Understanding and Overcoming Separation Anxiety in Relationships

If you regularly watch the time as you wait for your partner to return home, obsessively check your phone for messages from them, or feel physically ill at the thought of them going away on a work trip, you may be experiencing separation anxiety.

Separation anxiety in relationships looks like many different things, from physical nervousness to mental anguish, but consistent issues are lurking beneath it. Separation anxiety is almost always connected to fear of abandonment, self-esteem issues, and emotional wounds from childhood neglect.

When you feel separation anxiety and your partner does not, it can cause major imbalances in the relationship. There is no switch you can flip to turn off the separation anxiety. You might be aware of the strain you are placing on the relationship or how you are overwhelming and frustrating your partner, but you can’t stop.

Separation anxiety in relationships is almost always linked to wounds that need healing and trauma that needs to be resolved. It’s not easy to do, and you can’t always do it alone, but you can start to find healing today.

What Separation Anxiety in Relationships Feels Like

Like other forms of anxiety, separation anxiety in relationships can be exhausting for everyone involved. It usually starts with the build-up: you know your partner is going away for a few days, and you feel anxious in advance. Your stomach curls up into a ball, you feel restless and on edge, and you become preemptively upset with your partner, even though they have done nothing wrong.

You know that you won’t see them for a few days, or in some cases, a few hours, and this makes you feel a lot of things. Sometimes you can’t name the emotions you feel, but they are strong, and they deeply affect you. People with separation anxiety struggle with being alone more than most.

Being alone means having too much time to think, and your thoughts frequently become intense as they turn to your partner. It’s natural to wonder what your loved one is doing and to be curious about who they are interacting with, or to wonder if they are thinking of you as often as you think of them.

However, with separation anxiety, you can’t help but imagine the worst-case scenarios and picture something tragic happening when you haven’t heard from your partner in a while.

Not only does this fatalistic thinking deeply affect your mood, making the anxiety more intense, but it also spills out into the way you treat your partner. You might find yourself becoming cool and detached with them when you are together again, as you try to communicate your displeasure with them for leaving you.

Alternatively, perhaps you constantly downplay your emotions. You bury your intensity and anxiety beneath a mask. Despite feeling that you are drowning in concern and worry, you have mastered the art of appearing at ease, even when your nervous actions betray you.

Unshaken Affection

One of the most tragic consequences of separation anxiety in relationships is that you confuse your partner’s secure attachment with disinterest. When you have a partner who is totally at ease with you and with the relationship, their energy will look different from your own.

Your experience of love and affection is feverish and intense, punctuated with jealousy and distrust. You feel like you compete with anyone who gets close to them. By contrast, they trust you easily and don’t feel the need to obsess over you because they know you’re not going anywhere, and neither is the relationship.

To the person with anxious attachment, secure attachment often looks suspiciously quiet or disconnected. They don’t check their phones for texts from you every few minutes because they know you are alright. They think of you often, but not obsessively. You are an integral aspect of their life, but not their sole focus. Being together with you is a highlight for them in a book full of events, both good and bad.

Secure love can be intense, but it is not obsessive. Secure love can make you feel nervous and slightly on edge, but over time, it is calmer and grounded because it is rooted in trust. Secure affection is quiet, patient, calm, and unproblematic.

Separation anxiety in relationships is almost always connected to a fear of being abandoned or a wound from neglect. For you, love feels intense, uncertain, chaotic, and temporary. You feel like you must prove your worth, or make yourself indelible in their memories, because people are prone to forgetting you. You structure your life around your partner and centralize them in hopes that they will do the same for you.

The truth is that secure love and lasting affection are a lot calmer, steadier, and quieter than perhaps anything you have been used to in the past. Your partner might not match your energy or intensity, but this does not mean they don’t care for you as much as you do for them. On the contrary, perhaps their love for you is deeply rooted in the firm soil of trust, contentment, and peace. Closing the gap of time and distance with you feels like coming home.

A House Built Upon the Rock

Many people know that they have wounds that need to be healed and behavior that needs to be corrected, but they simply don’t know where to start or what to do. Perhaps you know that your separation anxiety is causing issues in your relationship, but you don’t know how to change. All kinds of anxiety are exhausting to deal with, and most people would flip a switch and turn it off if it were that easy.

To overcome separation anxiety in relationships, you must face and resolve any trauma you’ve experienced in your life. It might be from childhood or more recently, or it might be a pattern throughout all your relationships. You are likely anxious because you are afraid, and you are likely afraid of being neglected, abandoned, or treated as worthless.

You can find security in a relationship, and you can find some healing in love, but another person will never fully heal you. It causes more damage when you try to use people and relationships as bandages over unhealed wounds. Below the bandage, the wound continues to fester, and the infection will spread to the relationship.

You heal yourself by working on your self-esteem. You must recognize your value to your partner, but also your value outside of any relationship. You have something to offer the world that no one else has. Your purpose is far broader and more important than being a partner in a relationship. There are multiple defining roles for you to take in life, even if you can’t see what those are right now.

Your partner is a deeply meaningful addition to your life, just as you are to theirs. If your life revolves around a relationship, though, you will run the risk of never fully feeling satisfied. Your partner does not have everything it takes to make you healthy, healed, and happy; they are only human, just like you.

Trying to extract everything you need from your partner will leave them feeling drained. May today be the start of a journey that leads to you realizing that you are enough and that you have enough to feel satisfied in life.

It’s not easy to resolve trauma and overcome separation anxiety, and it’s twice as hard to do it alone. We suggest that you find a counselor and undertake the healing journey with them. We hope that you can find a suitable counselor in our online catalog, or by speaking with our reception team online or over the phone.