Anxious About Disconnection in Relationships?

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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach who's been helping others do the same with excellent results since about 2018. Today, I want to talk about those of you who experience panic or anxiety in your relationship when there's any sort of disconnection. Now, this might be that your partner starts to become distant in some way. It might become quiet. Maybe they're working a lot, or maybe you're going through a lot of arguments in your relationship. This could be a lot of disconnection. It could be very minor disconnection. This could even show up in the dating stages when the person isn't texting you back regularly. Or. Or sometimes we have this certain idea of the way we want things to look. So if they're not texting us every single day or they're not texting us every morning, our brains can really get this picture of what we want things to look like and then anxiety when they don't look that way. This is very common when you have anxiety or ocd. Some people might talk about insecure attachment styles and any sort of disconnection can cause fear. If we have fears around relationships and connection, but the reality is disconnection in relationships is actually very normal. Relationships have ups and downs. There are going to be times where you're connecting really well, times where one or both of you is very busy, in a bad mood, sick, whatever that thing might be focused on something else in life, and you're not going to be quite as connected as before. And what we have to do is work with the fear that we're getting in these moments. Now, one thing I will say is if you do have a partner that is constantly shutting down, not communicating or not opening up and sharing what's going on.

Being consistent with their connection and communication, then, yeah, maybe there's something to address there. But when we're experiencing high levels of anxiety anytime that there's a day or two where things aren't as normal or perfect as maybe they were before. So it's one thing to have consistent disconnection in a relationship from a lack of effort, and it's another thing to have normal levels of disconnection in a relationship where you do end up reconnecting with time or depending on the stage of your relationship, if you're at the beginning of a relationship and you haven't committed to that person yet, you may not get a text every single day. Sometimes we have to give things time to establish and build. But. But when we have anxiety or ocd, we tend to let little moments create big amounts of anxiety. Anxiety can often be we really want to look at when the anxiety is out of proportion with what is actually happening. And sometimes you're going to need help with figuring this out. Right? Sometimes it can feel like our anxiety is in proportion to what's happening because our brain is misjudging based on the fear. But essentially, when we have high anxiety in relationships or relationship ocd, our brain is hyper vigilant. It's scanning for danger and it's taking little moments that there may really be nothing wrong and making it seem like there is something wrong. It's noticing every little moment that there may be disconnection or uncertainty and it's creating a lot of anxiety around that. And the good news is we can retrain our brains to get, get out of this. I've been there myself. And with exposure and response prevention, what happens is the things that cause us discomfort with ERP treatment start to get more and more and more comfortable. We cannot run away from things that cause fear because when we avoid, it's just going to reinforce that fear. We're going to experience the same thing again somewhere else and the fear is going to be the same. So running away from it isn't going to help. Facing it is what's going to help. Leaning into it, acceptance. A lot of these tools are going to be really helpful. When it comes to fear, which sometimes feels like fear and sometimes feels like discomfort. There are very specific tips and tools that are going to help you work through this. Whether we're talking about ocd, anxiety, fear, discomfort, avoidance, exposure and response prevention works for all of this. So what is currently really uncomfortable for you can become very comfortable with the right help. I have been there myself and I promise you that this works. I used to really struggle with anxiety in relationships. I used to really struggle with all of this, and I don't anymore. It's taken time and finding the right help. But it's also important to learn how to react when your brain or your body is giving you thoughts or feelings around these scenarios. There are things that we're going to do that are going to make it worse, like seeking a lot of reassurance, trying to connect in an anxious way, checking, acting out. There's a lot of ways that we actually make this thing worse that we don't really want. And then there are ways that we can make it better. And it takes practice because we first have to learn when this fear and discomfort showing up, which you sometimes may know, and other times may sneak up on you, but it's learning to do something different than you're already doing when you want different results. I hope this was helpful. Please stay tuned next week for a new video. It's going to help you learn more about anxiety and OCD and eliminate these symptoms completely from your life.