Feeling Insecure In Your Relationship? These 7 Tips Will Help You Move Forward

A healthy relationship is made up of a few aspects: mutual love, deep respect, shared values, and genuine security in the relationship, to name a few things. While security definitely sounds far less romantic than, say, love, we need to feel that on top of everything else to have faith in our relationship.

It’s normal for us all to struggle with moments of insecurity, especially in newer relationships, and we assume that our insecurity is only affecting us. But nothing kills a relationship, even one where we both have love for one another, quite like insecurity. 

This lack of trust in our bond leads us to act with jealousy, start arguments instead of prompting helpful discussions, and use our boyfriend’s attention to make ourselves feel better. But for all our attempts at making sure our boyfriend won’t leave, it's these actions that start driving him away.

So, assuming we don’t actually have a reason to worry about our relationship, how do we combat these gnawing feelings of insecurity? Life coach Tony Robbins has a few ideas.

Learn How To Love Yourself Better First

Sometimes, the insecurities we’re feeling have less to do with our boyfriend’s actions and more to do with us — specifically, our lack of love for ourselves. The term “self-love” gets thrown around a bit too often these days, but that doesn’t change its importance. 

If we see ourselves as someone who is unlovable, doesn’t deserve a good relationship, or is bound to fail, then we’ll fall into patterns of self-sabotage and negative self-talk that compound our insecurities around our relationship. So when we consider how to fend off relationship insecurity, the first stop needs to be actual self-love. This can begin with some form of therapy, journaling, and turning inward to assess the root of our insecurities.

Learn the Art of Communication

Far too often, we let our insecurities take root and fester, but fail to communicate them effectively to our boyfriend. So from their point of view, we’re their jealous, controlling, insecure girlfriend whose reactions or outbursts take them by surprise.

Our best defense against continuing this cycle, which will most likely lead to our relationship’s demise, is to learn the art of communication, particularly in relation to our boyfriend. How does he receive information? What are the best ways to express what we’re feeling that he’ll understand, will empathize with, and won’t feel attacked by? 

What’s making us feel so overcome with insecurity is actually our worry that we aren’t connecting with our boyfriend — so connection, in the form of communication, is our best hope at working through these issues.

Think about How To Meet Each Other’s Needs

Feeling insecure in our relationship could point to some of our needs, or boyfriend’s needs, not being met. These needs include finding connection and love, feeling growth and forward motion in our life, being challenged and faced with exciting change, feeling valued and important, stability, certainty, commitment, and a sense of contribution in our relationships.

The likelihood is that if we’re feeling insecurity creep into our relationship, someone’s needs aren’t being met. We all prioritize these needs differently, so it’s important that we consider what needs of ours aren’t being met while also thinking about our boyfriend’s unique desires. Does he feel he isn’t being challenged enough? Do we feel unneeded and obsolete? These are questions to ask yourself and communicate within your relationship.

There Could Be a Lack of Balance

Healthy relationships are made up of two people who balance each other out — essentially people who’ve found harmony in their polarity by being the yin to the other’s yang. Another common way of thinking about this is picturing the balance between masculine and feminine energy.

This image of the masculine and feminine doesn’t necessarily have to do with gender as much as it has to do with how two people can create a full, healthy relationship by embracing what unique qualities they bring to the relationship. Maybe one person is structured while the other is free-spirited, or one is more gentle while the other is more upfront.

If we’re feeling insecure, it could be because we aren’t finding harmony and balance in our relationship. If both of us are taking on too similar of traits, we’ll find the relationship feels unstable, or even toxic. Once again, this comes back to reflection and communication to discover and resolve the root of our imbalance.

Behave Like You’re a New Couple

Remember those early days of the relationship, when sparks were flying in every direction, when everything our boyfriend did was new and exciting, when every spare moment we had, we wanted to spend with him?

Of course, the heightened, idealistic emotions at the beginning of a relationship are bound to fade. But security is supposed to take root, leading to a relationship that, while it doesn’t have the same feel as the first month, becomes even more stable and loving than we could’ve imagined.

But the other side of this spark fading is that we might stop pursuing our boyfriend, or they might stop pursuing us. The act of wooing and winning over becoming a thing of the past breeds insecurity, making us question our partner’s interest. 

Try to recapture some of what those early days had — plan a date out of nowhere, give them compliments, or leave sweet notes before going to work. Remember that they deserve, and we deserve, someone who continues to pursue them.

Leave the Past in the Past

Being in love with our boyfriend doesn’t discount their ability to hurt us — it actually magnifies it. Maybe we have past hurts, transgressions, or fights in our relationship that we haven’t been able to move past and let go of.

But allowing the past to color our present by replaying and hanging onto old dynamics, hurtful words, and tired fights will only grow our insecurity in the relationship. If we hope to cultivate more stability, we have to choose to accept our relationship’s and our boyfriend’s warts, offer true forgiveness for the past, and focus on how we can move forward.  

Quit Overthinking

Insecurity has a way of going round and round in our mind, like a broken record playing on repeat. The worst part is that, by giving voice to these insecurities and letting them fester, we allow them to get stronger, and feel all the more real.

And while some insecurities deserve our attention, we can’t treat every insecurity with the same weight without first asking ourselves where this particular insecurity is stemming from, and if it’s based in a reality that we need to deal with, or from a place of self-doubt or anxiety that isn’t telling us the full truth. With every new insecurity that pops up, we have to question it before we regard it as truth, and not allow ourselves to get caught up in an overthinking spiral.

Closing Thoughts

Feeling insecurity in our relationship can too easily put us into a defensive, anxiety-ridden, uncertain frame of mind — more often than not, hurting our relationship more than helping it. While some insecurities need to be taken with a grain of salt, we can also use our insecurity to help point our attention to what’s missing from our relationship, leading us to a more stable, healthy, long-lasting relationship.