Are you looking for the magic pill to free you from relationship anxiety?
Are you hoping that you’ll read an Instagram post or see a Tik-Tok video and the pieces of confusion about your relationship will instantly fall into place and in one fantastic movie moment your eyes will be cleansed of fear and your heart will be filled with warm, clear love for your loving partner?
That one magic post that will shatter all doubt and leave you with a drug-like YES of certainty?
Well, I’m sorry to break it to you, but that doesn’t exist!
In our quick-fix, endlessly-scrolling, Instagram-and-Tik-Tok culture that doles out prescriptive remedies like eye candy in the form of 30-second clips, it’s easy to fall into a fantasy that a quick answer exists that will take away your pain.
There is a part of me that fears for the soul of our world, that shakes my head and holds my heart in sadness at the toll that screens are taking on our attention span and our expectations.
And yet…
…there’s another part, a much bigger part, that rejoices because I’m privileged to work with people every day who show up for themselves and commit to doing the deep, hard, slow work of reclaiming their self-trust, self-compassion, joy and love.
Like the young man in one of my small groups who mediates every day shortly after waking up and sits on the train without his phone so that he can be fully present for what’s happening around him. His relationship anxiety is now a quiet whisper that only occasionally vies for attention whereas just a few months ago it was clamoring for center stage 24/7.
Like the course members who write to me years after taking the course to tell me that they’re happily married and that the tools and skills they learned through this work have helped them navigate all of life’s challenges.
Like my long-term clients who, years after resolving their relationship anxiety, bring me their dreams, their parenting challenges, their tears of grief and joy, their very souls.
This is what heartens me.
You see, deep down we don’t really want the quick fix because we know it doesn’t work. The soul longs to delve into the real stuff, even when it’s hard, because this is how we grow. And we’re wired for growth. There’s some part of us that can easily fall down the scrolling rabbit hole and wile away hours on meaningless content, but there’s a much bigger part that is hungry to heal and knows that true healing only happens with real work.
Three Magic Keys
While real work can only happen slowly, there are two keys that are somewhat magical that do help people break free from relationship anxiety:
- Shame Reduction: When you learn that you’re not alone and that there’s an entire community – literally tens of thousands of people (if not more) – who suffer in exactly the same way you do, you can dip beneath the shame barrier that says, “I’m the only one,” and begin to do the real work required to heal relationship anxiety at the root.
- Taking Responsibility: This is essential. Projections and intrusive thoughts are, at the core, an abdication of responsibility in that you’re convincing yourself that the problem is your partner and that if only they were more or less this or that – or you had an entirely different partner – you wouldn’t be feeling so anxious. Here’s one of the cut-through questions to help you break through the conviction that the problem is your partner: Is this the first time in your life you’ve had anxiety? I would bet a lot of money that the answer is NO!
And there’s a third magic key that helps enormously with the first two: being in community and hearing from other people in a live format as they share their struggles. Community is a shame reducer. Listening to others talk about their projections can help you name your own, which helps to de-fuse from the conviction that they’re true and encourage you to take the first steps toward living a life rooted in personal responsibility.
This is what I offer in my Break Free From Relationship Anxiety LIVE Course: not only fourteen in-depth lessons to guide you through the roadmap from fear to freedom (no quick fixes; the course takes weeks or months to work through) but also, through the LIVE option which I only offer once a year, an opportunity to connect with me and others on the group coaching calls.
There’s an additional layer of magic that happens when you know that others are receiving the course material right alongside you: from every corner of this earth, participants are receiving the emails, watching the videos, listening to the visualizations, and reading the articles. You are not alone, and we’re not meant to heal alone.
I’d love to connect with you on this next round, which will start on April 10th, 2022.
Here are the times for the live coaching calls. Keep in mind that only about 1/3 of course members are able to attend live calls, and there is still potency and healing power in listening back to the recordings afterward:
Call 1: April 11 at 6:15pm ET
Call 2: April 26 at 3pm ET
Call 3: May 16 at 6:15pm ET
Call 4: May 31 at 11am ET
