How to Overcome Insecurity in a Relationship and Gain Back Control of Your Life

Regardless if the basis of your insecurity in your relationship is real or imaginary, the feeling can still be damaging unless you know how to overcome it. In this article you’ll discover:

1. Why taking care of You is the most important act you can do to overcome any of your insecurities. 
2. Strategies to feeling good about yourself that’ll make you attractive to your partner and others.
3. How hypnosis can help change negative thinking patterns and quieten your inner critic so you can enjoy and thrive in your personal relationships with others.
4. Further reading and resources for help in overcoming insecurity in your relationship.

Leading causes of relationship dysfunction and dissolution can be found in miscommunication and jealousy. Essentially, many breakdowns are caused by one side being insecure and pushing the other away, or just plain giving up and walking out of the relationship.

So many relationships turn sour and end badly because one or both individuals feel misunderstood, not appreciated or disrespected due to another’s jealousy, or feelings of inferiority in the relationship… their insecurities.

At some point the bonds of trust and lines of respect get crossed, even compromised.

Eventually this leads to chaos and confusion whereby one’s partner or best friend has had enough, and chooses to walk away from the relationship to maintain a sense of dignity and sanity.

Do you find yourself in relationships that usually end badly with you either pushing others away, or people walking away from you? Perhaps it’s time to deal with potential ‘insecurity’ issues you might possess!

Let’s start by looking at ways these insecurities can creep into our lives and cause pain for everybody involved.

 

WAYS OUR INSECURITIES MANIFEST THEMSELVES:

Insecurities in relationships are often due to low self-esteem and a lack of self- confidence. We are all susceptible to feeling threatened or inadequate from time to time, and self-doubt can creep into our daily thoughts during many of our relationships, especially during the early stages when we are building the foundation.

However, chronic insecurities fester and can destroy intimate relationships. When your every thought of a person stops the enjoyment of being with them because it impacts your ability to act naturally around them then it can push them away.

This low self-esteem usually has its origins in childhood or one’s early teen years.

Often times it is caused by having experiences, or feeling unworthy, rejected or even abandoned by those closest to you, namely parents, siblings or other family members.

In fact, it’s not uncommon for a child to feel ‘rejected’ or not wanted if one parent leaves a marriage, whereby the child feels rejected as well by the estranged parent.

Insecure feelings can also develop after being hurt and rejected by somebody you cared deeply about. This could be a girl or boyfriend, or a family member or somebody you looked up to and respected. Many sibling relationships can end up on the rocks because of poor treatment or a reaction after a major family event.

I had a client who was suffering deep insecurities over an older sibling’s history of repeated rejections to them over time when it appeared they would come in and out of their life over decades. Each swing would be sudden and complete for years and assumed to be the fault of the rejected party. Which it wasn’t, but with no context to understand, the mind makes up its own stories, and many times its determination is inaccurate.

When individuals don’t resolve any of these types of ‘rejection’ they’re most likely to develop issues that include feelings associated with; rage, worthlessness, shame, jealousy and even possessiveness. If and when these feelings manifest and are allowed to flourish they can develop into long-term, acute ‘insecurity’ issues.

Another common feeling is of not being good enough for the other person. This plays havoc with your mind as you begin to have irrational thoughts about motives surrounding their every move or action. Their decisions on anything becomes fodder for your misinterpretation of their feelings towards you. Not wanting to go out for the evening plays into the fact they’re beginning to lose interest in you. Or going out to meet with friends, or lunch time appointments without you, means they’ve found somebody else.

In some cases, the person who walks out is… you. The determination being its going to end badly so I’ll save myself some pain and end it now. When in actual fact it’s all made up in the mind and not steeped in reality.

Other ways of feeding the insecurity fire include: seeing problems where none exist, confusing imagination with reality, irrational jealousy, obsessive thoughts, fear of being rejected or abandoned, lack of trust, and extreme clinginess or neediness.

These insecurities tend to lead one’s perceptions of relationships into being tainted.

When this happens, these insecurities can quickly destroy meaningful relationships. The key is to get to the root of the issues causing you to feel insecure; jealousy, anger, etc. and modify them.

Let’s move on now to discuss ways to overcome these insecurities.

 

WAYS TO OVERCOME INSECURITY IN YOUR RELATIONSHIPS:

The majority of our insecurities are on the inside and caused by us and not others, so the person we need to work on is… us.

For sure, a cheating partner or overbearing family member can impact us, and introduce self-doubt at any time in our life, but we get to decide how we respond to those people, and if we spend any time with them. So, overcoming insecurities in our relationships means we have to work on us.

Improving your self-esteem provides the foundation for feeling self-worth and value you bring to a relationship, and quietens the chatter and irrational thinking that happens when you act out in your mind your insecurities in your relationships.

Self-esteem is a topic all on its own – it covers confidence as well – and there are multiple schools of thought on how it can be improved. Specific to relationships it could involve seeing a psychotherapist or hypnotist over a course of sessions. To help you get on track and understand more about how to get more self-esteem and confidence I’ve linked in the resource section below to an earlier article I did about “The Eight Habits of Highly Confident People.”

Improving your self-esteem by feeling good about yourself will make you attractive to your partner and others. Exhibiting constant needy traits in a relationship is guaranteed to push your partner or friend away from you.

Dwelling on relationships in your past no longer has a bearing on the present because the past is over and done with. Those feelings hold no place in the present because it’s a different time and place. With that said, letting them go will also help build your self-esteem and self-confidence for present and future relationships.

Another important step to move away from insecurities is to achieve a healthy independence.

You need to take care of… You. We sometimes forget there was life before a spouse or partner where we had control over our needs and had activities going on with others. Reverting to having friends and activities outside our intimate relationship is healthy and necessary. Also make time to have some financial independence and look to include hobbies and interests outside the home.

In an article by Susan Krauss Whitbourne Ph.D, she quotes a study by Peking University’s Wenjie Yuan and Lei Wang (2016) “… which provides a simple step you can take to keep insecurity from getting in the way of your happiness and your mental health.” Whitbourne identifies “… potentially easy way to put an end to those insecurities, as proposed by Yuan and Wang, is to crank up your optimism levels. When you’re optimistic, you tend to attribute events that could have negative consequences in a way that reduces their threat value, primarily by seeing those events as being caused by outside factors that will undoubtedly change for the better. Being an optimist, in other words, means that you see the glass as half full, that you ultimately view it as completely fillable, and that you are not responsible for its emptying.”

You can find a link to Dr. Whitbourne’s article “The Key to Overcoming Insecurity” and more information about the Chinese University study in the resource section below.

A powerful strategy you can work on is to identify the ‘self-talk’ that goes on in your mind when you create conflict, or find yourself in continual conflict in your relationships. It’s important to monitor what you’re telling yourself that’s perpetuating these insecurities.

It may be difficult at first to try and keep tabs on these negative thinking patterns, however after monitoring them a few times, it will become easier and eventually second nature, and you’ll be able to ‘censor’ the negative thinking patterns, and silence that “inner critic.”

Since negative thinking patterns that lead to insecurities exist because they’ve been patterned, it means these thinking patterns rest in your unconscious mind where are habits and thinking patterns are housed.

They pop up without a moment’s notice when certain triggers from your past, feelings and experiences, become associated with what is going on in your present relationship.

Hypnosis is an exceptional tool for helping release old thinking and feeling patterns, and focusing on the here and now. Hypnosis is also helpful in dealing with negative self-talk by silencing your inner critic which we discussed earlier.

A trained hypnotherapist can help over multiple sessions to quieten and lessen the impact of habits and patterns of thoughts undermining your relationships. They can train you in self-hypnosis to continue with the therapy work yourself.

If you’re looking to kick start your ability to function positively in new and old relationships, then consider hypnosis as it can help supplement the other ways mentioned in this section. Hypnosis shouldn’t always be considered as an alternative therapy but as a supplement to strengthen other ways to overcome insecurities in your relationships.

 

CONCLUSIONS:

Insecurities in our relationships are usually rooted in a lack of self-esteem which can be traced back to childhood rejections, or being let down by a person who was important to you, and didn’t get fully resolved, and so you interpreted the rejection as your own fault or something you deserved.

The fact is self-esteem issues are reinforced by negative thinking patterns which trigger your inner critic and create self-doubt. The vicious circle has to be broken by increasing your feeling of self-worth and value. Review the “Habits of Highly Confident People” article in the resource section, and turn your back on pessimistic feeling and look to bring in an optimistic outlook on life and your relationships – see the link below on “6 Easy Ways To Be A Whole Lot More Optimistic About Anything.”

We discussed a number of other strategies for overcoming insecurities in relationships including hypnosis. Hypnosis can be a supplement to almost any other method to break down the “insecurity walls” and help break negative thinking patterns, your inner critic, and boosting your self-esteem and confidence.

Finally, If you’re interested in more information about my own online or in-office confidence and self-esteem hypnosis program then click here or contact me here.

 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES RELATED TO RELATIONSHIPS:

The Key to Overcoming Insecurity – Susan Whitbourne Ph.D >>>

The Eight Habits of Highly Confident People – Erika Slater CH >>>

Slay the ‘Foot in Mouth’ Beast by Discovering These Ways to Think Before You Speak >>>

When You Regularly Feel Insecure In Your Relationship >>>

6 Easy Ways To Be A Whole Lot More Optimistic About Anything >>>

Library of Self-Hypnosis Downloads Products >>>

 
Erika Slater CH
Free At Last Hypnosis
Massachusetts