Are you struggling to hold onto a relationship for more than a year? Do you still notice that you feel limited in a relationship and feel that you are not free? Do you find it hard to trust people and are quick to make a joke when you notice that a certain situation is getting a little too intimate?
If so, you may suffer from commitment anxiety. In this blog, you can read more about what commitment anxiety is and what you can do about it.
What is commitment anxiety?
We are social beings and connecting with other people is an important part of our well-being. With commitment anxiety, you find this particularly difficult to do with finding a romantic relationship.
But you may also suffer from commitment anxiety professionally. People with commitment anxiety may also suffer from regularly looking for another job and find it difficult to find a clear career path[1].
But for now, let's talk mainly about romantic commitment anxiety.
In a romantic relationship, you often intend to stay together for a long time (until death do us part). In time, you also begin to trust each other more and more and become very connected. The degree of connection you have depends on many factors. So does the idea of whether you have any alternatives to bond with.
Someone with commitment anxiety will always feel that there are alternatives and that the quality of those alternatives is "good enough."
That connection also depends on the investment you make in the relationship, and this is not (only) about money. This is also about showing yourself, and building assets together. For example, you can buy a house together, have children, travel or take on a car project.
With a healthy bond, you also start identifying yourself as a couple. It's not that you lose yourself as a person, but a piece of "us" is added.
There are actually two ways you can bond with your partner, namely:
- Wanting to be with your partner
- Having to be with your partner
The first is about commitment to your partner. The second is about limitation, and that second way of bonding to your partner can feel frightening to someone who suffers from commitment anxiety.
Wanting to be with your partner is about wanting to invest in the relationship. If you need to be with your partner, it may be because of a variety of circumstances, such as your thoughts about how things should be. Or how hard it is to find a new home in this day and age. Or you stay with your partner because you have a child with them.
Also, the investment is something that should feel good. Giving too much to your partner can cause feelings of depression and a deterioration in your relationship. What you give should not be bad for yourself and should not be done to avoid conflict or out of guilt. This does not help your own well-being[2].
Someone with commitment anxiety may find it difficult to find a good balance in making investments in a relationship.
How does commitment anxiety arise?
Attachment anxiety is often thought to arise because a person's parents are divorced, but research on students with divorced and undivorced parents shows that it does not matter at all for attachment anxiety and attachment style whether or not your parents are divorced[3].
What does matter is that person's attachment style. If someone has an avoidant attachment style, then they are trying to avoid intimacy and therefore bonding. The attachment style usually arises because the caregivers during childhood were not very ready for that person.
If caregivers don't take good care of you, you may also have an anxious attachment style, but then you often try with all your might to actually commit to someone. So people with commitment anxiety often have the avoidant attachment style.
An unpleasant childhood may be the primary reason you suffer from commitment anxiety[4].
Speaking of romantic attachment then, you may also suffer from anxiety when you find that the romantic connection is stronger than the attachment or bonding that occurred during the initial period. This fear can arise especially at the beginning of a relationship, and then if you are very afraid of rejection, you may break up the "courtship" already so that you don't get dumped. But this fear does not have to have anything to do with anything, and you may be breaking up for nothing. It is then more convenient to double-check with your fledgling relationship how the other person feels about it, because if you can both say that there is really a "courtship" now, this will quickly make the fear go away.
That fear about the balance of bonding and what one does for the other also has to do with power relationships. You don't want to be doing all sorts of things for a relationship and the other person doing very little for it. This is because it makes you feel that the other person, who does little, has the power in the relationship instead of feeling as powerful as the other person (source 2).
The latter shows the second reason for commitment anxiety, namely failed relationships in your adult life.
To come back to commitment anxiety due to childhood experiences. Those experiences may have caused you to acquire negative beliefs about yourself, such as the idea that you are not good enough. In addition, you may have acquired negative beliefs about others, such as that people cannot be trusted(source 4).
How to deal with someone who has commitment anxiety
Don't move in with someone who has commitment anxiety. Research shows that men who lived with their partners before getting married bond less with their wives than men who could only live together after getting married. So someone with commitment anxiety only bonds when very clear signals are given for this, such as getting married and then only living together (source 3).
In addition, people are often more satisfied with their partner if they have someone who suffers from commitment anxiety to the same degree as them[5]. After all, you then have the same need for intimacy as the other person.
If you are communicating about your problems with a partner who suffers from commitment anxiety, also make it very clear that your problems are not their problems and that they are certainly not caused by your partner.
When your partner does open up about his/her thoughts and emotions, be sure to listen and not judge. If you want to respond, try to find something that evokes acceptance and recognition.
Give your partner space to be themselves, too. You can use mindfulness to figure out if you are pushing too much now, or manipulating to get a certain reaction.
And also keep remembering that it's not up to you. If your partner needs some me-time, that says nothing about how much he/she likes you, but more about the space he/she grants himself/herself for a while[6].
The nice thing is that if you have been in a courtship for more than six months, it can help reduce commitment anxiety[7]. So persistence wins 😊.
Helping someone with commitment anxiety
When helping someone with commitment anxiety as a coach or therapist, the focus is often on improving intimate behaviors, such as sharing your emotions and telling stories about yourself, improving feelings of connection with other people and to reduce fears about intimacy[8].
For example, a hypnotherapist can help you improve your self-confidence and trust in other people by giving certain suggestions. You can also repeat these at home with self-hypnosis.
To improve the sense of connection, work can be done with the social panorama. This is a technique where you can visualize where people are in relation to you and you can then move those people closer or farther away in your mind. This can already do a lot to be able to be more intimate with your partner and to care less if other people are not as intimate with you as you would like, such as with your family.
In addition, you can visualize how to be intimate. What it would be like to tell personal stories. How you can express your emotions at times when you normally don't.
These are all techniques that can be learned at the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands training program.
Want to learn more about hypnosis? Then come to a free online master class.
Or register directly for one of our seminars or trainings. Training courses are delivered live online.
Instead, do you suffer from commitment anxiety and want to get rid of it? Then go to bestetherapeut.co.uk and find a hypnotherapist to help you with this problem.
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