Even though many of these thoughts are kept to ourselves, you’re actually not alone in this. In my NYC therapy practice, I often work with people who experience these vulnerable thoughts. It can be healing to learn that a different, sometimes more easily wounded, part of us shows up in romantic relationships than in other areas of our life, which helps explain some of the confusion around the contrast in how we feel. Trying to talk yourself out of the anxieties, worries, and fears that show up in dating often doesn’t work.
Additionally, much of the popular advice out there to “be chill” or “care less” usually doesn’t help and can leave us feeling even worse. That’s because this isn’t about being too much or not enough. It’s about patterns, experiences, and deep emotional wiring that can absolutely shift once we begin working with them, instead of against them. Relationship therapy provides a space where we can begin to gently explore that disconnect so you can feel like yourself in all areas of your life, with love no longer being the exception.
What Is Therapy For Relationship Issues?
Therapy for relationship issues can be confusing, and a question I often get asked is how it’s different from couples therapy. In couples therapy, we often (but not always) focus on issues that are created and continued by two people. In relationship therapy, we focus on one person’s experience in romantic relationships, whether that’s dating, your current romantic relationship, or your history in romantic relationships. This type of therapy helps you understand your own feelings and struggles. With this approach, you can feel better and build healthier relationships in the present and in the future.
This type of therapy isn’t about fixing anyone else or even fixing yourself. It’s more about getting to know yourself and your relationship patterns on a deeper level. Ultimately, the goal is to help you start to feel better overall. As a relationship therapist, one of the first things I often share with people early on in therapy is that relationships have been around long enough to be studied. Because of that, we actually know what makes relationships work, what helps them thrive, and what causes them to fall apart. We can use this research and knowledge to support us in building healthy, fulfilling relationships. Relationships are a skill, not something we’re just supposed to automatically know how to do, especially if we weren’t shown how growing up. Like any other skill, we can learn, grow, and get better with the right support.
Symptoms Of Relationship Issues
I understand that a lack of stability and security in your relationships can feel incredibly lonely, hopeless, and even scary. Looking around and seeing couples with partners who support them, attend events together, and tackle life’s challenges side by side can easily make anyone feel like something is wrong with them. It’s important to remember that there’s nothing wrong with you for not having a certain level of success in romantic relationships. Instead, it’s often a signal that you might need some TLC (my fav - tender love and care) rather than criticism to ease your relationship anxiety.
Some common signs of the impact of relationship issues include:
Feeling preoccupied with dating or your current romantic relationship. Especially when you're not with the person you're seeing or dating.
A history of relationships that feel chaotic, stressful, or what others might call “toxic.”
Heightened anxiety when you're not in a relationship.
Avoiding difficult conversations and not wanting to bring up your feelings or things others have done that may have upset you.
Trouble trusting people you have dated or are currently dating.
Feeling inadequate and worrying that there's something wrong with you because your relationships haven’t quite worked out.
Comparing yourself to those around you who are in relationships.
Childhood trauma or relationship trauma at any point in your life.
Hyper-awareness of others’ behavior, especially the person you’re dating or in a relationship with.
A fear of being rejected that may sometimes lead to difficulty being vulnerable.
Feeling emotions intensely and quickly, which may sometimes lead to reactions that feel big.
Small disagreements may make you feel panicked or like they’re an indicator that the relationship is in jeopardy. This may cause you to shut down, lash out, or need immediate reassurance from your partner or other support systems, like friends.
A history of dating people who are emotionally unavailable. Or noticing that you may be “drawn to” emotionally unavailable people.
A sense of hopelessness and fear about being alone for a long period of time.
Fears of abandonment and often wondering when, or if, people you love will end the relationship, even if there isn’t evidence they will.
The Benefits Of Therapy For Relationship Issues In NYC
Often, the main goal of working with a therapist for relationship issues is to feel better on a day-to-day basis. Because romantic relationships are so closely tied to the way our body functions on a physical level, feeling anxious in relationships often leads to distress, sometimes quite severe, throughout the day. Anxiety in relationships can even trigger our fight-or-flight response. You know, the thing that makes us feel like we’re being chased by a bear when it’s really just a text back we didn’t receive. The issue with feeling this way is that when we don’t feel good, our relationships suffer.
When we’re anxious, it can make everything harder in our relationships. Anxiety can make it tough to communicate, trust, or just be present with our partner, which can lead to arguments or feeling disconnected. The more anxious we feel, the harder it gets to connect, and the harder it is to connect, the more anxious we become. It’s a cycle that just keeps going. The good news is, the cycle also works the other way. When we start feeling better and less anxious, we’re able to show up more calmly and clearly in our relationships. This makes it easier to talk things through, solve problems, and get closer. The better we feel, the better our relationships get, which makes us feel even better. Once we can reduce some of the distress, we can learn new ways to approach our relationships that help bring us closer, instead of pushing us further apart.
The Different Types Of Therapy For Relationship Anxiety
There are many different types of therapy that can be helpful for relationship anxiety. Here are some modalities I use in my New York therapy practice:
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
EFT is all about attachment, which means how we connect and feel safe with those around us. EFT helps you understand your emotional needs in a relationship on a deep level. It also helps you learn how to express them in a way that will actually get these needs met. EFT is a great way to help you build secure, safe, and supportive connections, regardless of your current relationship status.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EDMR is my personal gold standard for actually healing past trauma (not just talking about it). EMDR helps heal attachment wounds and strengthen positive beliefs about yourself. This means you can live your life truly feeling and knowing that you are capable, enough, and worthy. EMDR helps you reprocess the memories that may have led to reactivity or difficulty in relationships. When done right, responding to current relationship issues feels more natural, instead of feeling like being in a healthy relationship is like climbing a huge mountain.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)
DBT focuses on various skills that are helpful for relationship issues. Emotional regulation and distress tolerance are two of DBT’s signature skills, and these are often key struggles when it comes to relationships. When emotions feel huge and unmanageable, DBT helps by keeping things grounded. This can translate to a small disagreement staying small, instead of spiraling into a bigger conflict that leads to threats of a breakup! DBT helps you respond more skillfully in tough relationship moments.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS works with the idea that we have different “parts” inside of us. If you’ve ever watched the Inside Out movies, that’s a great and easy-to-digest example of this. IFS is incredibly helpful for those with relationship anxiety but don’t experience anxiety in other areas of their lives. This is often because different “parts” of us are activated in relationships than, say, in work. IFS helps you build a better relationship with all these parts so you can respond to yourself and your partner differently.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT helps you understand how your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are connected. For relationship anxiety, this could look like identifying critical thoughts about yourself or your partner, challenging these thoughts, and then reframing them. This may help with overthinking, jealousy, and identifying how fears of abandonment are showing up, even when they may not be rooted in what's actually happening.
Therapy For Relationship Issues In NYC & NJ
We Can Rewrite Your Relationship Story
In most areas of your life, your career, your friendships, your habits, you feel pretty grounded and confident in how you show up. But when it comes to romantic relationships, something feels different. You find yourself overthinking, preoccupied with the date you went on last night. Or fixated on the most recent argument you had with your significant other. You feel insecure in your relationship in ways that don’t match how secure you are everywhere else.
It’s confusing. You look around at all the people who love you, want you close, and enjoy spending time with you. Then you’re left wondering, “Why don’t I feel this in my romantic relationships?” In some moments, you might even wonder if the problem lies with you or if there’s something inherently wrong with you that has doomed you in love long-term. Deep down, there’s usually an inkling that that can’t be true… a quiet knowing that it’s more complicated than that. But in those moments, all rational thought can go right out the window.
FAQs About Therapy For Relationship Issues
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The best therapy for relationship anxiety depends on each person, their individual symptoms, and their therapy preferences. If you’re looking to explore things from a more attachment-based perspective, EFT may be a great fit. If you’re wanting to heal past traumas that show up in your current relationships, EMDR and IFS may be more up your alley. For those who want skills and clear tools to use on a day-to-day basis, CBT and DBT may be more suitable. In my clinical experience, a mix of all these different therapies to address relationship anxieties from all angles works best.
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Severe relationship anxiety often looks like a relationship trigger of any degree (even a smaller degree), creating intense feelings of worry, fear, and panic. This severe anxiety can make you feel overwhelmed and even have strong physical symptoms such as a racing heart or panicked breathing. When this happens, your body’s “fight or flight” response kicks in. This is a natural response that is meant to protect you in dangerous life-or-death moments. However, in severe relationship anxiety, it’s being activated in everyday moments. When this response is consistently activated, your body struggles to remain calm on a day-to-day basis. As a result, anxiety increases and increases, making it difficult to feel safe in your relationship.
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When it comes to therapy for relationship issues, the focus is on your personal experience in romantic relationships. Whether that involves current dating, a current partner, or past relationships. Couples therapy involves looking at issues between both people. However, since only one person is attending therapy for relationship issues, this therapy zeroes in on your individual feelings, patterns, and struggles. We may not even talk much about your partner(s) outside of the influence the relationship has on you.
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Therapy can help a toxic relationship, but there’s no guarantee it will save it. What therapy often does provide is clarity, helping you figure out whether the relationship is toxic or simply going through a rough patch. It can also help you decide whether the relationship is worth repairing or not. We want relationships to be mostly good with some hard moments, not mostly hard with a few good moments. Either way, therapy gives you the support you need to make the best decision for yourself.
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Relationship anxiety is typically caused by different factors and is different for everyone. Sometimes it’s because of past experiences, like previous relationships that were unpredictable or hurtful. This could also include past childhood experiences with your family that left you feeling uncertain, unsafe, or rejected. Other times, it might be due to fears of abandonment or beliefs about yourself, such as believing that you’re not good enough. Certain things that may have happened before may lead your mind and body to react strongly to what happens now, or what might happen in the future. Your anxiety in relationships is likely trying to protect you by perceiving certain moments as threats and reacting to that “threat.” The good news is, with therapy, you can learn to understand what actually is and isn’t a threat and manage this more effectively.
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This is a great question. Anxiety can make it incredibly hard to tell the difference between our natural instincts and our intuition. In situations like this, therapy can help you learn how to tell them apart. One way I like to explain it is that relationship anxiety is loud and sometimes annoying! It’s like a fly buzzing around the room: sometimes right near your ear, sometimes farther away, but always there... buzzing. Intuition, on the other hand, is quiet and steady. It tends to show up when things are still and doesn’t typically come alongside panic.
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For relationship issues, I’d suggest looking for someone who understands attachment, trauma, and anxiety. Ideally, you’d want someone who uses evidence-based methods like EMDR, EFT, or CBT. You want someone who truly understands how complicated relationships can be.
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Breakups bring up so much: grief, loneliness, confusion, and so much more. Breakups can also be a type of trauma. One challenging part about breakups is how preoccupying they are. Sometimes we want to talk about it nonstop (which is so normal), but don’t want to reach out to our friends or family about it every day. Therapy gives you a space to work through all of it, talk about it as much as you want, understand what happened, and rebuild your confidence so you don’t feel stuck in the pain forever.
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If your breakup is consuming your thoughts, making it hard to function, or bringing up feelings you don’t understand, therapy can help. If you’re finding yourself wanting to reach out to people but stopping because you’re worried you’re burdening them, that may be a good sign that it’s time to start therapy.
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Breakup trauma happens when a relationship ends, and it brings up deep emotional pain. This pain can especially be around rejection, abandonment, or not feeling good enough. It’s more than just sadness; it can feel like your whole world got flipped upside down and like there is no path forward.
Begin Therapy For Relationship Issues In New York City
You don’t have to keep living with constant overthinking, fear of abandonment, or the anxiety that comes with dating or being in a relationship. Relationship therapy can help you feel more secure, confident, and clear. Our NYC therapy practice, Connected Healing Therapy, has caring therapists who specialize in relationship anxiety and romantic relationship issues. Here’s how to get started:
Contact our practice to schedule a consultation
Start working with a compassionate relationship therapist
Discover how to build healthy relationships with confidence
Other Counseling Services At Connected Healing Therapy In NYC
Relationship therapy isn’t the only service we offer at our NYC therapy practice. We know that relationship issues often connect with other emotional challenges, too. That’s why our experienced team of therapists also offers breakup therapy, anxiety therapy, EMDR therapy, individual therapy, couples therapy, and ADHD services. We’re here to support you in whatever season of healing or growth you’re in. We encourage you to contact us today to start your therapeutic journey.