Is this Relationship Anxiety or a Gut Feeling?
“Is this relationship anxiety or a gut feeling?”
You feel anxious about your relationship, and you don’t know whether it’s relationship anxiety or a gut feeling that you should leave. It feels like so much is at stake, and yet you can’t tell the difference.
In this post, I share some ways of telling the difference between relationship anxiety and a gut feeling.
I also talk about when this question becomes a compulsion. Compulsions make relationship anxiety worse, so it’s important that you know when you’re doing compulsions so you can do something different. When you replace compulsing with healthier habits, you take a huge step in recovering from relationship anxiety.
What is relationship anxiety versus a gut feeling?
Relationship anxiety involves worrying about whether you’re with the right person or in the right relationship. This worrying is intense and prolonged, meaning it happens frequently, for long periods of time, and causes a lot of distress in your life.
When someone has relationship anxiety, they worry about things like:
Am I really in love with my partner?
Is my gut warning me to leave?
Am I just in denial that this is the wrong relationship?
One of the biggest hallmarks of relationship anxiety is a feeling of urgency, the feeling that you have to find an answer to these questions.
As one person put it, “There is a huge sense of urgency and yet you're paralyzed and literally don't know what to do. There's so much evidence for and against and you're literally stuck.”
Clients have used other words like frantic, pressured, and exhausting to describe how relationship anxiety feels.
These are the signs I look for as a therapist to tell whether someone is struggling with relationship anxiety: lots of urgency and distress around not knowing what to do, and trying over and over to find an answer.
Not sure if you have relationship anxiety? Take my free relationship anxiety test to find out!
The difference between relationship anxiety or a gut feeling
Gut feelings don’t have the same frantic, urgent, and pressured feeling as relationship anxiety.
A gut feeling can feel intense, but it feels a lot more like intuition than intense questioning.
Gut feelings feel more like clear information. Relationship anxiety feels more like confusion.
Think of a time in your life when you had a gut feeling about someone you just met. What did it feel like?
For most people, there’s a feeling of “Something doesn’t feel right about this person,” or “I felt like I could trust them right away.” You can’t necessarily explain why, but you have a clear sense.
This is probably the biggest difference between relationship anxiety and a gut feeling:
A gut feeling gives you clear information to act on.
Relationship anxiety, on the other hand, doesn’t give you anything clear to act on.
Gut feelings make people feel more certain. Relationship anxiety makes people feel less certain.
Someone with a gut feeling has a sense of what action to take. Someone with relationship anxiety feels lost and confused, with no clue what to do.
Gut feelings aren’t always right
Even though gut feelings feel like clear information, it doesn’t mean they’re always right.
For example, think of how many times you’ve had a feeling about something and it turned out to be wrong.
We’ve all had these moments:
“There’s no way I got that job. I just know it.” And then you get the job.
“The 49ers are going to make it to the Superbowl. I can just feel it.” And then they don’t.
“I totally failed that test.” But you didn’t.
Why does this matter?
If you’re reading this post, my guess is that you’re desperately searching for an answer. It can feel like, “If only I knew whether this is relationship anxiety or intuition, then I’d finally know what to do.” The assumption we make is that if our anxiety is a gut feeling, then it must be true that we’re in the wrong relationship, and then we’d know to leave.
I understand how tempting it is to think this way, to feel like you have no other choice but to find the right answer. But when you come from that place of needing to know, your searching becomes a compulsion, and you get more and more stuck in relationship anxiety. Like a person trying to dig their way out of a hole, you keep doing the thing that keeps you stuck, not knowing what else to do.
This is one of the most important things to understand about relationship anxiety: the more you search for certainty, for a clear answer, the more likely you are to feel anxious and confused.
Searching for certainty = A compulsion
Compulsions make relationship anxiety worse.
Recovery from relationship anxiety involves doing the opposite: letting go of trying to find the right answer.
In other words, recovery from relationship anxiety involves embracing uncertainty.
As Phil Stutz said, “True confidence is living in uncertainty, and moving forward.”
The freedom of not knowing
Let’s say you discover that your fear is an actual gut feeling. In that case, you still wouldn’t know whether to stay or leave. Even if your gut is warning you, who says that your gut is right? Guts are often wrong. Intuitions are often false.
What’s the alternative then? To stop avoiding uncertainty, to embrace the not knowing, and to find the courage to move forward anyway.
Erica Jong wrote, "Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more."
I know how scary it can feel to realize there’s no right answer.
As one person put it, “It can be so tempting to think that our guts are giving us valuable information… Our brains know it's more important to be safe than it is to be happy! But remember that guts are often catastrophizing and don't possess some higher knowledge that you don't. They are your brain trying to help you by prepping you for the worst. But if you live your life according to that fear response, you're never going to do anything but run away from pretend saber-toothed tigers.”
I can tell you this: when a person truly accepts that there’s no right answer, and that the best they can do is to make an educated decision guided by their values, they start to access a freedom and confidence in themselves that they didn’t feel before.
This is one of the secrets to recovery: there’s a freedom in not knowing.
Someone said to me once, more or less, “You mean I don’t have to know if my relationship is right or not?” You could see the weight fall off their shoulders. This person was then free to show up and learn from the relationship itself.
You don’t have to know right now if you should stay or leave. Your job is to be present in your relationship and learn from it.
Have trust in your own wisdom. Have trust that if you show up with an open mind and an open heart, you’ll eventually arrive at a decision that’s right for you.
Relationship Anxiety or Intuition
If you find it helpful to know the difference between relationship anxiety and intuition, or relationship anxiety and a gut feeling, that’s great. I think it’s a useful skill to do a quick internal check and name, “Okay, this feels urgent and frantic. This is probably relationship anxiety.”
But if you find yourself coming to this question again and again - “Is this a gut feeling warning me? Is it the right choice to leave?” - I encourage you to shift your approach to what I’ve described above.
The better you get at being in your relationship even when you don’t know if it’s right or not, the better you get at handling uncertainty. And when you can handle uncertainty, relationship anxiety won’t have anywhere to grab onto.
What recovery from relationship anxiety looks like
When someone has recovered from relationship anxiety, they say things like:
I don’t know if I’m in the right relationship, but I’m going to keep showing up, trusting that I’ll reach an answer over time.
I feel the urge to look for an answer, but I know that’s a compulsion that makes relationship anxiety worse. Let me find a healthier way of handling this fear and doubt.
This may be my gut warning me, but I really don’t know. Let me decide for myself what I want to do.
All of these share a sense of resilience and agency that’s so often lost when you’re struggling with relationship anxiety.
Can you connect with your own sense of agency and self-trust? Your own ability to choose for yourself?
If not, that’s okay. I encourage you to work toward that in your recovery. The person who recovers is the person who stops running from fear and uncertainty, and learns to trust their own wisdom and strength.
Meet Cameron
I help men and women recover from relationship anxiety and ROCD. I’ve helped people who are dealing with relationship anxiety for the very first time, or who have struggled with it for years. I’ve seen again and again that recovery is possible, and that, as strange as it sounds, the work of recovery can be an incredible doorway into building confidence and healing your relationship with yourself. My job is to help you do this.
Reach out for a free consultation to see if I’m a good fit for you.
Or check out my online course called Choosing Love - How to Find Peace from Relationship Anxiety. It’s on-demand and includes over 3 hours of audio and 10 practical tools to use in overcoming relationship anxiety.
I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and I see clients both online and in downtown Oakland, California.
I’m also creating an online course to help people recover from relationship anxiety. See the signup form below if you’d like to stay notified of its release later this year.
Notes:
This post is for educational purposes only. This post is neither intended as advice giving nor as a means for diagnosis. Diagnosis of any mental disorder requires live interaction with a licensed mental health professional.
For more information on compulsing, consider reading Greenberg’s blog post on why rumination is a compulsion.
