Relationships can be a great source of pleasure, joy and happiness, enjoying each other’s company and spending quality time together.
You may already know this; your issues aren’t obsessiveness, OCD or anxiety, it is fear. This fear when intensified has turned into anxiety. Your fear of losing someone is the driving force for your anxiety. It is natural to have a small level of fear at the start of a relationship; you don’t know each other, however over time this anxiety disappears as a healthy relationship develops. Your fear leads to worrying and a constant need for reassurance. These behaviours can create a distance between you and your partner, the more you try and pull your partner into the relationship, the more he/she may pull away because it can become suffocating for them. This fear can make your fear come true, that your partner will leave, through your behaviours.
The causes for your fear can be down for several situations:
- Past pain, you‘ve felt in previous relationships
- Unconscious fear – a fear you feel however you don’t know where it’s come from
- Feeling vulnerable and the fear of being hurt
- Your un-comfortableness being in a healthy relationship
- Fear of getting too close to someone
To deal with this underlying fear, identify where it stems from and dealing with the feelings you had. Work on challenging your thoughts. When you know the feeling of fear or the paranoid thoughts creeps in, don’t accept them, tell them to go away repeatedly until they do. As you do this increasingly, the easier it will become, the intensity of your thoughts and feels will decrease.
