Can Relationship Anxiety Be Cured?

Understanding Attachment Styles, Healing from Childhood MUD, and Breaking Free from Relationship Anxiety

Oct 21, 2024

Relationship anxiety is like a quiet storm, often stirring beneath the surface of our happiest moments. You’re constantly seeking reassurance, overthinking every message, or worrying about your partner leaving—even when there’s no obvious reason to feel this way. It’s exhausting. But is it something that can be cured?

The answer is yes—but the cure doesn’t lie in the relationship itself. To truly heal from relationship anxiety, we need to dig deeper, uncovering the Misguided Unconscious Decisions (MUD) we made as children and adolescents. These unconscious decisions shape the way we approach love, safety, and belonging as adults.

By exploring attachment styles and using tools like the Feel, Deal, Heal process and Breath Enhanced Emotional Processing (BEEP), we can understand where our anxiety comes from, heal the wounds that drive it, and step into relationships with a sense of calm and security.

What is Relationship Anxiety?

Relationship anxiety is the constant fear that your romantic relationship is unstable or under threat. You may find yourself hypervigilant to every shift in your partner’s mood, interpreting small actions as signs of abandonment. You seek reassurance and worry endlessly about whether you’re "enough." This anxiety often manifests as:

Overanalyzing conversations and actions
Fear of being left or betrayed
Constantly seeking validation from your partner
Difficulty trusting that things are okay

But here’s the thing—this anxiety usually isn’t about your current relationship. It’s a reflection of past experiences and unconscious emotional patterns.

Attachment Styles: The Key to Understanding Relationship Anxiety

Attachment styles are the patterns of behavior we develop based on how our caregivers met (or didn’t meet) our emotional needs in childhood. They shape how we relate to others, especially in romantic relationships. When we examine attachment through the lens of the Next-Level Human framework, it becomes clear how these styles relate to different levels of consciousness: Base, Culture, and Next-Level.

Base Level: Avoidant Attachment

At the Base level, individuals are driven by fear, focused on self-preservation and survival. In relationships, this is reflected in avoidant attachment. People with avoidant attachment tend to keep emotional distance, avoiding vulnerability and closeness to protect themselves from perceived emotional threats. They may seem independent or detached, but this is a defense mechanism born from fear of being hurt.

Culture Level: Anxious Attachment

At the Culture level, attachment is rooted in the need for approval, validation, and belonging. Those with anxious attachment seek constant reassurance and emotional validation from their partner. They live in fear of abandonment, constantly on edge, waiting for the relationship to fall apart. Anxious attachment reflects a dependency on external validation to feel secure.

Next-Level: Secure Attachment

A Next-Level Human operates from a place of emotional growth and collaboration. In relationships, this manifests as secure attachment. Securely attached individuals trust in their partner and the relationship. They don’t need constant reassurance because they feel comfortable with both closeness and independence. Their relationships are built on mutual support, growth, and healthy emotional boundaries.

The Root of Relationship Anxiety: Control, Insecurity, and AFRAID Emotions

At the core of relationship anxiety lies a deep-seated belief: “I’m not enough.” This belief often stems from past experiences where our emotional needs weren’t met—whether that’s from inconsistent caregivers, feelings of rejection, or early experiences of neglect. These early wounds lead to the feeling that we must constantly earn love, and worse, that we are not worthy of love unless we can control the situation.

Relationship anxiety is essentially the mind’s way of reacting to a perceived lack of control. It’s fueled by the belief that if we can’t control our partner’s feelings or the relationship itself, we risk being abandoned or unloved. This sense of helplessness breeds a constant state of worry and hypervigilance.

Anxiety and the Need for Control

Anxiety thrives on the narrative that we don’t have control over our circumstances. When it comes to relationships, this lack of control is particularly distressing because love is inherently vulnerable. You can’t force someone to love you, stay with you, or meet your emotional needs all the time. The more we feel like we can’t control the situation, the more anxious we become.

For many, this anxiety is tied to deep-rooted insecurity—a feeling that they aren’t good enough as they are. They believe that if they don’t constantly manage their partner’s emotions, or prove their worth through actions, the relationship will fall apart. This belief can trace back to childhood experiences where love or validation was conditional—based on behavior, performance, or external factors.

Example: Let’s say you grew up in a household where your emotional needs were inconsistently met. One day your caregivers might have been loving and attentive, and the next, distant or even harsh. As a child, you learned that love wasn’t guaranteed, and you made the unconscious decision that you had to earn it by being good enough. Fast forward to adulthood, and now in romantic relationships, you feel the same need to earn your partner’s love and approval. When things feel out of your control, your anxiety spikes, and you worry that you’ll lose them unless you take action.

The Cycle of Insecurity and Anxiety

This lack of perceived control creates a vicious cycle of anxiety. The more anxious you become, the more you try to control the relationship through excessive reassurance-seeking, overthinking, or even self-sabotage. The underlying fear—“I’m not good enough”—fuels this behavior. You may even push your partner away with your actions, thereby reinforcing the belief that you are, in fact, unlovable.

This is where the AFRAID emotions come into play: Anger, Frustration, Resistance, Anxiety, Insecurity, and Depression. These emotions are the natural byproducts of feeling out of control, unworthy, and disconnected from the belief that you are enough as you are. Anxiety, in this context, is not just a fear of the future—it’s the manifestation of a deep insecurity tied to your self-worth.

How MUD Reinforces This Anxiety

This fear of not being good enough and the resulting need for control are often the byproducts of MUD (Misguided Unconscious Decisions). These unconscious beliefs—“I must control my relationships to feel secure,” or “I am only lovable when I’m perfect”—are formed in response to early emotional wounds and dictate how we engage in relationships later in life.

Anxiety is, therefore, a signal that your unconscious mind is reacting to the threat of losing love or validation. It’s not about your current partner—it’s about those old wounds from childhood where you felt out of control and unworthy of love. In other words, your anxiety is not about what’s happening now, but about the past patterns that you haven’t yet healed.

The path to healing requires recognizing these patterns, processing the emotions tied to them, and rewriting the story. This is where the Feel, Deal, Heal process and BEEP (Breath Enhanced Emotional Processing) come in.

Healing Through the Feel, Deal, Heal Process

The key to overcoming relationship anxiety is to process the MUD and rewrite the story you’re telling yourself about love and relationships. In the Next-Level Human philosophy, I use the Feel, Deal, Heal process to guide this transformation.

1. Feel

Allow yourself to sit with the anxiety and insecurity. What is it really saying? Often, anxiety is the mind’s way of telling you that there’s unresolved fear or pain. It’s a sign that your deeper needs for control and security aren’t being met—not by your partner, but by your relationship with yourself.

2. Deal

Examine the story behind the anxiety. Ask yourself, “What do I believe about myself that is making me feel this way?” This is where you confront the MUD—the unconscious decisions that formed in childhood and are causing you to act out of insecurity. For example, you might realize that your anxiety comes from a belief that you aren’t lovable unless you’re perfect. Or that you’re constantly afraid of abandonment because you were emotionally neglected as a child.

3. Heal

Healing means rewriting the story. You challenge the MUD, affirming that you are enough, and that love doesn’t need to be earned or controlled. This step often requires tools like BEEP, which helps you release the deeply held emotional patterns tied to your fear of not being good enough. Through breathwork and visualization, you rewire your emotional responses, allowing you to move forward in relationships without the grip of anxiety.

BEEP: A Powerful Tool for Healing

Breath Enhanced Emotional Processing (BEEP) is a method I use to help individuals process and heal their deeply ingrained emotional patterns. BEEP combines breathwork, visualization, and intentional emotional processing to access and release the emotional energy stored in the body due to past trauma or unresolved issues.

By activating both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems through controlled breathing, BEEP helps individuals access deeper emotional states, process old wounds, and reprogram their response to current triggers. It’s a key tool in the Heal phase, allowing you to move beyond the anxiety and AFRAID emotions that are rooted in your MUD.