The CALM Method: Matthew Hussey's Four Steps for Stopping the Obsessive Spiral When You Like Someone
Matthew Hussey
Dating coach Matthew Hussey opens this video with a comedy sketch. He whispers to his director, David, that "the girl I'm seeing" is sitting across the room and hasn't texted him back since their last date. David points out that the woman is Audrey, Hussey's wife, and they live together. Hussey still frets that if she turns out not to be into him, they'll have to run into each other every day. He cites his evidence that she likes him: they had a child together, she asked him to re-grout the roof, and she watches all his Instagram stories.
The joke sets up the question the video is about: what do you do when liking someone turns into anxious obsession? Hussey's view is that the obsession grows out of fears you already had, and that you can manage it on purpose. He offers a four-step framework he calls the CALM method, which he says he teaches to coaching clients and in his in-person retreat work.
Obsession Isn't a Choice, but It Can Be Met With a Conscious Framework
Hussey describes a familiar pattern. We want to enjoy liking someone, but "the nauseating reality for so many of us is that the moment we like someone, we begin to obsess." People decode every emoji, text, and silence. Any time not spent talking to the person is spent thinking about them or about when they'll see them next. If the other person seems to pull away, the response is to invest even harder. In his telling, connection, attraction, and fear combine into "a giant knot" in the stomach that gradually becomes the center of one's existence.
He stresses that none of this is voluntary. Nobody wakes up and adds "start obsessing" to their to-do list; the obsession "crept in through the back door." Because it arrives unconsciously, he argues, it helps to answer it with something deliberate: a conscious framework and four practical steps to regain control and peace. He says owning yourself and your emotions is "over half the battle" in dating and relationships.
The Fears Were There Before This Person Arrived
Hussey's starting point is that we already had fears before meeting the person we're now fixated on. He lists some: ending up alone, never meeting anyone, not meeting someone in time to have a family, not being enough.
When a promising person appears, he argues, they don't create those fears. They activate fears that were already there, and they also become the solution to them. The person turns into "the solution to me ending up alone, the solution to me having a family, the solution to me finally feeling like I'm worthy."
Hussey calls this dangerous. Once someone becomes the answer to our deepest fears, we stop relating to them as a real person we're assessing. We start relating to "what this person is going to save us from." In his view, that is where the obsession truly begins.
The Bodyguard: The Part of You That Tries to Control the Fear
To describe what happens next, Hussey introduces a character he calls "the bodyguard." When fear shows up, so does the bodyguard, a protective part of us that learned "a long time ago" a set of techniques for managing fear and controlling situations. He riffs on the Liam Neeson line from Taken: the bodyguard "has a very particular set of skills… it's learned over a lifetime." A short sketch follows. A panicked Hussey says "They've not texted back. I'm scared," and a calm handler voice orders him to study every detail of the person's last message: the emojis, the commas, the tone of voice from their last phone call.
He lists the bodyguard's behaviors. It goes out of its way to see the person whether or not that's convenient. It tells you "our needs don't actually matter. The only thing that matters is that we get this person." It obsesses, over-invests, rushes, tries to impress, chases, and tries to secure the person. Its instructions are: "Do more. Get them. Don't lose this. Be whoever they need."
He gives two everyday examples. In the first, you've had a couple of great dates, you text the person, and they don't reply for a few hours. A vulnerable part of you starts thinking, "I'm not that important. They're losing interest. I'm about to be abandoned." Then the bodyguard takes over: you check your phone, reread messages, and try to craft the perfect follow-up so you don't lose them. In the second, you meet someone impressive and think, "They're out of my league. I have to prove myself." Soon the bodyguard has you over-agreeing, performing, and putting them ahead of yourself.
Hussey says the pattern is the same in both. One part of you is scared ("I'm not enough, I might lose this"), and another part tries to fix the fear by securing the other person. The bodyguard tries to solve the fear by controlling the situation, "but in the process, it makes you lose yourself." The task, he says, is to notice when the bodyguard appears. That is the moment when the vulnerable part of us needs "a wise parent" to step in.
C: Connect With Yourself
The first letter of CALM is C, for connect with yourself. Hussey pictures the moment the vulnerable part of you realizes it likes someone and the bodyguard steps forward, again in Liam Neeson style: "I'm going to find you. And when I do, I'm going to do everything in my power to win you over." At that point a wiser voice should cut in: "Whoa, no, you won't, Liam Neeson."
He calls this wiser voice "the adult in the room." It puts an arm around the scared inner child and asks, "What's happening, friend? What's going on?" Then it actually listens to the answer. He says the most important part is self-compassion. The questions shouldn't carry judgment or punishment; the aim is to understand where the obsessive feelings come from. He adds that the best time to do this exercise is when it feels like "the last thing in the world we want to do."
Hussey frames this as re-parenting. The wiser voice sits with an inner child who is nervous, afraid, has been abandoned, or "has been taught that they won't be okay on their own," and tells them what they need to hear. The bodyguard is loud, and its message to the inner child is that they aren't capable. Your job is to show the child that they are. "You are the adult in the room. You can be a source of healing for yourself."
He gives a sample of what the wiser voice might say: "Hey, you were okay before you met this person. You've survived being alone before. You've been hurt before and you got through it. So, why are we acting like this one person determines everything?"
He argues that handing our protection to this "very one-dimensional bodyguard" with its "naive techniques" means abandoning our inner child. When that happens, people can end a relationship struggling to find themselves. He asks viewers whether they've reached the end of a relationship and realized they had abandoned themselves so completely that they barely knew their own needs, because they had only been whoever they thought the other person needed. The goal of this step is to notice when the bodyguard is taking over and to teach yourself that you can handle the situation without its methods.
An Interruption That Enacts the Problem
The explanation breaks off for another sketch. Hussey says "it's her" and reads a text from Audrey: "Haha, the other night when you thought my face cream was pudding and you took a bite, I almost threw up laughing." He immediately asks David whether this means she wants him to ask her out again. David says yes and thinks she'd agree. Hussey objects that "the ball is kind of in her court" and that it's her turn. David tells him, "Matt, you are spiraling." The scene then turns into a plug for his free Dating With Results video before returning to the method. The sketch acts out what the video describes: one ambiguous message, then overanalysis and hesitation about whose move it is.
A: Anchor Your Value in Yourself
The second letter is A, for anchoring your value in yourself. Hussey admits this may "sound a little off topic," but he says he is very taken with the idea of home. In his view, the real home we live in isn't the building we sleep in. It is ourselves, our body and the "walls of our mind," the home we carry everywhere. He suggests asking: how safe do I feel in this home?
When we obsess over someone and treat them as the solution to our problems, he argues, we're looking for safety in them rather than in ourselves. "We have made them our home." He sees this as part of why we feel so unstable, uncertain, and anxious: safety is being sought outside us, so home becomes something that can be taken away.
When we stand down the bodyguard and speak to ourselves with the compassion described in the first step, Hussey says, we build a safer home within ourselves. He puts it in property terms: "everyone else is only ever rented. The home that we own and will always own is us." He grants that building a relationship does involve building a sense of home with another person, but he insists we have to build a home within ourselves first. "We are the asset, not the other person."
L: Loosen the Story You Have About Them
The third letter is L, for loosen the story you have about them. The "story," in Hussey's terms, is the belief we cling to that says this person is so important. The job is to depersonalize the feeling.
His method for depersonalizing is to recognize that you've felt this way about other people before. Many viewers, he notes, have had several situations where they became anxious or obsessed with someone they liked, and anyone watching a video like this probably knows obsession is a pattern for them. If that's true, the conclusion follows: "The obsession is the common denominator, not this person." You can decouple the feeling from the individual, and then "they are not nearly as special as my mind has made them out to be."
He adds a caveat. He isn't saying the feeling is fake: "The feeling I have is real. I'm not minimizing that you feel anxious, obsessed, that you feel very much in like or love with this person." His point is that the meaning your mind attaches to the person "may not be real at all."
He also recommends humor, calling it "one of the great weapons you have against your bodyguard." He is careful to say the bodyguard isn't your enemy. It's trying to be your friend and protect you, "but it's just doing it in a bad way." Because the bodyguard treats everything as deadly serious, with stakes that feel "impossibly high," you can tease it back. If it insists, "If we lose them, we'll never meet anyone like them again," the wiser voice can answer with deliberate irony: "You're right. We'll never survive this if this person leaves us. Our life is effectively over… this person who we only just met 3 weeks ago is now the center of our universe. That seems to make sense."
M: Move Slowly
For the last letter, Hussey jokes that M stands for "Matthew" before giving the real answer: moving slowly. He repeats a line he says he has often used: "choosing wrong is slower than going slow." Moving fast with the wrong person costs more time than going slowly. He says a lot is lost and put at risk in love by going too fast, "mostly your heart, your feelings, your good judgment."
Moving slowly, as he describes it, means being present with the person in front of you and letting the story unfold naturally so you can judge your actual compatibility. The alternative is rushing, getting swept up in the other person's pace, or being "so busy trying to get this person that you don't slow down enough to appreciate whether you should even want to get this person."
He suggests reminding yourself that you don't necessarily know this person well, and that the obsession is "a form of projection." He says this applies even to friends of many years. He has heard people say, "I've known this person forever. I know how amazing they are." His reply is that they have probably never had a long-term relationship with that person, so they don't know what one would be like, and that gap is also filled by projection. He sums up the step this way: "Moving slowly is how you protect your heart without shutting it down."
Not Anti-Emotion, but Pro-Agency
Hussey closes by describing the CALM method as a way to reconnect with yourself and show yourself that you can move through the world happily without this person's help, while staying present in the situation instead of letting obsession take over. He is clear about what the method is not: "The calm method is not about suppressing your feelings. It is about not letting your feelings make your decisions for you." In other words, "it's not anti-emotion, it's pro-agency." He ends on this line: "The goal is not to stop feeling, it's to stop losing ourselves when we feel."
David. David, the girl I'm seeing, she's sitting over there right now.
How are you contacting me?
We're making a new video, remember?
Right. Right.
Look, she's working right across from me. She hasn't texted me back since our last date. If I go over there, I don't want there to be this weird tension like I know she hasn't texted me back, which I obviously do.
Matt, you live together. That's Audrey. She's your wife.
Yes, I know. That's what makes it so awkward. If she doesn't end up being into me, we're going to have to run into each other every day. I'm pretty sure she likes me. We had a child together, and she sends me all these signals. Last week, she asked me to re-grout the roof, and she watches all of my Instagram stories.
Look, dude, it's all good. You kind of got this locked in. Just play it cool.
I can't, Dave. This woman is the light that filters us through the clouds of my tumultuous mind.
Are you, like me, anxiously obsessing over someone right now? Well, stay tuned because I promise you, by the end of this video, both you and I will have exhaled, relaxed our shoulders, and regained a sense of calm. Just watch.
I remember these feelings well. I'm having them right now. We just want to enjoy liking someone, but the nauseating reality for so many of us is that the moment we like someone, we begin to obsess. We decode every emoji, every text, every silence. Every second you're not talking to them is spent thinking about them or when you'll see them next. And then, if you feel them pulling away, you invest even harder.
Very quickly, a potent mix of connection, attraction, and fear balls up in our stomach into a giant knot that slowly becomes the center of our existence. And none of this is voluntary. We didn't wake up one day and decide, "I like this person," and then add an item to our to-do list: "Start obsessing." It crept in through the back door and slowly took us over until we couldn't think about anything else, which is why in this video, I want to give you an actual conscious framework and four practical steps to stop obsessing, regain your sense of control, and your peace.
This is the kind of core work we do on my in-person retreat that I hold in Florida each year because owning yourself and your emotions is over half the battle in dating and relationships. Today, I'm going to give you some insight into that work that we do and how it can make you way happier in your love life. Give this video a little likey like, a little subscriby scribe, and let's get started.
We need to start this whole thing from a place of realizing that we already had pre-existing fears prior to meeting this person that we are now obsessing over. We may have been afraid that we're going to end up alone, that we're never going to meet anybody. Maybe we're afraid that we're not going to meet anyone in time to have a family. Maybe we're afraid we're not enough and we're never going to meet anybody because we're not good enough.
When this person came along, the fears didn't start then with them. They activated fears that were already there, but they didn't just activate them, they became the solution to those fears. This person is the solution to me ending up alone, the solution to me having a family, the solution to me finally feeling like I'm worthy.
In other words, this is a very dangerous thing because all of a sudden, we stop relating to them as an actual person we are assessing and instead we start relating to what this person is going to save us from. And that is where the obsession really starts.
So, in our fear, someone shows up. I call them the bodyguard. Our bodyguard learned a long time ago a certain set of techniques for managing their fear and controlling the situation. In other words, the bodyguard has a very particular set of skills, a set of skills it's learned over a lifetime.
They've not texted back. I'm scared.
I know you are. Stay focused, Matthew. You have to hold it together.
I can't.
This next part is very important. They are going to leave you hanging. I need you to do something very important. Ten seconds. I want you to notice everything about their previous message, emojis, commas, the tone of voice they had when they last spoke to you on the phone. Anything you see. Do you understand?
Yes.
They're still on their phone. I can sense them.
The bodyguard has many techniques. I'm going to go out of my way to see this person whether or not it's convenient for us. The bodyguard says, "Our needs don't actually matter. The only thing that matters is that we get this person." The bodyguard obsesses, overinvests, rushes, tries to impress, chase, secure. It says, "We need this person." So, it says to us, "Do more. Get them. Don't lose this. Be whoever they need."
You see the bodyguard come out in really simple moments. Maybe you go on a couple of great dates with someone. You text them and then they don't reply for a few hours. Suddenly, there is a part of you thinking, "I'm not that important. They're losing interest. I'm about to be abandoned." That's the vulnerable part of us. Then the bodyguard jumps in, checking your phone, rereading messages, trying to craft the perfect follow-up text so that you don't lose them.
Or you meet someone impressive and you start thinking, "They're out of my league. I have to prove myself." And before you know it, the bodyguard has you overagreeing, performing, prioritizing them over yourself. In all of these situations, the pattern is the same. One part of you is scared: "I'm not enough. I might lose this." And then the other part of you tries to solve it by securing this person. The bodyguard is trying to solve that fear by controlling the situation, but in the process, it makes you lose yourself.
Our job is to notice when the bodyguard shows up and to realize that this is precisely the moment where the vulnerable part of us needs a wise parent to step in and say what needs to be said. I have a four-step method for doing this called the CALM Method. I'm going to walk you through it right now, so grab a pen and paper if you don't have one because you're going to be able to start applying this immediately.
The CALM Method is about four specific things. The first letter in our acronym is C: connect with yourself. So, imagine the moment where the vulnerable part of you has realized that you like someone. And in that moment, the bodyguard shows up and says, "You listen here. I'm going to find you. And when I do, I'm going to do everything in my power to win you over." That is when the wise voice has to step in and say, "Whoa, no, you won't, Liam Neeson."
This wise voice, I think of them as the adult in the room, puts an arm around that child and says, "What's happening, friend? What's going on?" Then listen to what they tell you. The most important part of this is that you're being compassionate to yourself. You're not asking questions with judgment or punishment. You're actually looking to understand where these obsessive feelings are coming from. And the best time to do this exercise is when it feels like it's the last thing in the world we want to do.
The idea of that wiser voice coming along to re-parent us is being able to sit with that inner vulnerable child who is nervous, who is afraid, who has been abandoned, who has been taught that they won't be okay on their own, and tell them exactly what they need to hear. Imagine that in that moment the bodyguard is speaking really loudly about what you need to do. That is a loud voice and it is telling our inner child that they are not capable. Your job is to seek out that child and show them that they are capable. You are the adult in the room. You can be a source of healing for yourself. This wiser voice might sound something like this.
Hey, you were okay before you met this person. You've survived being alone before. You've been hurt before and you got through it. So, why are we acting like this one person determines everything?
It is precisely when we delegate our protection to this very one-dimensional bodyguard with all of their naive techniques for protecting us that we abandon our inner child. And when we abandon our inner child, we can struggle to find ourselves at the end of a relationship. Leave me a comment if you've ever got to the end of a relationship realizing that you abandoned yourself so much that you barely even know what your needs are anymore. All you did was show up and be whoever you thought that person needed you to be. Our job is to notice when the bodyguard is trying to take over and to teach ourselves that we are more than capable of handling this situation without the bodyguard's methods.
Okay, for the next letter.
Oh, sorry, guys. Oh, God. David, it's her. She's texted me back.
Well, wait, what did she say?
Oh, boy. She said, "Haha, the other night when you thought my face cream was pudding and you took a bite, I almost threw up laughing." Do you think that means she wants me to ask her out again?
Yes, I do. And I think that she would say yes.
Yeah, but the ball is kind of in her court. I feel like it's her turn.
Well, then, you...
Also, I do not want this to not end up being something real again that doesn't end up with the two of us in bed in Pizookie together.
You do do that. I've walked in multiple times and you've been doing that in the living room.
God.
Matt, you are spiraling. Look, hey, man, you yourself made a video. It's called Dating With Results that helps people with exactly the problem that you're feeling right now. You could go there right now at datingwithresults.com.
Well, that must have cost thousands of dollars for people to watch.
No, Matt, it's free.
Free? This is the one where we talked about how to navigate the landscape of modern dating.
Yes.
The one where we said how to stop yourself from feeling invisible on the apps, get out of situationships, and actually make real progress in attracting the kind of person you want in this life.
Yes. That's you right there.
Wait. I did this?
Yes, you're on the screen. You're looking at it.
Where did you say people could get this again?
This is at datingwithresults.com.
And you said it was free.
100% free.
And people can watch it right now.
You are doing that. Matt.
Yeah.
Matt, we're making a vlog.
Yes.
The CALM Method. The next letter in the CALM Method is A: anchoring your value in yourself. This is going to sound a little off topic, but I am really into this idea of home and how the real home that we live in is not the four walls of the structure that we go to bed in every night. It's us. The of our body, the walls of our mind. That is the home that we take with us everywhere we go. And a key question you can ask yourself is, "How safe do I feel in this home?"
When we meet someone and we like them and we start obsessing over them and thinking that they are the solution to our problems, we are looking for a sense of safety in them, not in ourselves. In other words, we have made them our home and that is part of why we now feel so unstable and uncertain and anxious because we're looking for that sense of safety on the outside. Home suddenly is something that can be taken away.
But when we're able to stand down our bodyguard and talk to ourselves on a level and be compassionate with ourselves and sit with ourselves in the manner that I'm talking about when I say connect with yourself, we're building a safer home within ourselves. And this is so important because we have to remember that everyone else is only ever rented. The home that we own and will always own is us. So, while it's true that when we build a relationship with someone we're kind of building a sense of home with another person, we have to build a home within ourselves first. We are the asset, not the other person.
The third letter in our acronym is L. L stands for loosen the story you have about them. The story is the thing we hold on to that says this person is so important. Our job is to depersonalize this feeling. How do we do that? Depersonalization means realizing that we have felt this about other people in the past. You may have had multiple situations in your life where you got too anxious or obsessed with somebody you like. If you're even watching this video knowing that obsession is a pattern in your life when you start to like somebody, you know this is true.
And when you know that's true, here's what you realize. The obsession is the common denominator, not this person. I can decouple this feeling from this person. It's not about this person. Therefore, they are not nearly as special as my mind has made them out to be. The feeling I have is real. I'm not minimizing that you feel anxious, obsessed, that you feel very much in like or love with this person, but the meaning your mind is attaching to this person may not be real at all.
It's worth having a sense of humor about all of this. It's actually one of the great weapons you have against your bodyguard. And your bodyguard, by the way, is not your enemy. It's trying to be your friend. It's trying to protect you, but it's just doing it in a bad way. We can actually play with our bodyguard more. Have a sense of humor with your bodyguard because with the bodyguard it's all very serious. The stakes are so impossibly high.
Your bodyguard might be telling you, "We need to get this person. The stakes are impossibly high. If we lose them, we'll never meet anyone like them again." Our job as the wiser voice can be to mess with that person a little bit. "You're right. We'll never survive this if this person leaves us. Our life is effectively over. This person who we only just met three weeks ago is now the center of our universe. That seems to make sense. Yeah."
And the last letter in our acronym, M. For Matthew. Think about your old pal Matthew. What would old Matt say here? It's not Matthew, it's moving slowly. I have often said that choosing wrong is slower than going slow. If you move fast with the wrong person, it is slower than going slow. A lot is lost in love by going too fast. A lot is put in jeopardy by going too fast. Mostly your heart, your feelings, your good judgment.
Be present with the person in front of you. Let the story unfold organically so that you can actually measure the compatibility between you instead of trying to rush it or getting caught up in their pace or insecurely being so busy trying to get this person that you don't slow down enough to appreciate whether you should even want to get this person. Remind yourself, "This person is someone I don't actually even necessarily know that well. This obsession I feel is a form of projection."
And that is true even if you have been friends with this person for years. Some people will say to me, "Matthew, I've known this person forever. I know how amazing they are." Yeah, but you probably never had a long-term relationship with them. So, you don't know what that would be like with that person. So, that is also part of the projection. Moving slowly is how you protect your heart without shutting it down.
The CALM Method is a way that you can reconnect with yourself, show yourself that you are quite capable of moving through this world in a happy way without this person's help. And actually being present with the situation instead of letting your obsession rule the day. The CALM Method is not about suppressing your feelings. It is about not letting your feelings make your decisions for you. In other words, it's not anti-emotion, it's pro-agency. The goal is not to stop feeling, it's to stop losing ourselves when we feel.
Everything I've said today is only a small part of the much more complete and meaningful work I do at my yearly retreat. This year it's happening in October in Miami. If you want to find out more about that, the link is in the bio. And let me know how this video spoke to you in the comments below. I love reading your comments and I'll see you again next week.
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