Scared of Losing Him

When we’re feeling insecure in our relationships, we seek to understand what might be going wrong in order to create change and improve our situation in order to feel better. But are we taking everything into account?

The Fear

When we begin to worry that our relationship may be breaking down, we tend to consider our own role in the partnership, what we might be doing wrong, how we might make things better or easier, or how we might change in order to make our partner happier and therefore help ourselves feel safer. 

If we consider that for a minute, what we’re actually saying is that we need to change ourselves in order to make someone else happy in order for them to stick around to keep us happy. Is that really the healthiest outcome?

What we really need is for our partners to meet us halfway, to look at each other’s needs and how we’re both meeting them. We need to work together in order to ensure both parties have a clearer understanding of each other’s difficulties and the potential solutions to these.

If our partner however appears to be dismissive of this, and we are left feeling that we are making too much of a big deal about nothing, then we are not being heard, we are not being valued, and we are not likely to succeed in feeling more secure in the relationship.

If we are left feeling that it is something wrong with us, that we are overbearing, or jealous, or paranoid, or our expectations are too high, or we’re too needy, then we need to take a serious look at this. The reality of the situation is that this is possible, and if so, you may need some support to work through your insecurities and your dependency. The reality of the situation however could also be that this is how we are being made to feel in order to prevent us from broaching this with our partner at all. Extreme emotions can be manufactured in relationships when the person we are involved with does not have our best interests at heart.

In order to determine which one of these is true, we need to consider our partner’s behaviour alongside our own. Too many times have I heard women state that they can’t seem to do anything right or they feel they’re not good enough, and the challenge to see their relationship clearly is one to be struggled with. 

If you’ve found yourself at this juncture in your relationship, consider what has brought you here. What has created such self-doubt and low confidence?

The Confidence Booster:

We can sometimes find ourselves in relationships with people who will initially build us up, make us feel on top of the world, and put us on a pedestal, who will lavish us with praise and attention and build our confidence and self-esteem, who will make us feel desired and loved and perfect for them, who will have done this deliberately with the intention of gaining pleasure from seeing us come crashing back down. 

They will compliment our looks, our character, our intelligence etc in order to make us reliant on them for our ‘feel good’ factor before belittling these same traits, causing us to feel worthless and in constant need for positive affirmations from them. They become our source of reassurance for everything that we do and we begin to approach them with often mediocre accomplishments that begin to feel like something we can gain praise for, something we can offer them, something that helps us appear to be a confident or even extraordinary person so they’ll see us in a better light.

When this person leaves the relationship, this will become apparent to you as you find yourself in need of sharing your every day experiences with him whilst beginning to recognise that there’s nobody else in your life you’d share them with because they simply aren’t that spectacular.

He will be very careful to ensure that he still throws in the odd compliment when the timing is right, as this will give us renewed hope that he still sees the worth in us, it’s a manufactured rollercoaster to keep us trying our best to please him, to keep us in our uncertainty and increase our need for his love and attention. It’s abuse.

Triangulation

In order to enhance this dependency on him, he will throw in additional curveballs in the shape of other people in his life that may generate jealousy in us and promote further fear in us around losing him. He may tell us that our best friend reminds him of his ex or someone famous he has a crush on. He may tell us about the camaraderie he has with a female colleague and how his male colleagues are jealous or have commented on their closeness. He may talk about his sister in derogatory ways but then choose to spend time with her over us, cancelling our exciting plans to take her shopping instead. There are many ways to make us worry about his interest in us, or his interest in others and he will use them all. Collectively they make for great entertainment for him and increase his control over us. This is commonly known as triangulation and is only one method used by narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths to generate power over others.

We can be left feeling inadequate if we are compared to others in our partner’s lives, and we can certainly be made to feel we don’t deserve the love our partner appears to have for us. We feel he deserves better whilst worrying that he will find better. We become dependent on him to help us feel secure. This will not be offered to us in any genuine way which increases our fear he will leave.

Self-doubt

The abuser will be very careful in ensuring that his methods are seemingly harmless or unintentional. He will take no responsibility for how he makes us feel. We will be accused of being over-sensitive, delusional, neurotic, jealous, and needy, and we will absolutely question ourselves on this. Again we will feel we are the one that is creating the issues in our relationship and we may start dismissing his behaviour, justifying his hurtful actions, making excuses for his absences and so on because we don’t want to hear ourselves sound irrational. It’s a very clever game that he plays.

He will likely accuse us of the things he is doing and will twist every situation to his advantage. We will find we are defending ourselves and trying to prove to him that he is wrong in his opinions of us. We will find ourselves explaining to him normal human behaviour, describing to him what it means to have common decency, because he’s displaying none of it and at the same time accusing us of reacting outlandishly to these behaviours. We will quite rightly feel frustrated and upset and angry and he will again use this to make us feel there is something wrong with us. It’s a never-ending cycle of emotion that keeps us feeling inadequate and wrong and like we’re missing something from our understanding of our own behaviour. What we’re actually missing is the understanding of his intention to make us feel that way.  

The Game

If you are currently feeling you’re at significant risk of losing your partner, he may well have stepped up his game. If he is being direct about your behaviour and the impact it is having on him, cementing these opinions with apparent conversations he’s having with others who agree with him (often women), telling you he simply can’t put up with it anymore but you’ve no idea how to do things differently, then he is likely planning his grand finale, and when he abandons you, you will of course blame yourself, your self-esteem will diminish and you’ll feel you’ll never find a secure relationship because you’re simply not worthy of anyone’s lasting love and commitment. What a great job he will have done. Game well played.

So before this takes place, you need to make your move. Take action. 

Trust your instincts, they are your most valuable tool, when you’re doubting yourself, listen to what your gut is telling you, it is showing you the truth about your relationship and your feelings. Do not dismiss it.

Trust yourself. He has taken your confidence away from you, search for it, find it, then pair it up with self-respect and throw a checkmate his way! Conversely, he will respect you for this.

Trust that you will be okay and that you will be much better off without him. He will always play the game, there is no opportunity for change in your relationship when he has no desire to change his behaviour. He enjoys the game. And if you don’t end it now, he will end it for you and move on to his next willing participant. Stop being scared of losing and focus on winning!

If you’ve benefited from this blog, feel free to check out previous blogs on this subject including “I can’t get over a failed relationship” which details one client’s journey to discovery.

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