After twenty-five years of working with the theme of relationship anxiety, it’s still the most common way that people find their way to my work. Luckily, I’m still endlessly fascinated by the underlying drivers of this particular anxiety theme, as well as ways to work with it to help people find their clarity and their freedom. I’m also endlessly grateful to receive daily communications from people who have been able to find their way to the other side of fear into the arms of love.
It’s that last sentence that carries one of the most powerful keys to engaging with this – and every other – anxiety theme: fear and love are not opposites but are intimately connected to one another, and, in fact, it’s through the potent energy of fear that we find our way to love.
What does it mean to walk the doorway of fear and find love on the other side?
It means that fear is not our enemy but is an ally in disguise.
The Wisdom of of Relationship Anxiety
With relationship anxiety, fear arrives in the form of doubt, irritation, rumination, and compulsions. It often arrives with the thought, “Do I really love them [enough]?” or as a somatic response of clenched stomach, tight throat, insomnia. Whether it starts or continues to manifest as thoughts or somatics is irrelevant; what matters is how we view and work with the fear.
The typical response is to (mis)assign meaning to the fear-based thoughts and feelings. We hear “Am I really in love?” and we immediately assume that we’re in the wrong relationship, despite a wise part of us who trusts that we’re with a loving, well-matched partner with whom we can grow and learn about love. We feel the clenched stomach and we recognize it as a sign of danger (truth), then (mis)assign the source of danger to our partner.
Why is it dangerous to be in a committed, romantic relationship? Because we know the we can – and will – get hurt. (I’ll be writing more about this next week, but if you’d like to learn more make sure you listen or re-listen to our Gathering Gold episode on Trauma Collisions.) Will this hurt result in loss of life? No! But our amygdala doesn’t know that. This reptilian part of our brain is designed to keep us safe, and when it registers threat it can’t differentiate between physical and emotional danger. It only knows that we need to run.
The task, however, is to stay and learn how to widen our capacity to love and be loved, which means widening our capacity to feel pain and move toward fear. This is one of the greatest invitations of relationship anxiety: to learn how to work with the fear/love revolving doorway.
Resisting Pain
This is no easy task, as we are hardwired to resist pain. It rises up in us and we want to push it down, run from it, do anything we can to get away from it. There is an ancient belief inside of us that says, “It’s too much. I can’t handle it. It will overpower me.”
I believe that this hardwired response is both biological – every sentient being recoils from pain – and cultural – most of us were raised with familial and societal message to “get over it” whenever any difficult emotion arose.
I also believe that part of our task at this stage of our evolution is to learn how to soften into pain. We are being asked to grow our collective emotional intelligence by widening the capacity of the heart to feel grief, fear, and uncertainty, and one of the most powerful ways to do this is through the portal of relationship anxiety.
In order to do this, we must know that this is our task, otherwise we mistakenly interpret that fear-based thoughts and feelings as evidence that we’re with the wrong person. How else could be interpret them when we’re never learned another way?
Another Way
Imagine what it would be like to feel or hear the fear and instead of jumping on the first train of interpretation to instead pause and learn how to be with the fear instead?
And what if every time you did that, you harnessed the power of fear’s fire and realized, over time, that it was enlarging your capacity to love?
We think that doubt and love have nothing to do with each other. But everything changes when we learn instead to scoop the doubt into the great cauldron of our inner world and allow it to do its work: the warrior work of alchemizing fear into love.
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
