amounts of self-work on over the last decade. For that reason, I’ve created a 10-week programme specifically designed to help you overcome relationship anxiety, build your self-esteem, value yourself and attract true love!

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Sara Maude

Sara Maude is an Edinburgh Hypnotherapist, Solution-Focused Psychotherapist, EFT Practitioner, Transformational Coach and International Wellbeing Trainer providing in-person and online sessions. Sara provides problem-free therapy which goes deep into the heart of the unconscious mind to create powerful lasting change.