The impact of emotional disorders on relationships

Living with an anxiety or mood disorder or OCD can feel like a lonely journey, but it often influences your relationships with your loved one too. The people you love, and the quality and quantity of those relationships, can be influenced by anxiety, mood, and OCD symptoms in a number of ways. Here are a few common ways that emotional disorders influence relationships.

Avoidance Whether your non-social symptoms (for instance, agoraphobia) cause you to avoid in a way that decreases your chance at social relationships or your social anxiety triggers avoidance, avoidance prevents relationships from starting and makes it difficult to maintain fulfilling relationships. Untreated symptoms in your past may have also made it difficult to make and maintain relationships now. You might not have as many relationships as you long for.

People-pleasing / reassurance seeking Social anxiety or social OCD can compel you to attempt to predict what others are expecting of you and strive to meet those expectations. It's an effort to alleviate the anxiety associated with disappointing others or not being liked, rather than a behavior that you value. Reassurance seeking is also an OCD behavior that can be associated with any content area and have an impact socially. You may feel very anxious in your relationships unless you're acting how you think is expected of you or you're getting reassurance.

Difficulty being assertive Depression will tell you that you are worthless and helpless and hopeless about doing anything about it. Depression will make you believe that you don't deserve what you need or want. It will make you feel helpless and hopeless about doing anything to get what you need and want. You may feel submissive and resentful of your loved ones while you're becoming more assertive.

It takes a lot of strategy to recognize what's happening and assert your needs anyway.

Difficulty letting go of control OCD will tell you that all uncertainty is intolerable and that to be happy, life should be controlled as much as possible. The consequence of attempting to avoid uncertainty through control often becomes difficulty with flexibility, adapting based on the needs of the moment. Loved ones often notice and feel frustrated by the need for control.

These are some, but there are many ways that emotional disorders impact relationships.