It is midnight and you are on your side of the bed with the phone lighting up your face, replaying the pause before they answered your text. The tone in the kitchen earlier. The way they looked at their screen and not at you. Your chest is tight. You want to ask, one more time, are we okay. You want to check where they were. You have already asked twice today and you saw their face the second time, and you know. You know you are pushing them away. And you cannot stop.
Then you type my insecurity is ruining my relationship into your phone, and everything that comes back tells you that insecurity is a personal defect. Build your self-esteem. Do affirmations. Stop being needy. Set boundaries with yourself.
I am going to tell you something different, because I have been you, and because that advice has never once worked for anybody who sat in my office.
Your insecurity is not a flaw. It is an alarm.
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We are mammals. Somewhere very deep in you is a nervous system that was built on a savanna, and on the savanna, if your person went quiet or turned away, you died. That is not a metaphor. That is the wiring. So when your partner’s tone changes, or they take too long to reply, or they seem somewhere else, your body does not register a small social ambiguity. It registers a threat to your survival, and it fires the loudest alarm it has.
Every recurring fight, every checking text, every are we okay, is a protest. It is one nervous system saying to another: I do not feel safe with you right now. I do not feel seen. I do not feel like I matter.
That is not a defect. That is a creature doing exactly what it was built to do. The problem is not that the alarm exists. The problem is what the two of you do once it goes off.
Why reassurance never sticks
You have noticed this. They say of course I love you, and the relief lasts five minutes, and then the panic is back, and now you feel worse, because you needed it again and you saw them sigh.
Here is why. When the alarm is on, words go to the part of your brain that is offline. Reassurance is water poured into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. Your thinking brain hears the yes. Your animal does not speak that language. It reads eye contact, tone, the body next to it, whether the nervous system across from it is calm or strained. And when your partner says of course I love you through gritted teeth because it is the third time tonight, your animal hears the strain, not the words, and files it as proof.
So you are not broken because reassurance does not work. Reassurance was never going to work. It is the wrong medicine for the wound.
The dance you are both in
I call it the Waltz of Pain. Your alarm goes off, so you reach. Check, ask, text, test, sometimes criticise. Your partner feels the pressure and the accusation underneath it, feels like a failure, and does the thing their nervous system does, which is pull back. Go quiet. Go to their phone. Get short with you. And their pulling back is the exact thing your alarm is listening for, so it fires harder, so you reach harder, so they pull back further.
You are not pushing them away because you are too much. You are pushing them away because two frightened animals are each doing the one thing that frightens the other more.
I am the insecure one in my marriage
I should say that plainly. I am a couples therapist and I am the pursuer with my wife. Why is everything up to me. Why do you never hear me. I come in the door already hurting and I turn into what she calls Mr. Blamey Pants, and then, when that does not get me what I want, she has another name for me. Pursuer bitch. She is not wrong.
What I am actually doing when I check and blame and push is asking, badly, whether I still matter. And the badly is the whole problem. Because the way I ask guarantees the answer I am terrified of.
Story of other, experience of self
This is the thing I want you to take from this article if you take nothing else.
There are two ways to say what is happening in you. The first is the story of other. You never text back. You are always on your phone. You do not care about me any more. Are you sure you still want this. That is what comes out of your mouth when the alarm is on, and every one of those sentences is a pressure and a verdict, and your partner’s body receives it as you are failing again.
The second is the experience of self. My chest is tight. I feel scared. I feel far away from you tonight. That is the same alarm, told from the inside instead of aimed at them. And it does something completely different to the person across from you, because there is nothing in it to defend against. There is just someone they love, frightened.
What to do tonight instead of asking
Not a plan. One thing.
When the urge to check or ask comes, and it will, feet on the floor. A breath. Hand on your chest. Say to yourself: my alarm is going off. My body is terrified and I am actually safe. Ten seconds. It will not make the feeling go away. It will stop you sending the text.
Then, if you need to reach, reach the other way. Not are we okay. Not why did you take so long. Say the inside. Something like:
I am going to sound needy or critical right now, and I am sorry. Underneath that my chest is tight and I feel scared and far away from you tonight. I love you.
Nothing after it. No question. You are not asking for reassurance, which does not work anyway. You are showing them the frightened animal under the checking, which is the one thing they have never seen, because all they have seen is the pressure.
If you are the partner reading this
Your person is not trying to control you. They are drowning and reaching for the only thing floating. Every time you pull back to get some air, their alarm reads it as the thing it was waiting for. You do not have to answer every question. You do have to answer the animal. Put the phone down, look at them, and say: I can see you are scared. I am right here. You matter to me and we are on the same team. Say it with your body as much as your mouth. That is the water that stays in the bucket.
What I tell the person in that chair
You are not too much. You are a mammal with a loud alarm in a dance that keeps setting it off. The fix is not to feel less. It is to say what you feel from the inside instead of the outside, and to let your partner meet the fear instead of the checking. When that happens, and it does happen, the checking loses its job. It was only ever asking one question, and the question finally got answered.
If you want help with the words for tonight, that is what I built Figlet for. Tell it what you wanted to ask and what you were afraid of underneath. It will give you the experience-of-self version, the one that does not push them away.
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”
