Bustle – 7 Signs Your Insecurities Are Affecting Your Relationship

Alicia H. Clark, PsyD
Relationship insecurity can burden your partner with having to respond and reassure you. Every now and then is seldom a burden, but chronic cases of feeling inadequate can put pressure on your partner to help. Not only can this cause tension between you, but it takes the solution out of your hands, which can drive insecurity up, not down.
While we may long for our partner’s assurances to comfort and reassure us, chronic insecurities are seldom helped by others. It is our OWN sense of self adequacy that needs overhauling. We need to extend to ourselves a sense of acceptance and love.
Worry and insecurities can be uncomfortable, and ultimately plague a relationship. I was pleased to join other relationship experts in noting some signs your insecurities might be getting in the way of your relationship satisfaction, and what you can do about it.
To read the full post on Bustle, click HERE.

 

Your Partner Is Constantly Having To Reassure You

There’s nothing wrong with craving some reassurance from your partner every now and then, but if you constantly need them to validate you, that’s a sign that your insecurities are getting the better of you — and if they grow tired of reassuring you, that can cause you to become even more insecure.

“Your partner’s drifting patience [with reassuring you] can mean you are leaning too heavily on them and not doing enough for yourself,” Alicia H Clark, PsyD, PLLC, licensed clinical psychologist, tells Bustle. “When your partner loses patience with your need for reassurance, this could be the mark of a critical, unaccepting partner who is actually contributing to your insecurity.”

You Rely On Your Partner To Make You Feel Like You’re Enough

Self-acceptance isn’t something you can summon overnight, but if you rely solely on your partner to make you feel like you’re ‘enough’ — attractive enough, fun enough, smart enough, kind enough — you’ll never be fully happy, both with yourself and in your relationship.

“You name it, an insecure person will wonder if they are ever ‘enough’ [of any given quality],” Clark says. “I call this the ‘tyranny of enoughs’. You don’t feel adequate enough, and you look to your partner to redefine this for you, when all along you are looking for something that comes from within: radical self-acceptance.”

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Alicia H. Clark, PsyD