Learn the 3 hidden ways anxiety impacts relationships and discover CBT, ERP, and ACT tools to build deeper, healthier connections | Ep. 489

In This Episode, I’ll Discuss:

• Why reassurance-seeking can feel like intimacy, but actually keeps both anxiety and relationship stress alive.
• The surprising way criticism, blame, and frustration can become anxiety-driven attempts to create safety and control.
• How accommodation happens when partners unintentionally rearrange their lives around anxiety, and why it often makes things worse.
• The subtle ways anxiety can keep you from true vulnerability, authenticity, and emotional closeness.
• Practical CBT and ERP strategies for responding to uncertainty without relying on reassurance or control.
• How ACT can help you become the partner you want to be, even when anxiety is still present.

The Hidden Ways Anxiety Is Impacting Your Relationship (And What to Do Instead) 

If you’ve ever wondered why anxiety seems to show up most intensely in the relationships you care about the most, you’re not imagining it.

Many people assume anxiety only affects what happens inside their own minds. They think it’s about worrying too much, overthinking, or feeling overwhelmed. But what often goes unnoticed is how anxiety quietly creates patterns inside our relationships, patterns that can slowly pull us away from the connection we want most.

I know this because I’ve lived it myself.

For years, I didn’t realize how much anxiety was shaping my marriage. I was convinced the problem was external. I thought that if certain circumstances changed, if my husband responded differently, or if life became a little more predictable, then I would finally feel okay.

But what I eventually learned changed everything.

Today, I want to walk you through three hidden ways anxiety can take over a relationship, why these patterns develop, and what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) teach us to do instead.

Anxiety Isn’t the Problem, The Coping Strategies Are

This might sound surprising, but anxiety itself is rarely the thing that creates the most strain in relationships.

The bigger issue is often the behaviors we use to try to get rid of anxiety.

When anxiety feels unbearable, we naturally reach for relief. We seek certainty. We try to control outcomes. We ask for reassurance. We avoid discomfort. We try to protect ourselves from fear.

These strategies make perfect sense.

The problem is that what helps in the short term often creates bigger problems in the long term.

If you’ve fallen into these patterns, please know this:

You are not a bad partner.

You are not broken.

You are not incapable of healthy love and connection.

You are someone whose brain learned strategies to cope with fear. The goal now is simply to learn new ones.

Pattern #1: Reassurance Seeking Disguised as Connection

One of the most common ways anxiety shows up in relationships is through reassurance seeking.

For me, this looked like late-night conversations with my husband.

As bedtime approached, I would unload every fear, worry, and uncertainty I had been carrying throughout the day. I needed him to listen. I needed him to tell me everything would be okay. I needed relief before I could sleep.

At the time, I believed this was intimacy.

I believed this was support.

I believed this was connection.

But what I eventually learned was that these conversations weren’t actually helping me heal. They were functioning as a compulsion.

Every time reassurance reduced my anxiety, my brain learned the same lesson:

“I can’t handle this uncertainty on my own.”

The relief felt real because it was real. The problem was that it never lasted.

Soon, the reassurance became more frequent. Then it became expected. Eventually, the relationship began revolving around anxiety management instead of genuine connection.

Why Reassurance Seeking Feels So Hard to Stop

If you’ve ever felt hurt, abandoned, or rejected when someone wouldn’t reassure you, I want to validate something important:

That pain is real.

The distress you experience when anxiety is activated is genuine.

You are not being dramatic.

You are not making it up.

Your brain is sounding an alarm.

The challenge is that reassurance temporarily quiets the alarm without teaching your brain that you can tolerate uncertainty.

What CBT and ERP Teach Instead

ERP encourages us to practice allowing uncertainty to exist without immediately trying to resolve it.

Instead of seeking reassurance, we learn to:

• Notice the urge for certainty
• Allow discomfort to be present
• Resist compulsive reassurance-seeking behaviors
• Build confidence in our ability to tolerate uncertainty

This is not easy work.

But every time you allow uncertainty to rise and fall without seeking reassurance, your brain learns something powerful:

“I can handle this.”

Pattern #2: Using Criticism and Control to Reduce Anxiety

The second pattern is much harder to recognize because it often doesn’t look like anxiety at all.

It can look like frustration.

Judgment.

Criticism.

Blame.

For years, whenever my anxiety was triggered, I often believed the problem was my husband.

I would mentally build a case for why he needed to change.

I would focus on what he should do differently.

I would convince myself that if he behaved differently, I would finally feel safe.

And sometimes he would adjust.

He would become more careful.

He would tiptoe around sensitive topics.

He would change plans to avoid triggering my anxiety.

At first, this felt helpful.

But over time, something else happened.

My husband stopped feeling like my partner and started feeling like the manager of my anxiety.

Understanding Accommodation

In anxiety treatment, we call this accommodation.

Accommodation happens when loved ones change their behavior to help someone avoid anxiety.

It often comes from a place of deep love and care.

Partners may:

• Avoid certain topics
• Constantly reassure
• Change plans
• Walk on eggshells
• Rearrange their lives around anxiety triggers

The intention is loving.

The outcome is often the opposite.

Accommodation teaches the brain that anxiety is dangerous and must be avoided.

Research consistently shows that accommodation can unintentionally maintain anxiety over time.

A Better Question to Ask

One of the most powerful shifts I learned was asking a different question.

Instead of asking:

“What does my partner need to change?”

I learned to ask:

“What is anxiety afraid of right now?”

That question changed everything.

It redirected my attention away from controlling my environment and toward understanding my own fear.

That is where real healing begins.

Pattern #3: Avoiding True Intimacy

This third pattern is often the quietest, and sometimes the most damaging.

Anxiety doesn’t just push us toward reassurance and control.

It also pulls us away from vulnerability.

Real intimacy requires uncertainty.

It requires honesty.

It requires allowing another person to see us as we truly are.

And that can feel terrifying.

Many people don’t realize they are avoiding intimacy because the avoidance is subtle.

It may look like:

• Staying busy
• Making jokes instead of being vulnerable
• Avoiding difficult conversations
• Keeping things surface-level
• Hiding struggles
• Deflecting emotional closeness

The relationship may still look healthy from the outside.

But inside, it can feel like something important is missing.

The Cost of Playing It Safe

Anxiety often convinces us that safety comes first and connection comes second.

But genuine connection requires vulnerability.

The deeper relationship you’re longing for often exists on the other side of the uncertainty you’re trying so hard to avoid.

What ACT Teaches About Relationships

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy offers a completely different approach.

ACT does not ask you to eliminate anxiety before showing up fully in your relationship.

Instead, it asks:

“What kind of partner do I want to be?”

That question shifts the focus away from comfort and toward values.

You don’t have to wait until anxiety disappears to:

• Be honest
• Be present
• Be vulnerable
• Have difficult conversations
• Show love
• Build connection

You can do those things while anxiety is present.

In fact, that’s often where the most meaningful growth happens.

The Power of Showing Up Imperfectly

Some of the most important moments in my marriage weren’t moments when I conquered anxiety.

They were moments when I stopped hiding.

Moments when I admitted I didn’t have all the answers.

Moments when I stopped defending myself.

Moments when I allowed my husband to see me struggling.

Those moments were uncomfortable.

They felt risky.

But they also created genuine closeness.

True intimacy isn’t built through perfection.

It’s built through honesty.

Please Don’t Shame Yourself

As you read this, you may recognize yourself in one or more of these patterns.

You might see reassurance seeking.

You might notice criticism or control.

You might realize you’ve been avoiding vulnerability.

If so, please resist the urge to shame yourself.

Accountability helps us grow.

Shame rarely does.

These patterns developed for a reason.

Your brain was trying to protect you.

Now the work is learning new ways to respond.

That process takes practice.

It takes support.

It takes patience.

And most importantly, it requires self-compassion.

The Goal Is Connection, Not Anxiety Elimination

Recovery is not about becoming someone who never feels anxious.

It’s about building a life and a relationship that aren’t controlled by anxiety.

It’s about learning to tolerate uncertainty.

It’s about reducing reassurance seeking.

It’s about recognizing accommodation.

It’s about choosing vulnerability over avoidance.

Most importantly, it’s about creating a relationship where you and your partner can connect as two people, not as two people constantly managing anxiety.

If you’re struggling, please remember that help is available. Whether that’s working with a therapist, attending couples counseling, learning CBT skills, or seeking support through courses and resources, you do not have to navigate this alone.

Be patient with yourself.

Expect setbacks.

Expect mistakes.

And keep showing up anyway.

That’s where meaningful change begins.

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Transcription: The Hidden Way Anxiety Is Running Your Relationships (And What to Do About It)

This is what nobody tells you about anxiety and your relationships. Anxiety isn’t just causing you to struggle internally. No, instead, anxiety mischievously builds a system inside the things you love the most, and where it plays out the most is inside your relationships. It gives you a strict set of rules, patterns, habits, things you feel like you have to do, things your partner has to do, all designed without anyone realizing it, to manage and control your anxiety.

 

This is the thing getting in the way of you having the relationships you want. Now, I don’t want you to feel any shame or judgment from me, especially when we’re from me, because I know I’ve lived this too, absolutely, for years, and I did not see how much anxiety was impacting my relationship until my hubby came to me and said, “Kim, I love you, but I think it’s time that you get some help.”

 

And if you are watching this, there is a real chance that you are living right now that same way. Now, before we move forward, I want us to hold ourselves in a lot of compassion, because this might be a hard conversation for you, as long as you know that you are not broken or that you’re not a problem that needs solving.

 

I also want you to know that your relationship is not doomed for ruin. But what you do need to know is that anxiety is very, very good at what it does, and that is what we’re gonna get into today.

 

Most people think that anxiety in relationships looks like this. Maybe you worry too much. Maybe you need a lot of reassurance. Your partner gets frustrated, and if you could just calm down, everything would be fine. Now, that framing makes sense, but it misses the most important thing, which is it is not the anxiety itself that drives the most damage in your relationship.

 

It is the behavior, the desperate attempts to reduce or remove anxiety, that causes the relationship to be impacted, and we have tons of research to back that up. When we have anxiety and we don’t have any helpful tools to manage it, well, what do we do? We turn to control. We try to control our environment.

 

We try to control our partners, trying to make anxiety and our intrusive thoughts stop, trying to get one single moment to breathe and just feel at ease. And here is what I want you to hear before we go any further. If you’re in a relationship where anxiety is running the show, you are not a bad partner.

 

You are not weak, and you’re not someone who is incapable of love or closeness or real connection. You are someone whose brain learned a set of strategies to cope with fear. Those strategies kept you safe. They got you through. The problem is not that you developed them. The problem is that they have outlived their usefulness, and now They’re costing you the very thing that you want the most.

 

For me, it was connection. Anxiety was getting in the way of myself and my husband connecting. I spent years not understanding this, years where I was convinced that the problem was external, that if the right things would just fall into place, that if my husband would just do what I wanted him to do, was to respond in the way I wanted him to, or if he would just be the way he, quote-unquote, should be, I would be okay.

 

But I was wrong, and learning that changed everything. So in this video, I’m gonna walk you through the three hidden patterns that anxiety uses to run our relationships. For each one, I’m gonna tell you what it looks like, why it makes sense that you developed it in the first place, and what cognitive behavioral therapy and research actually says to do.

 

This is not about reducing your anxiety, it is about building a relationship where anxiety doesn’t call the shots. So let’s go. Pattern one is reassurance seeking. Let’s start with the pattern you probably already have some awareness of, but awareness and understanding are completely two different things.

 

So let’s slow down on this one. So when it comes to reassurance seeking, here is what it looked like in my marriage. Every night around 10:30 at night, right before my husband was winding down, trying to decompress, trying to transition out of the day, I needed to talk. Not just talk , dump every fear I had been carrying all day, I needed to hand to him.

 

I need to say it out loud. I needed to, him to hear it, to absorb it, and for him to tell me everything was going to be okay. And if I could do just that, if I could just get it out and get reassurance, and then I could finally fall asleep. So when it came to him saying that he needed some time before night, bedtime, and when he tried to set a limit, I felt so heard- I felt so frustrated.

 

Actually, it wasn’t just frustration. I was furious. I felt abandoned. I felt dismissed. Does this guy even care about me? It felt like I was all alone, like his need to wind down was more important than my pain. And I want to pause here because this might be the most important thing you take away today. If you recognize that feeling, that feeling of feeling abandoned and furious and hurt, I want you to know something.

 

That feeling was real. That pain was real. That loneliness in that moment was real. Having anxiety does not mean we dismiss all of our emotions and the feelings that you have. The distress you feel when you can’t get that reassurance that you’re reaching for, that is genuine. It genuinely hurts. It feels so hard when you ask for reassurance and your partner won’t give it to you.

 

You’re not being dramatic. You’re not making it up. You are someone whose brain genuinely is sounding an alarm. And yes, reassurance does quiet the alarm, but it’s temporary, which is exactly why it becomes so hard to stop. But here is what I did not understand then and what CBT helped me finally understand and see.

 

That conversation at 8:30 PM was not intimacy. It was a compulsion. It was reassurance-seeking looking like connection. It felt like connection. It felt like he was supporting me. It seemed like a completely understandable thing to need. It felt reasonable. But every single time the reassurance works, every time that it’s…

 

But every single time reassurance works, every time you get that, “It’s going to be okay,” that brings you relief, but your brain is only learning one thing, that you must rely on others to give you relief instead of finding relief with tools that actually don’t exhaust your partner and you in the meantime.

 

That conversation was once just a weekly thing, but then it became nightly, and then nightly became every single time I felt uncertain. And slowly, without either of you choosing, the relationship stopped being about connection. It became about managing our anxiety, my anxiety. And in this case, your partner becomes the anxiety’s first responder.

 

In this case, you both get exhausted. So, like I said, let’s slow down. I wanna be so gentle with you here because if this is what you’re in, this pattern right now, whether you’re the one seeking the reassurance or the one being sought, this is not your fault. I want you to feel so understood here in this moment.

 

You’re not bad or wrong for falling into this cycle. It makes complete sense. Like I said, I was in this cycle, too. Anxiety found a way or a strategy that worked for you to keep you safe, but the short-term relief only maintains long-term anxiety, and that is not the solution. That is the problem. Now, what CBT actually teaches, and specifically ERP, exposure and response prevention, is that the path forward is learning to sit with and manage that uncertainty without seeking reassurance, to allow that discomfort and anxiety to rise and fall on its own without immediately moving to resolve it.

 

And I wanna acknowledge that uncertainty you’re feeling, it is real. It does take courage to do this work, but by allowing it rather than escaping it, that is how your brain learns that it can tolerate what it’s been running through- from. Even though it didn’t feel that way in the moment, my husband setting that limit at 10:30 PM, it was not abandonment.

 

It was probably the most compassionate, healthiest thing he could have done for both of us. Now, I couldn’t see it then. Anxiety did not want me to… able to see this. It did not like it. And if your partner has tried to set limits around reassurance and you felt that same hurt feeling, I want you to be so gentle with yourself about this.

 

This work is about not beating yourself up for the fact that you’ve fallen into this pattern. The work is about slowly, with- support choosing to respond differently. What he actually did say is he would around 8:00 say, “Okay, we’re moving into the nighttime. Is there anything you’d like to talk about now because we’re not doing it at 10:30?”

 

And in that 8:00 time, I had already learned that I was not just to dump. I had to manage my own anxiety. I had to get my own therapist to manage it instead of dumping on him every single time. Now, the rumination reset, one of the places reassurance cycle shows up the most is in rumination, the mental loop of going over and over the same worries, trying to think your way out of certainty.

 

And if you recognize that pattern in yourself, the late night replaying, the mental what if spirals that you can’t quit, I actually created a course specifically built just for this

 

Now, as you know, I have a private practice. I have six amazing therapists in Calabasas, California. However, we do not take insurance. Now, if you are looking for insurance-covered OCD or BFRB treatment, I wanna let you know about NOCD. NOCD provides face-to-face live video sessions with specialized licensed OCD therapists.

 

Now, their therapists use exposure and response prevention. We know this is the gold standard for OCD, so you can be absolutely confirmed that you’re in the right place there, and they have a clinically proven app that helps you stay connected to your therapist and others who have OCD between sessions, so you’ll always feel supported.

 

Now, the cool thing is NOCD is available in all 50 US states and even internationally, and they accept most insurance plans, making it affordable and accessible. We love that. Now, if you think you might have OCD or you’re struggling to manage your symptoms, you can book a free call. Just click the link in the show notes at nocd.com.

 

I am honored to partner with NOCD. I want to remind you that recovery is possible. Please do not forget that. Now, big hugs, and let’s get back to the show It’s called the Rumination Reset. It is grounded in CBT, in ACT, and ERP, and it walks you through exactly how to interrupt and redirect these loops, not by trying to suppress them, not by going to your husband or your partner, but by learning a completely different relationship with your own thoughts.

 

Now, you can click the link in the show notes if you wanna check it out. I would love to have you join us. So let’s go back to 10:30. Even when I was not doing that 10:30 conversation, even when I was not explicitly seeking reassurance, anxiety had another strategy running in my relationship, and I was so frustrated at this point.

 

I was like, “If it’s just replacing one problem with another one.” This one took me longer to see because it didn’t look like anxiety at all. And please be gentle with me here. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit this, but I hope that I make you feel a little less alone if you struggle in the same area. Now, if my husband did something that made me feel anxious or uncertain, or maybe he triggered my fear of being judged by other people, I would get really mad, and I would blame him for making me anxious.

 

Now, I know this is so unfair, but I would judge him and get so mad at him for how I felt, for what my brain was doing, and I had this whole arsenal of judgment ready to go. I would build this case in my head and detail out every little thing. I would construct an argument for why he needed to change. I would create a whole narrative that said that if he just showed up differently, things would be better, and I would feel, quote, unquote, “safer.”

 

I would tell him he needed to change and that it was unfair and maybe even selfish for him not to change. And here is the part that still gets me when I think about it. In many cases, he would then go and change. He would get quieter around certain topics. He would rearrange his plans if he thought something might set me off.

 

He would maybe even choose his words carefully, and that’s okay. We all have to choose our words carefully. But he really had to tippy-toe around me, and he would often say he felt like he was always in the wrong, that he was constantly tippy-toeing around what would trigger me and my anxiety. And I do remember watching him do this and feeling for a moment relieved, like, “Okay, this is working.”

 

I finally had engineered this safety plan that I could breathe. But the relief… only lasted short term. Within the next moment, I would be anxious, and then the next, and then slowly, without either of us knowing it, he stopped being my husband, and he started to feel like he was just my anxiety’s manager.

 

Now, this is what we call a safety behavior. It’s a strategy that anxiety uses to try and control the environment enough so that I would feel safe. And what my husband was doing in response, he was just adjusting, tippy-toeing, rearranging his life around my anxiety. And this has a name too. We call it in therapy a term called accommodation.

 

Accommodation is one of the most thoroughly researched patterns in anxiety treatment. We actually have a lot of research to back it. When partners accommodate anxiety by adjusting their behavior, avoiding topics, maybe providing extra reassurance, changing plans, again, like I said, tiptoeing around triggers, they’re not helping.

 

Despite this very loving intention, they’re maintaining anxiety. Every adjustment sends the same message, which is, “We both have to plan our lives around your anxiety.” And neither of you choose this. This grows slowly out of love and pain and the complete human desire to make suffering stop. But we have to stop for a moment and recognize what this actually means.

 

If you’ve spent time being frustrated with your partner, or if you’ve directed anger at them, like I did, for anxiety that they’ve caused- And they then respond by accommodating and adjusting and abandoning their own needs, you are both caught in the same trap. Neither of you are the villain. Both of you are trying to survive something painful without a roadmap, and that deserves compassion for yourself, for them, for anybody in this circumstance.

 

Now, here is what cognitive behavioral therapy recommends for you and for your relationship. Now, for you, begin to notice when the judgment and criticism are anxiety speaking, not your genuine values, not your reasonable relationship standards, but anxiety building a case trying to engineer safety through control.

 

When you notice it, this takes practice, real practice, right? Not just a one and done, but you can then start to ask a different question, and this is the question I include in every one of my courses. Not what does my partner need to change, but what is anxiety afraid of right now? And what would it mean to tolerate that fear instead of outsourcing it to somebody else?

 

Now, for your partner, they need to understand that accommodation, as loving as it feels, is not helping. Now, what you may wanna do is work through this with a therapist together, not because something is wrong with your relationship, but because you both deserve to understand this system that has been living inside your relationship.

 

And for those of you, if your partner does not yet understand this, be gentle with them. They are doing the best they can, and they’re doing what love told them to do. They need education, not blame. Okay, so we’ve done reassurance seeking, the compulsion that feels like connection, and we’ve reviewed how judgment and criticism can be anxiety strategy for forcing accommodation from the outside.

 

And both of these patterns, as different as they look, are doing the exact same thing. They’re trying to make uncertainty stop But the third pattern, the one I want to leave you with today, is quieter than both of these, and for a lot of people, this is the one that does the most damage over time. Now, this pattern is avoiding real intimacy.

 

Anxiety is a protection system. It scans for threat. It sounds the alarm, and it moves you away from anything that feels dangerous. And for a lot of people with anxiety, real intimacy feels dangerous, not because their partner is unsafe, but because real intimacy requires things that are genuinely uncertain, genuinely vulnerable, and the risk that if you show someone who you are, they might not stay.

 

Real conflict, not the anxiety-driven criticism we just talked about, but the kind where you say what you actually need Where you need to let yourself be seen in the, your disappointment or your hurt. The ability to actually sit with not knowing, not knowing if you will be loved the way that you hope to be loved.

 

All of this feels like a threat, so anxiety moves you away from it. Not dramatically, maybe not obviously. This is really insidious and quiet. It’s sidestepping deeper conversations. So many of my patients and clients have said this. They kind of stay on the surface. They keep things smooth and really kind of…

 

They make a lot of jokes. They deflect a lot of connection, and what they’re really doing is they’re reaching for certainty instead of connection. They’re filling space. They’re filling space rather than allowing that raw or uncertain, ungovernable experience of actually being known by someone. And the relationship that results can look okay, it can be functional, even stable, but it always has a ceiling on it because the depth that you actually want, that closeness that you’re so hungry for, lives on the other side of the things anxiety is telling you to do and to avoid.

 

Now, this is where acceptance and commitment therapy comes in, because ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy, offers something genuinely different. ACT does not ask you to feel less anxious before you connect. It does not say that you have to work on your anxiety first and then, then you can show up fully for your relationship.

 

It simply asks, what kind of partner do you actually want to be? And then it asks you to take steps towards that, even when anxiety is present. Now, you’re going to do this because you’re gonna be focusing on what you value more than your comfort. Now, I wanna be honest about what this looked like for me.

 

There were moments in my marriage where the bravest thing I did had nothing to do with managing anxiety. It was about showing up honest and uncertain. It was about saying that I don’t know if I’m doing this right instead of defending myself. Oh my gosh, I used to defend myself all the time. It was letting my husband see when I was actually struggling instead of managing how I appeared to him.

 

Now, those moments were so uncomfortable. They did not feel like relief. It actually felt like a scary, dangerous risk. But the thing is, in those moments is where I actually felt like we were building something real, right? We were actually building vulnerability. We were showing up honestly. And to be honest with you, being honest was one of the scariest things I’ve ever had to do in my relationship.

 

To show up imperfect and actually be honest about what I wanted, what was important to me, what I valued, that is what real closeness is made of. If you have been using anxiety as a reason to stay on the surface of your relationship, I wanna say something so gentle to you. You deserve More than that, you deserve to have a relationship, and so does your partner, where you actually show up truly authentically.

 

Now, before I bring all of this together, I wanna slow down for something important. As you’ve been listening to this, maybe you have recognized yourself in some of what I’m saying. Maybe you were like me at, at 10:30 trying to get reassurance, or maybe you were like me and getting really angry and engaging in a lot of judgment when you’re feeling anxious.

 

Or maybe you’re the person who pulls back from real connection. There might be a part of you that wants to be really hard on yourself for this. I want to ask you, please don’t do that. Now, I know that accountability matters. It really, really does in, uh, terms of moving forward, but shame does not move you forward here.

 

Please don’t beat yourself up. Self-criticizing yourself for these three behaviors, which I have done, and I now have a beautiful marriage that is almost 26 years old. Uh, so I want you to know that this doesn’t mean you’re doomed. We can work on this and improve it. I want you to know that you can be gentle with yourself and make these baby steps from a place of self-compassion paired with real commitment, recognizing the pattern, absolutely, understanding how anxiety became so tricky, and choosing step by step to do something different while being genuinely kind with yourself, because this is so freaking hard.

 

You did not develop these patterns because something is fundamentally wrong with you. You developed these because, again, at that time, that was your natural default. It is for all of us, and it’s your brain just trying to protect you. Now the work is not punishing yourf- self for how anxiety has shown up in your relationship.

 

The work is learning to respond differently with support, with practice, with time, and with a whole ton of grace for yourself on those days where you get it wrong, and you will get it wrong. I have, too. I still make a lot of these mistakes. Now, I want you to remember here, and I really want you to hear this clearly, you asking for help is not a weakness.

 

If you need to go to couples therapy, please ask for that. If you need to go to an anxiety specialist to get working through this, absolutely, please do. We also have a whole library of courses at cbtschool.com if you don’t have access to a therapist that can help you with anxiety, OCD, rumination, self-compassion, depression.

 

We’ve got courses that are covering a lot of those areas. It is the most effective thing you can do, is to actually learn these CBT skills to help you manage this in your relationship for yourself. to reduce accommodation and reassurance seeking and getting really, really mad at your partner. You deserve guidance and you deserve to get better with this so that you can have the most beautiful relationship with your partner.

 

Now, as always, this is a podcast where you can also get tons of free resources. Okay, so here’s what I want to leave you with. Please be patient with yourself. Expect to get this wrong sometimes. Expect avoidance to happen. Expect to reach for reassurance when you said you wouldn’t. I often tell my clients to talk to their partners and say, “Listen, I love you, but I don’t want to strengthen your anxiety,” or, “I love you, but I don’t love your OCD, and so I want to build a relationship with you, not with your anxiety.”

 

Expect it to feel. And finally, please know that you are not alone. This is something we’re all working in together. Think of me, again, shaking my head, thinking, “Oh my goodness, here we go again. I got caught.” I’m gonna see you in the next episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit, and I hope you have a beautiful day.

 

Please note that this podcast or any other resources from CBTSchool.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day and thank you for supporting CBTSchool.com.