Insecurity is destroying your relationship
Our insecurities don’t just undermine our happiness — they also drive our partners away.
by: E.B. Johnson
Struggling to connect with your partner? Feel like they’re being pulled away from you by some underlying force that you can’t quite put your finger on? When our insecurities get the best of us, they can create a repulsive cloud of fear and uncertainty that makes it hard for us to see one another. Feeling the weight of your fears, you might discover that partner pushes away or becomes repulsed by your affectionate advances.
This is because insecurities are a heavy burden to bear. When we allow these shortcomings in our self-esteem to take over, we shift a heavy responsibility onto our partners which is neither fair nor enjoyable. It forces our partners to deal with the pain of a past that had nothing to do with them, while giving very little but drama in return. Want a better relationship? Get to the root of your insecurities, overcome them, and stop driving your partner away.
Insecurity is a heavy burden to bear.
The weight of our insecurities can be crushing, and it can cause us to crumble all over our lives and our relationships. This crumbling causes fractures in our partnerships which are hard to overcome, and divides which can be impossible to bridge. We have to solve these shortcomings in our confidence and learn to see the beauty and strength in our independence — especially if we want to be better partners and better people. This takes time, however, and the knowledge that you alone have the power to create happiness and peace within.
Insecurity (at its root) is an uncertainty or anxiety about oneself or one’s abilities. We’ve all felt little breaches in our confidence before, but these insecurities are expanded when we get into a romantic relationship. They feed off our base insecurities and become more complex and more problematic. We have to face them in order to deal with them.
Stop allowing your personal insecurities to undermine your happiness and your partnerships. Take charge of who you are and re-establish that strength and that courage that you’ve left behind. The only person who can let go of the past is you. The only person who can release the weight of your fearful baggage is you. Don’t allow your insecurities to undermine your partnership for one more minute. Commit to building a better, stronger you from the inside out so that you can thrive without fear.
Where our insecurities come from.
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Childhood experiences
Childhood is the baseline on which we form our initial perspectives on things like love and relationships. Broken homes, in which there is a lot of romantic turmoil, generally tend to teach children that it’s not safe to love. Likewise, abusive or volatile relationships with our own parents and siblings can go a long way in informing how we create connections later on in life. If it wasn’t safe to love your family as a child, it can turn you into an insecure adult.
Past relationships
Do you have a series of past relationships, each more toxic than the last? The way things work out with our exes helps us to form insecurities around our relationships in the future. If all your past partners were cheaters, it creates the idea that you will always be cheated on. You begin to become insecure about your body, your skills, and the things you have to offer a partner. These insecurities eat away at you and then get projected onto your partner.
Warped perspectives
If you sat down and were asked to define a relationship (or love) in a paragraph or less. — what would you write? When we have outdated, or warped views on what equitable partnerships should look like, it can create power dynamics and struggles which lead to frustration and discontentment. We have to align our definition of partnership with our values and needs. Then, we have to look to our future and ensure we are picking people who want similar things from their own horizons.
Zero self-awareness
Self-awareness is so crucial when it comes to building happier lives, but it’s especially important within our romantic partnerships. We have to be self-aware in order to communicate, compromise, and coordinate our lives together. If you don’t know the depth of your own abilities and strengths, it can make you timid and uncertain about taking action. You need to know what your body can do, and you also need to know what you’re capable of handling and withstanding. The more aware you are, the more capable you become.
Toxic connections
The people we surround ourselves with go a long way in determining who we allow ourselves to become. If you are surrounded by toxic people who reinforce the idea that you aren’t good enough, or that you aren’t deserving enough — you’ll come to believe it, and you’ll also come to manifest that reality by taking actions which reinforce it. These toxic manifestations trickle into our romantic relationship and eat away at our faith in one another. Thinking you aren’t a good will cause you to push your partner away.
The insecurities that are driving your partner away.
Once you know where your insecurities come from, you will start to notice the signs of their corrosive effects on your partnership. From physical self-loathing to paranoid, jealous conflict — these are the red flags you should be looking out for.
Physical self-loathing
The way we feel about our bodies can play a big part in our relationships. It plays into our confidence, and it plays into our physical intimacy. This looks like hating your body and complaining about it (and your looks or appearance) all the time. Practicing self-acceptance for you is a foreign term — and it doesn’t seem to be anything you’re working toward either. Instead, you force your partner to shoulder the entire burden of making you feel good about yourself. Something that isn’t only impossible, but weak-willed, lazy and insulting to your own strength and abilities.
Easily panicked
We are living in a world that is tense and fraught with uncertainty. We all feel like we’re on edge, but the difference comes down to how we deal with it. When you’re scared all the time, but not aware enough to deal with your emotions — it leads to big flash-in-the-pan blowups and constant panic that is hard to handle. This can leave your partner on edge, or cause them to become uncertain about you or where your intentions really lie. The more emotionally stable we are, the more sure of ourselves, the easier we are to rely on.
Need for constant reassurance
Are you someone who needs constant physical or verbal reassurance? Do you demand that your partner be in your physical presence all the time? While we all have unique needs that deserve to be respected, this type of intense insecurity and clinginess is not among those needs. That is because it infringes on the space and person of someone else. We have to build space in our relationships for one another to retain their individual lives, but we also have to find comfort in that space for ourselves. Allow your partner to be on their own sometimes…without fear.
Obsession with social media
Though we generally think of our insecurities as referring to infidelity or other breaches of trust, there are other personal insecurities that can result in serious corrosion in our partnerships. If you are someone who addicted to social media, or someone who is always looking to their phone for validation or a sense of worth — you can find that there’s little room left for your partner. Those insecurities you’re feeding build a wall that not even true love can trespass, and the entrance is padlocked with your phone.
Zero backbone
You might be confident in your partnership, but what other insecurities are lurking on the edges? Being strong at home, but weak abroad can result in divides that are complicated and messy. While you might have a firm belief in your partner, insecurities that keep you dependent-on or tied to a toxic family that push you around (or pit you against one another) destroys what you’re building. You have to find the strength to stand up to people where your relationship and your partner are involved; or risk losing them altogether.
Paranoia and jealousy
Paranoia and jealousy are two of the most common ways in which insecurities destroy our relationships. If you’re possessed by the fear that your partner or spouse is cheating, is can cause you to lash out or strike out — rather than sitting down and communicating like an adult. In order to move past this jealousy, we have to get down to the root causes that linger in our past, and do what we can to address them within ourselves.
More drama than needed
Because you’re so insecure about yourself and your place in this world, you might find yourself thriving on drama as a means of feeling important. Drama is addictive, and it can make you feel like you’re living right in the heart of your own movie — but these patterns are toxic to perpetuate and undermine the overall happiness of our lives. Constantly looking for drama (or creating it yourself) because you’re so insecure that someone will see you for who you are, drives our partners away. It’s a major turnoff. We want peace from our partnerships, not a forever rumble and decades of uncertainty.
How to resolve our insecurities once and for all.
We don’t have to cling to these insecurities forever. We can become more confident people and build more confident lives by committing to the journey and taking action in the name of our own betterment.
1. Start your journey in the past
Getting to the root of our insecurities is the first step in combatting them. Think of it a bit like gardening. When you discover a weed, shearing off the top just isn’t going to cut it. You have to dig into the earth and get the roots of the problem out if you want a garden that is clear, bright and fertile. By looking into our pasts and confronting the things that force us to believe we aren’t good enough, we can learn to reshape our confidence and life perspective.
Take some time away from your partner (regularly) and use it to start working out the pain of your past. Find a space where you’ll be uninterrupted and spend 10–15 minutes every day journalling or meditating on those past experiences have led to the belief that you’re not good enough.
Work on detaching yourself from those events and letting go of the pointless guilt you’ve invested in them. Pull back your energy and severe the ties you have to the past. Push for a little more distance each day. Take what lessons and silver linings you can, but then release back into the universe. You were responsible for what other people did to you. You are not defined by who you were in the past. Plant yourself firmly in the here and now.
2. Let go of the comparisons
Many of our insecurities arise from the constant comparisons we make between our circumstances and those of others. When we live our lives constantly in the pursuit of what other people have or want, we find ourselves lacking and going without in a reality we don’t even belong in. Once we let go of these comparisons, we allow ourselves to move beyond the self-doubt and into the arms of comfort, stability and confidence.
Stop comparing your relationship to the relationships you see on TV or in the movies. Stop listening to your friends and your family when they tell you what is or isn’t right. Listen to your gut. What things are core to who you are? What things matter most in this life that you’re building?
You can move past your constant comparisons by getting crystal clear on what you want from your life. The more determined you become, the more sure, the less you will look to others for direction or competition. We all have different journeys to take in this life and we all go about getting to our final destinations a different way. Comparing your journey to someone else’s is not only unhealthy, it’s pointless. No one can (or will) live this life precisely like you. No one has a relationship exactly like yours.
3. Drop the starring role
When you walk through life believing everything in this world is somehow a reflection on who you are as a person, it creates this idea that you’re in some dramatic leading role. You see the world as revolving around you. Everything is about what you are doing, and that’s enough to make anyone feel insecure. The sooner you drop this idea that you’re the lead victim, or a star in some big drama — the more realistic (and peaceful) your life will become.
Dump the idea that you’re the star of the show. Stop taking everything so personally and understand that not everything is about. The more you come to understand how little anyone really cares about what you’re doing, the easier it will become to allow your anxieties to melt away.
Let go of your victim mentality. Your partner isn’t out to get you, and they don’t want you to fail. The world is not conspiring against you, but you are conspiring against yourself by staying small, scared and insignificant in this world. Allow yourself to step back and detach from your need to prove yourself to everyone but the people who actually matter. Make space in your partnership for the other person and allow yourself to breathe.
4. Get active about self-approval
Self-approval is a bit of a complex idea, especially if it’s not something you’ve ever practiced before. Differing from self-acceptance, self-approval is an active process of analyzing our behaviors before we react in order to make sure we are taking actions that align with our values. Where our self-acceptance looks at the entire person and says, “I see you” — self-approval requires us to actively engage with our behaviors and say, “I got you.”
Notice when the weakness is seeping in, or notice when you start to become clingy, paranoid and jealous. Quickly trace back the root causes. Does your partner deserve this doubt? Or is this a projection? Identify the feeling, the cause, and then take your own action to correct or fulfill it.
Need the praise of your partner? Or someone to tell you that you look pretty? Put on your most confidence-inducing outfit and walk yourself to the mirror. Fall in love with the picture that is looking back at you, and tell it every day what a stunning, transformative person they are. Practice self-love. Be active about self-approval. Actively provide yourself with displays of confidence, compassion, self-respect, and love. Don’t rely on other people to give you what you are perfectly capable of giving yourself every day.
5. Invest in a better version of self
If you’re insecure about who you are or what you have to offer to this world — change it. While you should never change for another person, you are certainly able (and encouraged) to change for yourself as many times as you want to. Insecurity comes when we don’t know who we are and we don’t know what we’re capable of. That takes exploration. Invest in yourself and change those things into strengths if you want to become a better, stronger person who gives their partner’s support and love.
Hate the way you look? Give yourself a makeover. You don’t have to break the bank or find a plastic surgeon. Find a couple of outfits that make you feel good and make a modest splurge on a haircut. Hate the way you speak? Or carry yourself? Or make friends? The internet is literally crawling with courses that can help you transform any skill you’re insecure about it.
Invest in being a better you. Get healthy. Worship your body. Nourish your soul. Allow yourself to bloom and grow in whatever direction you need to in order to feel as though you’re a rooted, wanted part of this world. The more beautiful and confident you feel, the more beautiful and attractive you will become to your partner. It has nothing to do with becoming a new person on the outside, and everything to do with becoming the person you were always meant to be on the inside.
Putting it all together…
Insecurities are toxic, and they eat away at our sense of self and our relationships. The more power we give these personal doubts, the clingier and more paranoid we tend to become. We drive our partners away by failing to believe in ourselves. While shouldering them with the burden of providing us with the validation and security that can only come from within.
Start your journey in the past. Get to the root of your insecurities and work your way forward in order to detach from them. Let go of all the comparisons and understand that whatever journey you’re on — it is entirely and uniquely that of you and your partner. Don’t allow your relationship standards to be dictated by others. Understand too that not everything in this world is a personal reflection of you. Our insecurities arise when we put ourselves in a starring victim role. Step out of this forced spotlight and know that no one is judging you as harshly as you are judging yourself. Get active about self-approval and take steps to give yourself the validation you’ve been looking for in your partner. Once you are confident from the inside, it will draw your partner to you on the outside. Stand strong. Change the things you don’t like and invest in a better self for yourself.
