Anxiety can cause so many problems in your life. It can affect your job, social life, friendships, and even your romantic partnership.

Can anxiety interfere in your relationship? Yes.

People who struggle with anxiety often go one of two ways in relationships. Either they’re overly-dependent or avoidant.

Neither of these extremes is suitable for a healthy, balanced relationship. Anxiety can also keep you from opening up to your partner, spending time with them, doing something new together, or showing vulnerability in your relationship.

You don’t have to let anxiety interfere in your relationship. Let’s learn more about the impact it can have and how EFCT can help.

Constant Reassurance

Someone with an anxiety order may be extremely dependent on others. Some of the signs that anxiety is impacting your relationship include:

• You need continual reassurance from your partner.
• You fear rejection.
• You require constant communication.

As you might imagine, expressing these things can grate on a relationship after a while. In these cases, it’s easy to let anxiety interfere in your relationship.

When you express your fears of your partner leaving all of the time, or ask them for reassurance about yourself or your relationship, they might get annoyed quickly. Even partners who want to be a reliable support system can tire of the constant attention you demand.

Avoidance

On the other side of the coin is avoidance. Some people with anxiety tend to become extremely dependent. As a defense mechanism against this particular tendency, they emotionally detach themselves from others.

Anxiety comes with a lot of fear and uncertainty. People who struggle with it often go to great lengths to protect themselves or to feel “safe.”

If you don’t process your feelings entirely in your relationship, anxiety could be the culprit. Or if you try to keep a distance from your partner, it could be your anxiety at work. People who respond to anxiety in this way can come across as cold and uncaring. Naturally, those aren’t characteristics you want in a healthy relationship.

Avoidance in a relationship may also cause your partner to think you aren’t happy. Or, they might even think you want to get out of the relationship, which can lead to fear on their end. It may also trigger some substantial arguments.

How Can EFCT Help?

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT) can help to strengthen your relationship, even when anxiety tries to interfere. EFCT can help by breaking through some of the patterns caused by anxiety.

For instance, if you’re overly dependent and need constant reassurance from your partner, EFCT can teach you how to find a more productive and effective way to express yourself. As a result, you might start to feel less anxious. Plus, the way you talk to your partner about it will be much more pleasant for them.

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy also will teach you how to communicate better with your partner. Anxiety doesn’t always make communication easy, especially when you’re in the midst of extreme fear or worry.

But, again, it’s about breaking old patterns and replacing them with new, more positive ones that you can take with you for the rest of your lives.

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Anxiety can be crippling when left untreated. Getting to the bottom of the cause(s) and starting on a treatment plan will not only help you, but combined with EFCT, it can make your relationship even stronger.

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay area, and you want to learn more about EFCT or how it can help to remedy the anxiety that has interfered in your relationship, please feel free to contact me. Or, visit my [specialty page link] to learn more about how I can help.

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