Relationships naturally have a way of evolving over time. They can move and shift slowly, they can become closer, more intimate, more deep, more distant, eb and flow, and, at times, can even take unexpected turns.
For many, the unpredictable nature of relationships can be quite anxiety-inducing, especially if you’ve been through trauma, pain, or loss in various types of relationships. Many, in fact, may even try to keep relationships from shifting due to the fear of this uncertainty. When you haven’t had positive experiences growing up of how to navigate or welcome changes and shifts into relationships, this can make any movement in a relationship even more anxiety inducing, unsure where the shifts may take the relationship.
Embracing this uncertainty and learning how to manage and move with the changes over time is actually important for maintaining healthy, long-lasting connections. With open communication, curiosity, patience, resilience, and more, it becomes easier over time to develop a sense of trust in the evolution of a relationship, which generally serves to strengthen and deepen relationships and connections.
What Causes Unpredictability to Be So Anxiety-Inducing?
For many people, change in relationships has a way of indicating inevitable loss or abandonment. This generally happens because in one’s experiences with relationships, there haven’t been people around them who have known how to navigate shifts and changes together. One of the most common examples of this is children (and adult children) of divorced parents. When you see your parents divorce, especially as a young child, you learn very early on that people leave, people breakup, and that if you’re not careful, people will do the same to you. Divorce is a clear way that people can learn that change in a relationship doesn’t go well. (And even if the changes were gradual with parents who just didn’t know how to manage it, a young child can have a harder time seeing this nuance, and can take it in as more black-and-white — that relationship shifts equals loss of the relationship).
Divorce, however, isn’t the only way that people struggle to embrace relationship evolution. This can also happen with parents who struggle to adapt to your developmental changes as you grow up. You’ve probably encountered parents of older teenagers, or even parents of adults, who struggle to see their older or adult children as anything other than children. Some parents have a hard time evolving with their children, and it can leave them feeling frustrated, or even alienated and removed in their relationships with their parents.
This becomes more complicated because not only is it an experience of change in the relationship feeling like a loss, but as a child it can feel like your growth and development may have caused your parent(s) to pull away from you. To a child, who still needs your parents to love and care for you, seeing your parents struggle to connect with you as you get older can make you feel like you need to control your development, or slow it down, or stay in a place where your parents can stay connected to you. This can make it hard to know how to have healthy evolution in a relationship, and know how to trust it and embrace it.
Opening Yourself to Unpredictability and Change in Relationships
When people have been through pain with relationship evolution, it can be very hard to internalize that the movement and the shifts that happen in relationships actually can be very healthy, and add more depth, intimacy, and lead to a stronger foundation in your relationship. But when having these other negative experiences, people not only don’t trust the unpredictability of an evolving relationship, they may try to impede its growth, or simply just not know how to grow together.
Obviously, navigating the changing tides of a relationship can sometimes be much easier said than done without help, especially when you haven’t had positive role models in this area. Going with the changes doesn’t mean no effort is needed, however. Both people in the relationship need to have a sense of openness to growth and the motivation to navigate the changes together. The real issue comes when one is motivated to shift and grow together, and the other isn’t. Because the shifts naturally happen either way. However, when we try to resist the unpredictability of shifts, it can lead to not only to constricting the growth of relationships, but also to constricting your own evolution as a person. This can lead to depression, anxiety, and lack of fulfillment in relationships and in life, as a whole.
Moving Forward
Since these habits have often been entrenched in one’s relationship dynamics for a long time, help is usually needed to learn to manage the unpredictability of relationships. Therapy is a good place to work on these issues. It can be automatic for some to try to control relationships, or to keep them from evolving, or even to react by leaving the relationship once you start to sense shifts happening. This can actually lead to the unnecessary breaking of relationships when really, it’s learning how to navigate the uncharted territory and unfamiliar space that’s really needed.
This can mean learning how to communicate more openly in your relationships and learning how to listen to each other in different ways than perhaps your own role models or relationships around you have known how to do. There is a sense of trust and patience that is needed when navigating shifts, which can actually be very difficult and unnerving when it feels like change in a relationship can be so hard to trust. It can make you want to act fast to fix the shifts, rather than being patient and allowing the space for it to happen together.
If you’re looking to be more grounded in the inevitable changes that come with relationships, including wanting to be more trusting, or less anxious in these spaces, contact me and we can discuss what you need.
