Difficulties in relationships

Relationship difficulties: when the problem isn't your partner

Not every relationship difficulty is a couple's problem. Many people come alone, and not because their partner refuses: because what they want to understand is about them.

Why they always choose the same kind of person. Why the other person's silence sets off an alarm out of all proportion. Why it's so hard to say no, or to leave, or to stay without checking.

Relationships are also where anxiety shows most clearly. Someone who fears judgement fears it most with the person they love. Someone who needs certainty asks for it from whoever is closest.

Emotional dependence and fear of abandonment

There's a form of relational suffering with a recognisable signature: the fear of being alone outweighs the pain the relationship causes.

You accept conditions you wouldn't accept anywhere else. You postpone a decision for years. You mistake intensity for intimacy, and the anxiety of waiting for love.

People living it often already know. Knowing isn't enough — recognising a mechanism doesn't switch it off. What helps is understanding what keeps it running.

The same pattern with different people

What usually brings someone to ask for help isn't a single crisis. It's the sense that this has happened before.

Same dynamic, different people. Or the same person, the same argument, for years. The words change; the feeling at the end is always the same.

When something repeats with that precision, it's usually not a matter of bad choices. It's a learned way of working: how you read the other person's signals, how you respond to distance, whether you seek reassurance or withdraw. It formed where there were reasons for it to form.

The pursue-withdraw cycle

One of the most common mechanisms works like this.

One person senses distance and moves closer: calls, asks, wants to resolve it now. The other feels pressed and takes space. The distance grows. The first moves closer again.

Neither is doing anything wrong on purpose. Each is doing what, from where they stand, seems reasonable. Together, the two reasonable responses produce exactly what both of them fear.

The one pursuing isn't pursuing the other person. They're pursuing a feeling of safety they had found with them.

Relationship anxiety: when the real problem is something else

Sometimes what looks like a relationship problem is anxiety expressing itself through the relationship.

The constant need for reassurance. Checking messages. Reading a change of tone as withdrawal. The immediate emptiness when there's no reply.

Telling those apart changes the work. If the relationship is where the anxiety appears, working only on the relationship leaves the mechanism intact — and it shows up again with the next person.

Therapy in English for relationship difficulties in Milan and Monza

I'm an Italian psychologist and psychotherapist, registered with the Order of Psychologists of Lombardy. I see people in two practices in Milan, in Monza and in Cernusco sul Naviglio, and online. I work in English and in Italian.

Relationships carry particular weight when you've moved country. A partner can become the whole support network by default — the only person who knows you, the reason you're here, sometimes the only one who speaks your language at home. That concentration puts pressure on a relationship that has nothing to do with the relationship itself, and it's worth naming.

The first session is about understanding what's being asked: whether the question is about one relationship, about a way of being in relationships generally, or about a decision that won't get made.

Then the work goes to three things: recognising the mechanism as it fires, understanding what feeds it, and finding room to respond differently.

I don't advise people on what to do about the relationship. What can be worked on is the clarity with which the decision gets made.

When to see a psychotherapist

— Does the same argument start over, and do I already know how it ends?

— Am I more anxious with this person than without them?

— Have I been postponing a decision for months?

— Do I recognise this pattern in earlier relationships too?

You don't need a crisis to talk about it.