One of the most common patterns I see in my work with couples is not explosive conflict, but a quieter kind of strain. One partner feels emotionally overwhelmed and flooded, while the other feels confused, pressured, or never quite enough. Both are trying to protect the relationship, yet each feels increasingly alone inside it.
This dynamic is often misunderstood as a mismatch in emotional capacity or effort. In reality, it reflects two nervous systems responding to stress in different ways. One system moves toward urgency, expression, and proximity. The other moves toward logic, containment, or distance. When these responses collide, partners begin to experience each other as the problem rather than recognizing the state that is driving the interaction.
When anxiety or emotional intensity enters the relationship, it brings speed with it. The body signals danger and demands relief, even when no immediate threat exists. This can show up as reassurance seeking, heightened emotion, or repeated attempts to talk things through. The partner on the receiving end often responds by fixing, explaining, or trying to calm the moment through solutions. When this does not work, both partners feel frustrated and misunderstood.
What is often missed is that emotional intensity is a state, not a character flaw or a measure of relationship health. In my clinical work, the shift that changes everything is helping couples slow down enough to ask a different question. Not, How do we solve this, but, What does this moment need to feel safer.
Support does not always require answers. Sometimes it looks like staying present without pushing for resolution. Slowing the pace. Sitting in silence. Naming that nothing needs to be decided right now.
For the partner carrying the anxiety, the work is learning to notice when fear is shaping the interaction more than the actual issue. For the partner who feels pressure, the work is learning how to remain connected without taking responsibility for making the feeling disappear.
Healthy relationships are built through moments of discomfort that are met with care rather than urgency. When couples learn to move from fixing to attunement, connection becomes possible again.
This work is not about getting it right. It is about practicing a different way of being together!
Laura Moore, M.Psy., is an integrative therapist, and Senior Registered Psychotherapist at the Centre for Interpersonal Relationships (CFIR) in Toronto. Her work focuses on helping individuals and couples understand the underlying relational and attachment patterns that create distance, particularly during periods of stress, uncertainty, or emotional overwhelm. Using a psychodynamic and nervous-system informed approach, Laura supports clients in recognizing how anxiety and protective strategies shape connection, and in shifting from urgency and fixing toward attunement and emotional safety. She is committed to creating a therapeutic space where complexity is held with care and where new ways of relating can emerge through presence rather than pressure.
