Different Anxiety Types in Partners Create Tension Between Insecurity and Need for Control

“I’m really anxious – you haven’t spoken to me since last night!” Nico said to his partner Tamara when she nagged him to book his vacation dates at work so they could plan the family vacation. “I’m anxious that it’ll be too late and we won’t get a good cabin on the cruise ship,” replied Tamara, a 34-year-old wedding planner, as she flitted about trying to tidy things around her.

Both partners have anxiety, but different types of anxiety, triggered by different experiences. Nico is so tightly wound up with his insecure anxiety that he can’t understand or calm Tamara’s future based anxiety of losing control. Tamara is so obsessed with imagining an upcoming sense of helplessness and loss of control that she cannot compute Nico’s insecure anxiety. They clash, and leave each other in the lurch, making their connection less and less viable.

Different types of anxiety -Trait Anxiety Versus State Anxiety – Traditional but Insufficient Differentiation

One crude spectrum of anxiety is that it’s either part of your personality (trait anxiety); or fear of specific threats gets you need to control before they wipe you out (state anxiety). This muddy delineation of anxiety doesn’t take into account the lived experience of those who have anxious tendencies (personality proneness) but who also get triggered by specific anticipated doom laden scenarios that require action in order to survive.

Nico and Tamara could both have anxious personalities and react to everything anxiously. But Tamara is more inclined to be triggered by anticipating a loss of control in the future, and Nico is more prone to be triggered by reliving a past experience of loss of connection and stability.

Different Types of Anxiety -Apprehension Anxiety Versus Arousal Anxiety – a more useful definition

Nico, a 36-year old AI image generator for a startup company got anxious when he felt insecure about their relationship due to Tamara’s silent treatment. He felt untethered, unable to find his bearings. His brain shut down and he became hyper vigilant watching and listening for any sign from her that he was back on her radar. He couldn’t be stable unless and until Tamara resumed eye contact and acknowledged his existence as someone she wanted in her world. His heart raced and he couldn’t focus on anything let alone thinking ahead and booking vacation time.

Brought up in an environment of constant apprehension, Nico developed an anxious personality because of chronic insecurity in his early years. So in that sense he has trait anxiety. But when he gets aroused/triggered by apprehension about Tamara’s emotional availability he is reacting to the moment to moment connect-disconnect dance, which is also referred to as state anxiety.

Different Types of Anxiety – Development of Apprehension Anxiety

Sometimes Nico’s mother tuned into him so that he could depend on her to meet his emotional needs, but most often it was Nico who was hyper focused on tuning into his mother, so that he could be her companion, and her comforter when his dad worked abroad for long periods of time. He was in a state of constant apprehensive anxiety – on the alert, ready for the worst, and preparing mentally for being cut loose without knowing if or when he would ever be reunited with her mentally.

He never knew when his mother would be stable enough to offer him stability and security, and that same sense of apprehension was repeated in his relationship with Tamara. When Tamara was ignoring him, it was like his mother tuning out, leaving an unequipped little Nico to try to bring her back to life in the moment and attend to her maternal duties so he could concentrate on survival and thriving.

Booking vacation dates in the future didn’t exist in his world of anxious apprehension – dread of being cast away with no chance of survival. Both his trait and state anxiety were in gear, focusing in on his apprehension regarding the solidity of the connection.

arousal anxiety originates in fear of loss of control in the future

Stressed businesswoman

Different Types of Anxiety – Development of Arousal Anxiety

Tamara on the other hand has more of a state anxiety profile, because she gets aroused by a fear of not being able to control her future. She is not living in the here and now. She is focused on screening for future threats – using her emotional sonar beams to scan the environment outside and inside for the slightest sign that she could be placed in a powerless situation and be destroyed. It’s her inner scanning which is using her past experience for clues to anticipate the future apocalypse. In a millisecond a certain sound or lack thereof pierces her consciousness as a threat, and she relives those past threats as if they were happening now.

Her past too, plays a role in her anticipatory arousal anxiety. The past experience that felt annihilating gets ignited, making her terrified about being unprepared and unable to head off an impending catastrophe that was on its way.

Tamara is emotionally aroused – activated in a fight or flight physiological experience where she has to do something to calm her existential terror and restore her feelings of safety and control again. The fact that she is dependent on Nico’s actions to maintain her equilibrium upscales her anxiety levels. She relives her childhood experience of hearing her father’s raised voice, anticipating violence against her mother and her own intense need to stop the violence that would have left Tamara without a functioning mother.

She grew up unable to trust that adults would do their duty and became burdened with the anticipatory anxiety that everything that could, would go wrong in an irreparable manner. She felt anxious when aroused by the repeated experience of not being able to trust in adults doing their duty. Nico’s failure to book the vacation was like her father about to hit her mother. Her version of taking control was to use him as her proxy by nagging/controlling him, giving her a sense of taking action, whether or not he followed through. The act of controlling him was like little Tamara controlling the dad she couldn’t influence when she was a child.

Different Types of Anxiety – Apprehension Anxiety and Arousal Anxiety Respond to Different Management Strategies

There is no one size fits all strategy for managing anxiety. Being aware of the origins of the specific anxieties offers a wider range of strategies with a greater chance of efficacy. A mix and match approach is necessary to address both the personality/proneness aspects and the arousal aspects of anticipatory features.

An article in Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews 173 (2025) suggests that management protocols which emphasise cognitive control and those that favor mindfulness based options both fail to catch the nuances in the anxieties that originate from different sources but may look similar on the outside. For example both Nico and Tamara appear to panic and worry – Nico about the stability of the romantic connection, and Tamara about her ability to control the future.

The authors of the above research suggests that cognitive management involves a series of continual shifts in perception as revaluations occur milli-second by milli-second. But it fails to deal with the physiological experience of fear when the body is swimming in adrenalin, the pre-frontal cortex (rational, judgment part of brain) is shut off and the amygdala (emotional fear center of the brain) is blaring emergency signals that are deafening to both Nico and Tamara.

Therefore meditation by itself isn’t going to make Nico feel any more secure, and nor is Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy going to make him feel less fearful of being abandoned or unwanted. Similarly for Tamara, cognitive based therapies that address the reality of never being fully in control isn’t going to diminish her fear of utter ruin if she isn’t hyper-alert, or quiet her inner alarm bells from ringing when her body isn’t bathed in a neuro-chemical bath promoting fight or flight behaviors.

Apprehension Type Anxiety Management Pathway

Step 1 – As Nico’s anxiety is based on an apprehension that he will be forever cut off from his loved one to whom he is attached, his insecurity is best dealt with initially by processing his attachment traumas in his childhood in a psychodynamic therapeutic setting in individual therapy. He needs to develop a sense of security, reliability, and safety with an adult care giver where he never has to take care of the therapist. He needs to be tuned into fully and without judgement, so that his fears about being abandoned, insufficient, undesirable etc. can be worked through in the therapeutic relationship.

Step 2. When he has established a sustainable sense of security within his therapeutic reparenting relationship, the treatment can shift to alerting him to his bodily reactions of fear of loss. These may include stomach churning, cramping, increased heart rate and shallow breathing, together with throbbing temples, dry mouth, and agitation. He needs guidance to tune into his automatic physiological responses to anticipating/being apprehensive of how the therapeutic relationship may repeat his childhood experiences.

He can keep a journal of the instances when his relationship insecurity creeps up into his throat and blinds him to everything else, and then note his pattern of behavior and the outcome.

Step 3. As Nico begins to match his bodily reactions to his apprehensions and arousals he can then be guided and supported to do some reality testing. One example is when he fears the therapist is going to say something critical, his body cramps and his breathing changes, he braces – but that forecast turned out wrong. Now he has to learn how to take in, file and store the instances when his apprehensions were not borne out and begin to make those cognitive updates.

Step 4. Introduce mindfulness as a way of separating from the world for short periods of time where no particular outcomes are sought. It’s a chance to check out and allow the body and mind to find and stay in a mode of flexible equilibrium – to split off from the hypervigilance and get a taste of what it’s like.

Step 5. Invite Nico to describe a situation when as a little boy he was left alone and felt cut off from his mother. Let him link it to how he feels when he is cut off from Tamara. What would he say to his mother about his anger and fear? What would he want her to know that she didn’t attend to?

Then get him to imagine being his mother and respond accordingly, so he is basically playing both parts in an imaginary childhood scene. This will help him mourn the loss of not having an attuned mother, and start depending on himself- becoming more secure.

Step 6. Discuss the coming together and separating with Tamara several times a day that to him are life or death situations, but are actually a normal part of a relationship. Help build a deeper sense of permanence in his attachment with Tamara over time. Focus on the reunifications and maintaining the satisfying feelings of connection so that he can access them at times when he is insecure.

Anticipatory Arousal Anxiety – Need for Future Control – Management Pathway

For Tamara, who gets hyper aroused when she anticipates losing control at some future point, her pathway may look something like this:
Step 1: Focus on the physiological symptoms of arousal, as that is what she reacts to when she is anxious. Create an awareness of the earliest signs such as throat tightening, muscle tension, dry mouth, shaking, increase in heart rate and breathing rate, stomach churning and more. Talk about what she is compelled to do when she feels these bodily messages, and what are the corresponding thoughts she thinks.

What is the catastrophe she imagines, and how does she regain her composure?

Step 2. Create an awareness of the pattern of arousal, action, deflation and then ask Tamara to reflect on what works for her – what are the outcomes that she has most control of, and least control of.

How does it play out in her relationship with Nico?

What does it remind of her from her childhood, and are those early patterns suitable for her adult partnership with Nico?

Encourage her to keep a visual graph that shows the curve of her arousal, action, and dissipation. Then invite her to annotate the graph with words and images that depict what she was thinking and feeling at specific points along the graph.

Step 3. Let Tamara free associate on the worst possible scenario for her if she wasn’t in control and why she can’t depend on others to be in control – beginning with her parents and now with Nico. This experience allows Tamara to appreciate how her body responds when she can’t trust her attachment figures to take care of things, and that causes tension and insecurity in her romantic relationship with Nico.

Ask adult Tamara to talk to Little Tamara about how scared she must have been seeing her father abuse her mother, and how awful it was not to be able to stop it. She can show Little Tamara how Big Tamara is not helpless now, and that Little Tamara doesn’t need to keep ringing the alarm.

Step 4. Begin a protocol where she imagines or relates a recent anxiety episode and put into words her arousal signs and when she reaches her peak, introduce breathing strategies that activate vagus nerve parasympathetic operations that slow down the hypervigilance and help her body recover its equilibrium. Then talk about the experience of being okay again, and feeling the control of using the vagus nerve stimulation.

Step 5. Begin the psychodynamic work of lack of trust in attachment relationships. Build the trust in the therapeutic relationship and give Tamara baby steps to begin trusting Nico in ways she could tolerate.

As Nico and Tamara learn about their anxiety styles and triggers in their individual therapy, they would benefit from couples therapy where they can learn about the other and have room for acceptance and understanding. They can rehearse ways of responding to one and others anxiety manifestations without going into their usual destructive patterns.