Is Anxiety Poisoning Your Personal Relationships?

Sometimes anxiety just sucks. Worst of all when it affects more than just me. Of course I try to limit that - how much of it leaks out, how much it affects the people I care about most. But there's really no preventing it affecting them.

Anxiety is a tide - relentless, and difficult to turn

Standing against it may seem like the courageous thing to do. It can feel like protecting those around us- if only you try hard enough. Whether that's the right thing to do or not the reality is that more often than not it just doesn't work. It can't. And if I'm honest, I'm probably protecting myself as much as those I love.

Anxiety affects your whole life

Some of the roughest waters are to be found in the area of intimacy. I've thought it isn't worth trying, contemplated giving up.

Anxiety and depression can suck the fun and meaning out of personal relationships. Even if you're a total match in the usual dating arenas (likes, dislikes, his/her willingness to vacuum the floor when you can't face getting out of bed), anxiety has a distinct tendency to overwhelm it.

Sense of futility aside, it is perfectly possible to have a thing, keep a thing, enjoy a thing. With someone. With an anxiety disorder (you, or them. possibly both.). For a very long time.

Why does anxiety gets in the way of intimacy?

If you're anxious you're pretty much just going to have a hard time adding any kind of vulnerability or loss of control to your life. But what else are relationships if not a certain willingness to let go, to trust, give and receive in new and potentially healing ways?

Relationships & anxiety: the essentials are even more essential

The usual story is that the basics, like trust, are based on communication. For anxious folks that means showing up, every single day, in as many ways as possible. If you don't, you get nervous. Suddenly there's more pressure.

Strange thoughts crop up - and maybe a few memories of none too pleasant Christmases past. You wonder how your partner could ever understand. No matter how understanding, caring, loving, compassionate they actually are.

Anxiety is a hole in your heart

Relationships can bridge the gap. They can also make you question everything you think you know about yourself, the world, your partner. All at the same time. So yeah, they're messy.

For the very same reasons that I'm searching for a particular kind of security in a relationship, relationships will trigger nerves, and panic. It's a hard thing to face.

It's also about a choice: A choice not to assume that you, and whomever you are with, are insane to even entertain the idea of an intimate partnership.

Even if I'm positive someone loves me, there'll be days that I'll wake up, shaken by fear. Rather than stirred, by love. Like I should be.

Maybe should isn't a useful word? It's just the way I, the way anxious people, think. Anxiety so easily sweeps away the better things in life, replacing them with chaos, and fear.

Yes, the tide will turn - but holding onto a feeling you can't always feel, even if you know it's there, takes a willingness to wade through a world of crap churned up in the meanwhile. Let's face it, relationships are a whole lot of "meanwhile".

It's hard to hold onto the feeling of being loved

It's hard to receive and accept and cherish each other, ourselves, the way we need, when we're anxious:

For all that love is a many splendid thing, relationships take a world of commitment. For anyone with an anxiety disorder to enter into a relationship, it means working harder than most.

A lot of us are willing to work that hard but that doesn't make it easy. And it certainly doesn't take away from the fact that anxiety complicates even the best times of our lives.

to be continued...