Why do I feel so unsure about my future with my partner? Here are 4 reasons why.

As we head into the holiday season and the new year looms before us, many of you will be feeling mixed emotions.

There is that excited feeling of the festive season, those old childhood pangs of joy and delight at a time of the year that is so deeply filled with warm feelings, comfort, and deliciousness.?

And then there’s likely that sense of time running out.?

The year is coming to a close, the holidays will fly by before you, and New Years Eve will be here before you know it.?

2025 will be here, and that blank canvas, that expanse of opportunity will lie ahead of you.?

A clean slate, a space to try anew, have things be different, and make the year ahead be your…well, hopefully best year yet. Or at least, better than the year prior. Rich with opportunity, it’s inevitable that if you’re feeling slightly unfulfilled or unhappy in your relationship, a sense of pressure will be hovering overhead.

What will you do differently this year?

What will you do with your relationship?

How will your relationship evolve?

What will happen?

What lies ahead?

It can all feel a little bit scary.?

In fact, you can feel quite unsure.

Unsure about your future, unsure about your partner, unsure about your future with your partner.

Unsure about what will happen, unsure whether you should buckle down and make it work, and sometimes, unsure if you should consider maybe even…plan to leave.

It’s a lot.

And this begs the question, WHY are you feeling unsure in the first place?

You may have some ideas…but if you were sure of what these were, you would likely have a clear gameplan on how to solve for the sense of uncertainty. Right?

So to alleviate your sense of uncertainty, your sense of not being sure, you would benefit from knowing why you’re feeling so unsure, so that you know what to tackle.

In my experience, it boils down to the following 4 reasons:

• You have unresolved past pain.

If you have any pain from your past, that hasn’t been resolved, even if it doesn’t involve your partner explicitly, you can be sure that it will be popping up in your life in ways that you don’t expect. Our unresolved childhood wounds will continue impacting our adult life until we are able to go inward and process them. This, you’ve likely heard pop culture or conventional wisdom talk about - it’s not a new idea, right?

But what may be new is just how insidious this is.

Imagine: your father (or mother) was a little bit less than perfect growing up. Maybe he was traveling a lot for work (as in my case), or maybe he was navigating financial difficulties at home so he was stressed a lot of the time, or maybe he was just a bit up and down - sometimes very happy and upbeat, and sometimes stressed or angry. Maybe he talked over you, or would be hard on you, and criticise you, all out of love, of course - he wanted you to do better and he wanted to guide you and direct you.?

All of these experiences that I’ve described can be extremely challenging for a tiny kid to experience. They’re confusing, incongruent with what the kid needs (which is generally unconditional love, acceptance, validation, and support). So the kid has some unresolved pain from its childhood. We call these wounds. And these wounds are sure as heck going to show up later in life.

Specifically, these wounds here, are wounds around trust. Feeling unsure. Feeling unsafe with someone. Because that someone is constantly unpredictable and not all that consistent.

Think of them like your original blueprint. As a kid, you grew up with these experiences, and they became familiar patterns to you. You experienced them a lot of the time (like for me, my father was absent a lot because he traveled a lot for work) and so they become ‘normal’.

But they’re still painful, right? Because as a kid you never got to stop and resolve them. No one ever showed you how, and you likely never got a chance to. And yeah, therapy isn’t really always going to cut it here, because these wounds are deep - deeply seated in your subconscious and half the time you won’t even be aware that they are there.

As such, these wounds continue to play out in your later years.

?You develop a wound around trusting people, trusting yourself even, and feeling constantly unsure…and likely a bit unsafe.

Your brain is VERY good at protecting you, so it will remember the wounds from your childhood and store them deep in your subconscious as past pains that you need to constantly stay alert for. Your subconscious mind is also ALWAYS looking for healing, so it's going to be relentlessly trying to heal that old pain.

So what happens?

Projections.?

You walk around as an adult, and your subconscious mind is constantly projecting your past pain onto your present, partly out of survival (it’s part of your blueprint of how you see the world, and so it’s keeping you safe) and partly out of healing (if it can recreate the pain of the past, there is a new chance to resolve it and work through it so that it finally goes away).?

And so how does this affect your relationship now??

Well, you’re sense of being unsure about your partner may well be rooted in that. It could be an old projection from your past.

And so you’re seeing your partner from this old blueprint of conditioning, this old way of seeing based on what you experienced in your childhood, and it isn’t actually the most accurate way of seeing them.

So what you will want to do, is to clear out this old wound so that you CAN see the relationship clearly, beneath the trust and unsure wounds, and gain the clarity you deserve.?

This can feel like a lot - and therapy really won’t help you here because therapy only deals with the conscious mind, rather than subconscious, so it isn’t quite enough - but there are solutions out there to guide you. And I can absolutely help you with this.

• You experienced a previous betrayal with your partner.

Another really common reason why I see folks feeling unsure about their partners is because something happened in their relationship, in the past, that hurt them. And if you didn’t address that hurt in real time, back then, then this hurt becomes another past pain buried deep in your subconscious.?

So, imagine you catch your husband doing something back in the day that made your spidey senses go off that something was up. Perhaps you saw receipts in his wallet for something you don’t understand, like drinks one night that they didn’t tell you about, or charges on their credit card bill you’re uncomfortable with (I’ve seen my clients find Onlyfans charges on statements, or flights that they weren’t aware of, or even dating app subscriptions). Or perhaps the incident is far less clear cut and it’s more that your partner failed to support you during a hard time - your pregnancy, or a period of unemployment. Perhaps they didn’t come to hospital with you when you needed them to. Perhaps they were absent longer than you wanted them to be.

?And because you were busy, distracted, and don't like conflict, perhaps you didn’t DO anything to address this. You didn’t know how, you didn’t want drama, and you let it go. Maybe more than once.

And now, years later, you find yourself filled with this nagging sense that something is off and you’re unsure about your future with them.

You can bet that it’s the past pain bubbling up inside of you. Which makes sense, it’s your subconscious mind trying its best to heal you and save you.?

It’s trying to remind you that hey, you got hurt here, remember that? That hurt. That didn’t feel safe. And you haven’t addressed it. So I’m going to keep reminding you of this pain until you do something about it. Because until you do, you’re not going to be safe. Because you’ll keep letting things go that hurt you, violating your boundaries, abandoning yourself. So I’m going to keep reminding you about this pain, and reminding you that you are not safe to move forward until you do something.?

Can you see how your subconscious mind is just trying to help you?

So the path forward for you isn’t to bury it deeper and ignore it, but to go inward, identify the past pain, and resolve it. Resolve it by processing it, and perhaps talking about it, and moving through it with new boundaries and behaviors that support you. This can be scary, I know, and that’s why you may want a professional to help you.

• You have unmet needs?

Another common reason, that is linked to the other two reasons I’ve cited, is that you have unmet needs in your relationship.

We all have needs but unfortunately many of us don’t know what are needs are. Not really. We know what we want - the car, the house, the money, the promotion, bla bla bla - but the real needs, we rarely connect to.

Your deep need for feeling safe, loved, accepted. For validation. For connection. For being seen. Heard.?

These will be showing up for you in different ways. You may need to know that you can trust your partner deeply because they have acknowledged your past pain, heard you, validated you, told you that you make sense, and then made a vow to behave differently next time in ways that feel safer to you.?

Perhaps you have a need to feel loved and appreciated by your partner, to have them acknowledge how hard you work, the hours you put in, how you provide for the family, and to give you regular words of praise, physical touch like back rubs and massages, and support with the kids by making dinner so that you feel seen and heard in all that you do.

These are just two teeny tiny examples and we’ll all have tons of these needs, often unmet, in our subconscious.

These will need meeting if you want to feel sure about your future - because until you meet them, of course, your subconscious mind (which is all about getting your needs met, since that’s the fastest way to keep you safe and happy), is going to keep poking you until you do.?

So if you’re feeling unsure or like something is off, then you can bet that there are unmet needs that need addressing here.?

Clearing your wounds, past pains, and getting clear on what the need is beneath the pain, will be important here.

• Lastly, it may be because you haven’t put boundaries in place.

Connected to all the above, are going to be the boundaries you put in place to keep yourself safe. We all need boundaries but many of us are pretty poor at implementing them. If you have a strong boundary around monogamy, for example, and you know that infidelity is a BIG no no for you, and even watching pornography is considered an act of betrayal, then it is totally fair for you to have a boundary around that.?

Your boundary is yours and whatever you want it to be (within reason, if you want a conventional partnership, of course). So if you decide that watching pornography violates your boundary around what feels like a monogamous marriage, that is fair, and you have the right to express that to your partner.?

Same around your boundary around yelling, or name calling, or violence.

Whatever it may be.

If you haven't expressed your boundary clearly in your relationship, heck, if you don’t even know what your boundary is, then it’s going to be almost impossible to feel sure about your future.

Because your boundary is what protects you and keeps you safe. So if you don’t have any, how can you expect to feel safe? How can you expect to feel confident? Full of self assurance and certainty? If you don't have a boundary to hold things in place, of course you’re going to feel unsure.?

So setting boundaries is going to be SUPER important.?

These are just some high level reasons why you might be feeling unsure about your future with your partner. Of course, these aren’t all that easy to fix if you don’t know how to, and we can spend years in therapy trying to unpack all of this without really going anwywhere.

What is going to be super important is having a tangible gameplan and strategy to unpack your sense of being unsure, resolve the underlying causes, and create rigorous - bullet proof - self trust within you, so that you DO feel sure, you DO feel confident, and you know precisely what to do next in 2025 and beyond, to feel your best.

All totally doable when you have the tools, techniques, and strategies to do this. Which is precisely what I can help you with. ??

In fact, in my methodology, the Successfully in Love? method, we do all of this and more.

Over 90 days, we will:

1. Unpack whether (and where) it’s your past pain affecting you and how you feel in your relationship so that you can see things more clearly
2. Overcome the past pain so that it no longer shrouds your vision, and you can trust yourself more (because you know it’s no longer coming from a wounded, triggered place)
3. Get clarity on what you need to be happy long term, and what your boundaries may be (as well as more on your identity), so that you can feel sure about where you’re going
4. Create practical strategies, rooted in science, to get you what you want and need for the new year (and beyond), including communication and intimacy techniques with your partner.

If that sounds good to you, drop me a DM with where you’re at in your relationship, what you are feeling unsure about, and where you think I can help you most ??