How to Lean Towards Relationships When Stress is Leading You Away

Rachel sits at home petting her cat. She is finding it hard to focus these days with the world experiencing a global pandemic. Only a few weeks ago her biggest concerns were the tension at work with her boss and whether that cute guy at her gym would ask her out. Now she doesn’t see either of them.

Now her concerns feel more serious. How will she make it being isolated alone for months? She worries about losing her job because many co-workers have lost theirs. Now she’s expected to do more work at home in the same about of time. And her dating life? Well, all this stress has her pushing it aside. She thinks, “Why would I want to add any more crazy feelings of anxiety to my life when I’m already feeling on edge about everything?” She kisses her cat and turns on another episode of Love is Blind.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? That when we feel a lot of stress that we want to avoid any potential feelings of discomfort in dating and relationships. I’m the first to admit that I’ve avoided relationships in my life so I wouldn’t have to risk confronting issues and feeling bad. However, pulling away from relationships at times has left me feeling painfully alone.

It’s understandable that we react this way if we’ve experienced past relationships where we felt unsafe or rejected. If you’ve had bad experiences in relationships in the past, of course you’d fear entering a relationship that could bring more feelings of insecurity, rejection or pain.

When we attempt to self-protect from feeling that kind of pain again, instead of seeking healing and moving toward a relationship, we actually miss out on the potential benefits of a good partnership. Supportive partnerships are known to lower stress levels in difficult circumstances, provide more physical contact with direct health benefits and give us opportunities to work through interpersonal communication in order to experience exponential growth beyond what any self-help book could do.

However, even if we know this to be true, why, for some of us, does it become hard to lean towards a partnership in the middle of stressful times? Even while we’re in a partnership we can become more reactive to our partners and therefore pulling away, manipulating or blaming others for the intense feelings that we’re not so sure how to deal with on our own.

So whether you’re avoiding partnership altogether or find yourself pulling away in a partnership now that you’re spending more time together in the quarantine, here are a few suggestions to consider in order to lean towards relationships so that you can experience their live-giving benefits in a crisis:

1. Ask a Safe Person in Your Life to Listen - Whether you’re single or in a partnership, reach out to a safe person in your life and ask them if you can share honestly what you are experiencing right now. Ask them if they’ll give you 10 minutes to just listen and be willing to share what emotions are coming up for you so that you can be heard. In expressing yourself honestly, you are letting another person into your life and validating that what you’re experiencing is normal. While this seems simple, it can feel challenging to let yourself receive the emotional support that you need right now, believing that others are busy with their own problems. But it’s surprising what people are willing to give us when we ask for exactly what we need.

2. Let Your Emotions Move Through You - Moving towards relationships often requires first moving towards ourselves. What are we feeling now as we sit at home without our normal activities, distractions or numbing habits? Can you get in touch with what’s really going on when you say now is not the time for you to date? What do you really want from your partner right now? How did what your partner say honestly impact you? It can be easy under stress to default to ignoring our own emotions or trying to caretake everyone else’s emotions to avoid tuning into your own. How can you give yourself time to feel? You won’t feel angry or sad or alone for ever—emotions are meant to be felt and to move through you.

3. Take One Step Towards Relationship - Is there something that you normally resist doing in relationships because it feels too edgy? Maybe it’s sharing one level more intimately with a guy on a video date. Maybe it’s admitting first to a partner that you were wrong. What would it look like for you to decide to take one step towards relationship? This can be challenging if you are already feeling stress, but what if taking this step could result in a deeper connection that would support you emotionally and physically in this time—wouldn’t that be worth it?

4. Get Support to Do Something New - If you feel stuck because your relationships aren’t working, often getting support helps to do something different than what you’ve always done. Get the support of a friend before you decide to have that hard conversation with a partner about handling the kids. You could join a singles dating group, where you meet regularly to share your online dating experiences. Maybe it’s time to get professional support to work through your anxiety around men that paralyzes you from moving forward in a relationship. Whatever it is, getting support demonstrates a strength that you’re willing to give yourself what you need so that you can create a supportive relationship.

So if you’re hunkered down with your cat, enjoying the simplicity of their furry companionship, but deep down yearning to have more engaging conversations with a partner who gets you or have a nurturing physical connection with a partner that soothes your nervous system in stressful times, maybe it’s time to consider what ONE step you can take today to lean in towards relationship. Because while clothes, food, shelter, health, and furry companions are wonderful, what makes life meaningful amidst suffering is love.

From now until May 8th, I’m offering ten individual coaching sessions around a relationship challenge you may be experiencing in the COVID quarantine. Click here to answer a few questions to reserve your session.

Anxious? Shift Into Your Feminine Energy

I’m not generally a very anxious person, but when it comes to dating, I’ve had more than my fair share of anxiety. In fact it got so bad in grad school that when a guy I had crush on was coming over, I had to have my housemate sit on me for 20 minutes because I was shaking so hard that I couldn’t calm down.

So I get it If you’ve been dating and feeling anxiety come as you navigate your experiences. Especially right now when our whole world has been thrown into major changes from the Corona Virus, it’s likely a lot of human beings are experiencing anxiety from the uncertainty of their financial security, relationships and health.

If you’re someone who’s been feeling quite anxious to the point of overwhelm, especially when related to dating, I’m going to share a few reasons why this happens and how shifting into your feminine energy can help.

If you get anxious in dating you may recognize that certain situations trigger you. This can happen:

1. When a person pulls away, doesn’t text or call you back - Maybe the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd dates went really well and you started to think, maybe this could be your guy, but then it drops off suddenly and you don’t hear from him at all. You text him to check in, but he doesn’t respond for 2 days. The anxiety kicks in.

2. When you’re not getting what you need- When you know that you want a person who talks respectfully about his mom or who pays attention to details to make sure you feel good on a date or calls you consistently throughout the week, but you’re not getting that. You come up with reasons why he’s that way and ignore honoring what would feel good for you. The anxiety kicks in.

3. When you’re not being yourself- Your date takes you to a restaurant with bacon in every dish, but you’re vegan, you don’t speak up and instead try to make it work for you. You laugh at his jokes that are partially offensive. You cancel your favorite gym class to spend time with him. These can be the start of compromising in small ways who you really are. You put in a lot of effort to be someone you think your date would like. The anxiety kicks in.

4. When they don’t seem as into you are you are into them- Are you waiting by your phone to see his text pop up? Did he tell you he wasn’t sure about when he’d be free this week? Does he not seem sure about the kind of relationship he wants or his contact has been “on” one week and “off” the next 2 weeks? If you’ve got strong feelings for a guy that isn’t making you a priority with his communication nor taking action to be with you. The anxiety kicks in.

5. When you are fantasizing about who a guy really is- You’ve gone on 2 dates with this guy and you are imaging how great he’d be playing with the daughter that you’ve always wanted. So you stop entertaining all other date options and start to focus only on him. But you don’t really even know who he is yet. The anxiety kicks in.

In each of these scenarios a woman gives her value over to another person for them to define her. She is usually making meaning of a man’s behavior and letting it dictate whether she is worthy, lovable or attractive enough to get the love that she desires.

When we are giving another person the power to define our worth, we stop drawing our innate value from who we are—the amazing, uniquely beautiful, talented, sensual, funny, light-hearted, compassionate, resourceful, creative woman that we are. When we don’t stand in our innate value, we tend to go more into our masculine energy, which is about making things happen and fixing things. We start to feel anxious in order to not feel the emotions that are coming up, which is suppressing our feminine nature that naturally feels emotions easily. This causes problems in our experiences with men, because they can sense that action oriented energy is covering up for our lack of belief in our own value.

On the other hand, when we stand in the truth of our worth as women, we shift into the power of our feminine energy.

A woman in her feminine energy knows that her essential being is valuable, powerful and desirable. There is nothing that she has to do to earn or gain the affection of a man or anyone else in her life. While the masculine energy takes action and makes things happen to attract a partner, the feminine rests in her value, which looks like honoring her feelings, speaking up about her desires, honoring her body and the intuitive information that it gives her. The feminine takes time to go inward to see what she is feeling. Instead of keeping herself busy and doing activities to numb their feelings, she tunes in to give herself time to feel and then acts on what feels good or creates boundaries around what feels bad.

So shifting into this feminine energy can help us to overcome anxiety in many ways, here are 3 specific ideas:

1. Resting in Your Value - Whether that means telling yourself the truth about your value daily or reminding yourself in the face of a financial crisis that you are worthy to receive the things that you need. Start to see yourself as the prize that a man gets to have when he treats you in the way that feels good, nourishing and creates security for you. Then qualify the man—is he good enough for you? Do you want him as he is?

2. Get Curious - what am I feeling about this experience?—write down all the feelings. Where is this feeling coming from? Instead of reaching for your phone to call a guy in attempts to relieve yourself from the unbearable anxiety that he’s not texting you, how can you sit with yourself and get curious about your feelings?

3. Notice Your Body’s Intuition - Notice when you start to feel tension around your heart or start to clench in your pelvis or when your gut feels like it’s tied in knots. Then close your eyes and ask yourself - what is my body telling me right now. So often our bodies have wisdom for us about a dating situation before we realize that wisdom on a conscious level.

Once we gain awareness of the experiences that cause the anxiety to kick in for us, it can be helpful to start to take steps to both increase our own sense of self-worth as well as taking time to check in with what’s coming up for us in our feeling space.

When anxiety comes on, it can be a way to numb our emotions. When this happens we sometimes want to make the uncomfortable feeling of anxiety go away by going into our masculine energy. For instance we think by taking action to get a man’s response we’ll feel better. However, it’s rare that we ever feel better when we grasp at getting a man’s attention, instead of resting in the knowledge that we deserve what we actually want—for the guy to freely choose to reach out to us because he wants to. He is free to choose and we are assured of our value no matter what happens.

If you're experiencing anxiety and having trouble getting to the root of it on your own, it can be helpful to get support explore ways to shift into your feminine energy. Schedule a coaching session below to feel calmer and confident in your relationships.