Break Free From
Relationship Anxiety Course

“You must receive hundreds of emails a day, so I’m sorry for filling your inbox, but I felt moved to send you a personal thank-you. Sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, I want you to know that you and your e-course have been a gift from heaven for me.

“It has only been a week and a half since I found your course online and poured through everything, but honestly my thoughts and perspectives prior to going through the course seem decades in the past. I’m going back through the course again to do some of the exercises which, of course, are making me rehash the thoughts that brought me here in the first place, but I’m actually having trouble connecting with those thoughts now. They don’t even make sense to me today.

“From listening to other stories, I’m sure it’s just wishful thinking to imagine that I’m out of it now, so I know to prepare mentally for the thoughts and anxiety to come back, but I will be ready for it and until then I will remain hopeful that I’m out of the darkness.

“This last weekend with my boyfriend was nothing short of magical. This is the man I’ve been with for close to five years, but it was as if I was seeing him with new eyes. His jokes seemed funnier, his face seemed more handsome. It’s like the anxiety has been a cloud blocking my ability to love him and I’m just now learning how to truly appreciate our connection. How to be content and happy with what is right in front of me.

“And as an added bonus of no anxiety for the last week and a half, I’ve slept like a baby every night. It feels so good to be well rested. From the bottom of my heart: thank you, Sheryl!”

Sara, Denver CO

“I am feeling incredibly compelled to write you today. I have been moving through your relationship anxiety course. I cannot count how many times I’ve had a moment where I was completely blown away by the truth you share in each lesson. The first year of my beautiful relationship would’ve been met with more compassion towards myself and my partner had I found this course sooner. Though I believe I found it exactly when I was ready to break through my ego and allow my true self to shine through.

“This year I lost my father and may have allowed old wounds, projection, and personal frustrations to take me back to the anxiety I always seemed to cycle through. I could’ve easily imploded the very relationship I both need and want love and growth. With this work, I’ve come to understand not only my romantic relationships but why I have made certain choices in my life. I feel like I have found a tribe of kindred spirits who understand my sensitive soul and want to help guide me in this process. I’ve been looking for that my entire life.

“This course sums up perfectly every lesson life has handed me with my 2 1/2 year relationship. It is beautiful, sad, heart-opening, loving, fulfilling, and everything in between. I cannot believe that precisely the words I needed to hear are on every page of the reading and in every minute of the videos. Thank you is too small. You have given me the tools to free my heart and more importantly, embark on a greater journey of self-love. I am forever grateful.

Thank you for changing my life.”

Louise W.

“As a sensitive person with a history of anxiety spikes throughout my life, I was shocked at how transformational the course curriculum was for me. I had suffered for 15 years before I found Sheryl’s work. Doing this work has done more than neutralize my crippling anxiety around my gender transition; it has also helped me get to the core of who I am and to unpack layers of defenses I didn’t even know I had.”

Ethan C, transgender ftm

“Engaging is Sheryl’s work has changed my life in ways I didn’t imagine possible. What’s been the best ‘result’ is that I feel more me, and my relationship feels more real. I’m less caught up in the mainstream culture of ‘do more, be more have more’, and my life and relationship are a reflection of the hard work I’ve done and the guidance Sheryl has provided. For so long I thought I was an exception, that my anxiety was different than the others going through the work.

“What I learned is that I’m not different. I’ve learned so much about myself, about my relationship, that I wouldn’t trade my experience for anything. The work is about coming into contact with all that lives inside you, learning to embrace all the parts of yourself lovingly so you can share that love with others. If you’re in a loving relationship with someone you generally enjoy and with whom you share generally similar values, yet are plagued by anxiety please consider her courses. Having a real love relationship, one in which there are ebbs and flows, hardship and ease, is so much better than bouncing around waiting for the perfect someone to make your every waking moment a joyful one. Won’t happen. It’s so possible to work through this anxiety and to dip your toes in the waters of real love, and it’s so worth the work to get there.”

Sarah Love, Ann Arbor, MI

“I know the insights I started to gain through this process will serve me for a lifetime, and they have already started to influence my thinking and experiences about many areas of my life (job, other relationships, motherhood, etc). With the deepest appreciation, thank you, Sheryl, for helping me to see all of that!”

Caitlin, Vermont

“‘Am I just with him because he treats me so well?’ Perplexed by whether or not to call it quits with my boyfriend of only a few months, I broke down and wrote an email cry for help to Sheryl asking what to do. Although she couldn’t make the decision for me despite my urging, she did suggest the e-course. I hesitated at first, as my partner and I had only been seeing each other for a few months, and I didn’t even know if I wanted to be in a relationship with him. While I enjoyed spending time with him – he’s smart, generous, thoughtful, and loves me unconditionally – I was still so unsure. Sheryl appealed, noting:

‘The nicer the guy, the more fear it will activate. It sounds like you have a great guy on your hands and you owe it to yourself to do everything you can to address what’s interfering with your ability to be fully present in the relationship. If not now, when?’

“The answer was now. I dived head first into the e-course and made a commitment to work through my anxiety without sacrificing my relationship. Each lesson touched on an anxiety pain point I was experiencing, from projection to real love to managing my anxiety in the moment. I found relief with each passing day. Interviews, message board wisdom, gratitude lists, and targeted exercises helped me to see that I was not alone in my thoughts; and not only that, but that I could be happy in my relationship. The forum allowed me to share my fears with like-minded men and women who were encountering similar experiences. In conjunction with a counselor, diet and exercise, prayer, and support of loving family and friends, the e-course kick-started positive changes that have reverberated in every aspect of my life. I cannot thank Sheryl enough for warming my cold feet on that December day and for guiding me along this incredible journey to wholeness.”

KD, New York

“My mind became like a roller coaster. Relationship anxiety triggered even more fear, uncertainty, doubt and confusion and a great amount of anxiety with all sorts of physical manifestations. I googled about it and came across Sheryl’s website. It was comforting for me to realize that I could put a word on it, but I was still very confused. I was reading blog posts but it took me quite some time before I got the courage to sign up for the course. There was a lot of resistance about what I might find out if I do this work.

“I didn’t realize at that time what kind of inner work is ahead of me – it’s not the easiest thing I have ever done :-), but as any worthwhile thing in our lives (which real, good relationship definitely is) it requires some effort. The e-course was really eye opening to me and so interesting. I’ve never come across such well-designed e-course with so much information in different formats.

“It has been an interesting journey for me since then, because it doesn’t just help me deal with my relationship anxiety but it is also a big help with my anxiety in general. The e-course includes a wide spectrum of information and knowledge that are all linked to relationships but also to other part of our lives. I’m learning new ways of connecting to myself through yoga, writing poetry, learning mindfulness meditation. I’m also learning how to work with thoughts and so on. The benefits for me are huge.

“There are times when we make a decision just by blind faith and I think the decision to sign up for this e-course is one of them. I encourage you to make this decision and gain so much out of it. I sure have and it still continues to be a work-in-progress.”

Sasa, Slovenia

My initiation into anxiety came off the back of numerous significant life transitions that I had absolutely no idea how to navigate: moving cities, publishing a novel, moving back in with my mum, changing jobs, flying to the other side of the world and campervanning for six weeks and, finally, being asked by my boyfriend to marry him. I thought I could waltz my way through all of this tumult without a care in the world, but my sensitive constitution was calling for consciousness, gentleness and grounding. Not knowing this at the time, anxiety came down on me like a ton of bricks: I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, my head hurt, my chest hurt, I had episodes of being unable to breathe properly, my ears rang, I lost so, so much weight and was completely at the mercy of the most excruciating intrusive thoughts. In the meantime, more changes were afoot as I started a new job, moved into a new flat and became an aunt all amidst the longest and hottest summer ever recorded in the UK. I was emotionally crippled.

Like many other people, I googled my symptoms and my thoughts and thankfully found Sheryl’s website. I had found other websites that had encouraged leaving your partner if you felt doubt, or espoused that if you loved him but were not ‘in love’ with him then that was a good reason to break up. These were truly scary to read and did not give me the answers I was looking for. I knew something bigger was at work here: it was Sheryl’s book and website that gave me a language and a context for what was happening to me. I was completely and utterly terrified of being loved, being vulnerable and surrendering to the great uncertainty of life. It turns out that thousands of other people all over the world had experienced that exact same thing and that in spite of the pain, this was an excellent opportunity and a gift.

My main fear and resistance lines that arose around buying the course where strong but, I have come to know, very common. They revolved around doing the work and still discovering I would have to leave; that doing this work successfully would require nothing short of a personality transplant; that it wouldn’t work for me because I was the exception and worst case scenario; that Sheryl didn’t actually know what she was talking about (what’s 20 years of counselling experience worth anyway?!) and that simply by having to embark on this course and needing Sheryl’s work, I was already a failure. My mind would latch onto every possible fear outcome. Clicking ‘Buy’ is a massive act of courage: it requires so much bravery to hear those fear lines and to push on regardless. But it is so, so worth it.

The course has given me the emotional education I wish I had been given at school. I learned about projection; taking responsibility for myself; that paradox is at the heart of living and loving fully; that real love isn’t the adolescent Disney fantasy that we are exposed to and want to be true; that sensitivity and creativity are gifts that are so underappreciated in our society and can result in sensitive-creative-anxious people squashing themselves into boxes of shame and not attending to their needs fully. Most importantly, I have learnt how to cultivate an inner loving adult to attend to my hurt places, to my fears and worries, to show up for myself when I feel alone, listless and completely out of control. This takes time to develop, because it is truly the work of a life time, but with the tools and practices Sheryl teaches like meditation, Tonglen and dialoguing, the creative expression she encourages through letter writing, poetry and dance and the bibliography she provides of books, audio files and articles, you are given so much material to guide you. Additionally, she provides the stories of people who have been exactly where you are to give reassurance, to help explore the roots of anxiety and to give you hope that you too will heal. I also loved the spiritual element of Sheryl’s work: I am not religious but I have always believed in something bigger, that we are all connected in this wonderful expansive universe. We are made of the same basic chemistry as the trees and the stars: that gives me such a sense of belonging! This course has given me the opportunity to explore that fully and to find comfort and grounding in that, especially when I feel lost and out of control: off the back of the course, I have been inspired to research the works of Pema Chodron, Ram Dass and the Tao Te Ching. I have transformed my Instagram feed from an endless scroll of selfies to recipe channels, quotes by Thich Nhat Hanh and videos of public speakers like Brene Brown. The course teaches you how to surround yourself with the goodness and nourishment you never even knew you needed.

If you are here, you will know that you are crossed some kind of threshold: you may have arrived at this point willingly but you may also have been dragged across it kicking and screaming, like I was. Either way, you know that the anxiety you are experiencing requires your attention. You need a context, you need to know what is happening inside you and you need to know how to help yourself move towards clarity and peace. On some level, you know that these fear lines and habits and ways of thinking are not serving you (even though they are telling you that they are) and that the time has come to learn how to be with yourself, how to heal old pain and how to open your heart. I know it feels like you can’t do this, but you can. Sheryl and the amazing community she has built are here to help you!

Elizabeth, Nottingham, UK