THERAPY for relationship anxiety
When you care deeply about your relationship but can't stop questioning it.
You may love your partner and still find yourself wondering whether something is wrong.
Maybe you constantly question whether your relationship is right, worry that you're settling, or find yourself analyzing your feelings for signs that you should stay or leave. You might become preoccupied with your partner's flaws, compare your relationship to others, or notice an urge to pull away when the relationship becomes more serious.
Sometimes the question underneath all of these questions is even harder:
Is something actually wrong—or is this anxiety?
Relationship anxiety can make it difficult to trust your feelings, your relationship, and ultimately yourself.
Does This Sound Familiar?
You might find yourself asking:
Do I really love my partner enough?
What if I'm settling?
How do I know if this is the right relationship?
What if there's someone better for me?
Why do I suddenly want to leave when things are going well?
Am I noticing a real problem, or am I overthinking it?
Is this my intuition—or my anxiety?
You may replay conversations, monitor how you feel around your partner, compare your relationship to other people's, or look for reassurance that everything is okay.
And even when you find reassurance, the relief may not last very long.
Relationship anxiety can create an exhausting cycle of questioning, analyzing, seeking certainty, feeling temporary relief, and then questioning again.
Therapy can help you step outside of that cycle and become curious about what's driving it.
Attachment and Relationship Anxiety
Relationship anxiety doesn't develop in a vacuum.
The relationships and experiences that came before your current one can shape how you experience closeness, uncertainty, conflict, and vulnerability.
For some people, distance can activate a powerful fear of abandonment or rejection. For others, greater closeness can bring up discomfort, doubt, or an urge to pull away.
You might find yourself reaching for reassurance when you're afraid of losing your partner—and then questioning the relationship when intimacy begins to feel overwhelming.
When we understand these responses through an attachment lens, patterns that once felt confusing can begin to make more sense.
Therapy can help you understand where these patterns came from without assuming that they define you or your relationships.
When RELATIONSHIPS BECOME MORE SERIOUS…
Sometimes relationship anxiety becomes louder when a relationship begins moving forward.
Dating may have felt relatively easy, but becoming exclusive, moving in together, getting engaged, getting married, or talking about having children can suddenly bring up unexpected uncertainty.
You may find yourself thinking:
What if I'm making the wrong decision?
What if I regret this?
Shouldn't I feel more certain?
What if there's someone better for me?
Major relationship transitions ask us to make meaningful choices without knowing exactly what the future will look like.
If you already struggle with uncertainty, attachment fears, or trusting yourself, those decisions can feel especially overwhelming.
Therapy gives us space to understand what the uncertainty is bringing up—without immediately needing to find the “right” answer.
Is it anxiety or intuition?
One of the hardest parts of relationship anxiety can be not knowing whether you should trust your thoughts.
You may wonder whether your anxiety is trying to tell you something important—or whether anxiety itself is creating the doubt.
There isn't a simple checklist that can answer that question for you.
Instead, therapy can help you become more familiar with your emotional patterns, understand what tends to activate fear or uncertainty, explore how past experiences influence the present, and become more grounded in your own values, needs, and boundaries.
The goal isn't to eliminate uncertainty entirely.
It's to develop enough self-trust that uncertainty doesn't have to make every decision for you.
how therapy for relationship anxiety can help
My approach to relationship anxiety is attachment-focused, relational, and trauma-informed.
Rather than focusing only on stopping anxious thoughts, we'll also become curious about why certain fears and patterns have become so powerful.
Depending on your experiences and goals, our work may involve exploring attachment and family-of-origin experiences, previous relationships, fear of abandonment, difficulty tolerating uncertainty, people-pleasing, self-worth, reassurance seeking, commitment fears, and the ways you respond emotionally and physically to closeness.
I integrate approaches including EMDR, Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy, parts work, somatic approaches, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy depending on what feels most helpful for you.
Therapy isn't about telling you whether you should stay in your relationship or leave.
It's about helping you understand yourself more deeply so that your decisions can come from greater clarity and self-trust rather than fear.
online relationship therapy in washington & california
I provide online individual therapy for adults residing in Washington and California, including clients in the Seattle area and Orange County.
Sessions are held virtually, allowing us to do this work from wherever you are located within the states where I am licensed.
you don’t have to have it all figured out
You don't need to know whether your fears are “valid,” whether your relationship is right, or exactly what needs to change before reaching out.
We can start with the uncertainty.
I offer a free consultation where you can share a little about what you've been experiencing, ask questions about my approach, and get a sense of whether working together feels like a good fit.