Anxiety kills relationship communication. When you're anxious, you can't calm down enough to listen to what your partner's saying, because you're too busy thinking about what you want to say next. If you want to have a productive relationship talk, start by taking a few deep breaths, and invite your partner to do the same. If you start to go into fight or flight mode, take a break and continue the conversation once you've calmed down. Calm is contagious, and anxiety is also contagious. The more anxiety you bring into the conversation, the less progress you'll make.

When you feel abandoned or overwhelmed, you might blame your partner for these feelings and the physical sensations that accompany them. In reality, this distress has more to do with your childhood than with your partner. While your stress is related to your relationship and your partner contributes to your distress, they are not the cause of it, nor will they be the solution. As a child, you had to maintain a close emotional relationship with your parents to survive. That’s why your body experiences so much distress when you feel abandoned or overwhelmed by your partner. These feelings are not an accurate reflection of what it means to be an adult; they are just emotional flashbacks from childhood.

Touch

One partner is the giver and the other is the receiver. We will switch roles after few minutes.

When I am the giver: take a deep breath and allow my body to settle down. Search my soul for the love I still feel for my partner. Reach out and communicate that love through a gentle caress on the hand or arm. This requires me to let go of the tension, anger, and hurt I have been holding on to.

When I am the receiver: settle myself enough to receive my partner’s touch. Reach out with my heart to receive what is being given. Accept my partners’ gift without judgment.

Children who do not get enough positive emotional engagement from their parents sometimes turn to disruptive behavior as a way to attract negative emotional attention. Family card games, especially games that involve bluffing and guessing, help children learn to tolerate intense emotions, self-soothe, and enjoy emotional interactions with family members.

My favorite way of working through anxiety is to focus my attention on my place in the physical world. This starts with what is happening inside my own body: if I’m anxious, I probably have a sense of pain or tightness in my chest or stomach. That physical sensation is more real than the imagination games that feed on my anxiety, so it’s a good place to start. I notice what my body is experiencing, and open myself up to it: it’s OK for me to feel what I’m feeling right now.

Like other relationship difficulties, a breach of trust is an opportunity for personal growth. Take the chance to re-evaluate what kind of person you’re in a relationship with, and how good you are at determining how trustworthy they are. In the end, it’s more important to trust yourself than it is to trust your partner.

When we were children, we were vulnerable to being abandoned or overwhelmed. We regulated our emotional state by trying to increase connection with our parents if we felt abandoned, or trying to decrease it if felt overwhelming. Our brains were programmed to maintain a reasonable level of connection with our parents, because we needed it to survive.

Our bodies used intense, unpleasant physical sensations to make us take action in those situations. As adults, we still feel those sensations, especially in relationships. Have you ever felt a tightness in your chest or stomach when you want more (or less) attention from your partner? This physical distress makes sense in a child/parent relationship, where the child needs the parent for survival. It doesn’t make sense in an adult relationship, but it happens anyway. Our bodies are telling us lies.

Somatic acceptance is the practice of noticing, accepting, and feeling kindness toward the unpleasant physical sensations that accompany intense emotions. By noticing the physical component of intense emotions, we can increase our emotional capacity and our ability to tolerate intimacy. The practice of somatic acceptance has helped many of my clients let go of their need to “do something” about intense emotions.

During an intense, frightening, or dangerous experience, the brain shuts off higher-level thinking in favor of low-level survival protocols. After the event is past, there is an opportunity to reprocess what happened with the brain fully engaged.

Writing is an excellent way to do this reprocessing. Writing engages the prefrontal cortex and helps us add structure to difficult memories. This can move a memory from the survival category to the “something that is no longer a threat” category. When memories stay in the survival category, they trigger emotional flashbacks, also known as trauma responses. These are the intense feelings we get that have more to do with the past than the present.

The way we breathe changes the way we feel. Each of these exercises can help you feel less fear, sadness, and anxiety.

You can’t fill your lungs if you’re hunched over. Sit up straight or lie down, and tilt your head back to make room for more air in your lungs.

Intentional breathing sends an “I’m safe” message to the brain, helping the body relax.

Most marriages incorporate a dynamic where one partner tries to soothe anxiety by seeking emotional and physical closeness, while the other tries to soothe anxiety by seeking emotional and physical distance Each partner's behavior intensifies and reinforces the other’s. This is called the anxious-avoidant or pursuer-distancer dynamic. I’ll use the second term here because both sides of the dynamic are equally anxious.

Kate had a clear memory of her father's actions, but not of his internal state. Her little-girl brain had constructed a world where her father was not responsible for his own behavior, didn't know what he was doing, and was unaware of the consequences of his actions. None of this was true, but it is the way abused children see the world. When Kate reprocessed the memory with her adult brain, she was able to create a clear reconstruction of what role her father had actually played.

These exercises, developed by sex and relationship therapist Dr. David Schnarch, are designed to help you learn to be physically and emotionally close to your partner without being overwhelmed by anxiety or other difficult emotions. They work best when practiced regularly over time.

Romantic relationships almost always happen between two people at similar levels of emotional development. Once the relationship is established, both partners grow or stagnate together. If you think you are significantly more (or less) mature, kind, or loving than your partner, you probably aren’t.

We don’t get the sudden ability to manage our own emotionality just because we had a kid. Parenting pushes us to become more capable of emotional regulation. Our children will always operate at a fraction of our won emotional skill level. It’s unreasonable to expect any child to exceed their parent’s emotional maturity, but that is exactly what we do when we ask our children to regulate their emotions more skillfully than we do ourselves.

My first operational assignment as an Air Force helicopter pilot was to a nuclear missile base in Montana. Within a few months of arriving at that base I had developed an unhealthy relationship with Captain Bradford (not his real name), one of the senior pilots in the squadron. He would find opportunities to degrade and belittle me, and I lived in constant fear of him.

Infants use intense emotional expression (crying) to get their needs met. As adults we often resort to the same strategy: using emotional intensity to manipulate others. This behavior is instinctive and hard to grow out of.

Most relationship arguments are about differences in preference and perception. If perception is Point A (where I am, where you are, where we are) then preference is Point B (where I want to be, where I want you to be, where I want us to be.) Point A is what I see, and Point B is what I want.

Healthy conflict is good for relationships, and most relationships actually need more conflict, not less. We avoid conflict because we are afraid of upsetting each other, but the conflict ends up happening anyway, in more harmful ways. Here are seven examples of healthy relationship conflict:

Self-respect is something we build, not something we are born with. As an adult, you are probably already building your self-respect by becoming the kind of person you want to be, and avoiding the temptation of trying to become the kind of person someone else wants you to be.