When someone close to us is anxious, we often feel it too. Anxiety therapy helps us untangle why and learn to stay grounded in ourselves.
Emotional absorption may reflect a past need to regulate others to feel safe in chaotic environments. Anxiety therapy helps increase emotional differentiation and tolerance of relational vulnerability.is familiar for many people, including many of my patients.
Whether it is the urgency in a friend’s voice, the distress of a romantic partner, or the unspokn tension in a colleague’s presence, we may find ourselves suddenly uneasy without an identifiable source within ourselves. , emotionally attuned, or “sensitive. ” It is often useful to consider that deeper and more complex dynamics are involved. What might be happening within ourselves that makes us more vulnerable to taking in other people's anxiety as if it was ours?
Anxiety is not merely a surface-levelenactment of early relational dynamics in our life. This post explores why someone else’s anxiety can so readily trigger our own and how anxiety therapy can help. Anxiety is a natural human emotion. It is not only not"bad" in itself, but it's useful and necessary at times.
It can also be a very disturbing and disruptive experience. While many people have the understandable wish to make it go away, understanding it more deeply can be important because it might be connected with different parts of who we are.
Anxiety, in that way, can be seen less as just a symptom to be eliminated and more as a signal that something intolerable or overwhelming is threatening to emerge from within, whether it is an internal conflict or a perceived threat. This distress is often connected to different types ofWhen one is in the presence of another’s anxiety, it is not merely an observation of their distress.
The anxious person, often unknowingly, may externalize and displace internal tension into what has been called “the relational field,” the co-created space that exists between two people in all human interactions. The recipient, in turn, may unconsciously absorb or be drawn into this distress, not out of conscious choice, but because something deep in their mind is being activated. Much of our vulnerability to others’ emotional states is shaped by early developmental experiences.
Infant researchers have, for the last few decades, uncovered and explored the co-regulatory processes that start from birth with our caregivers. These processes are intricate, continuous, and often out of our awareness. When things go well enough, children can develop not only the capacity to recognize and tolerate their internal emotional states, but also the trust that the other person will be able to regulate their own emotions as well.
In contrast, in families where caregivers were inconsistent, emotionally fragile, or overwhelmed, the child may have learned that their own stability depended on the regulation of those around them. Such children often assume the role of emotional caretaker, suppressing their needs, heightening their sensitivity, and organizing their behavior around the perceived emotional climate of the household.between self and other, marked by patterns of enmeshment and undifferentiation, might lead the child to feel that their sense offeel external.
The other’s emotional state feels indistinguishable from our own, leading to a kind of emotional contagion that is difficult to parse or resist.patterns that persist into adulthood. In that context, the presence of anxiety in another might be unconsciously registered as a potential threat or elicit roles we have played in earlier relationships. When someone close to us becomes anxious, we may reflexively enter a state of internal alert.
Even ifare not directly in danger, our old templates might get activated: “I need you to be okay so that I can be okay. ”, or soothing behaviors towards the other.
However, it can also be experienced through the internalization of their emotional state. By making their anxiety ours, we unconsciously wish that we might make it go away for them. Absorbing the other person’s anxiety might be, we hope, a way to make our environment calmer and safer. These dynamics are often outside of conscious awareness and can lead to a profound and automatic internal reaction, particularly in close relationships.
Moreover, they can become part of how we organize our wholeAnxiety therapy informed by psychodynamic principles attends to these relational blueprints. It does not simply seek to reduce symptoms, but rather to explore the internal narratives and emotional roles that continue to shape how one experiences anxiety in relation to others. Being around someone else’s anxiety, particularly a person close to us, can lead us to feel helpless.
Observing or being confronted with another’s anxiety often evokes a sense of urgency or compulsion to act. The impulse to soothe, advise, or intervene is not only a sign of care, but it can also be a way to mitigate the intolerable feeling of powerlessness. For many individuals, their capacity to tolerate helplessness is linked to early experiences of emotional abandonment, inconsistency, or chaos. When one could not control.
We may have even felt responsible or blamed ourselves for other people’s anxiety and distress, as a way to gain some sense of power and control over an otherwise scary or painful experience. Our anxiety in response to someone else’s operates not only as a response to the other person’s state, but as a defense against the internal vulnerability that helplessness creates.
The need tobecomes a way to disavow the reality that we may, in fact, not be able to alter another person’s emotional condition. A central aim of anxiety therapy in such cases is to help the individual recognize and tolerate these moments of helplessness without collapsing into anxiety or reactive behavior. This involves developing the capacity to observe one’s own internal responses with curiosity rather than urgency.does not pathologize anxiety, nor does it aim simply to eliminate it.
Instead, it treats anxiety as a meaningful expression of unconscious conflicts, fears, and relational history. By exploring the ways in which another person’s anxiety resonates with one’s internal world, therapy can start creating the conditions for greater differentiation, self-possession, and emotional clarity. Over time, people can come to recognize their own patterns of emotional absorption and regulation, develop an increased capacity for emotional differentiation, and tolerate the inevitable moments of helplessness that human relationships entail.
This is what anxiety therapy can offer: not quick fixes, but a deeper kind of change — one where we become more able to hold the complexity of feeling without being consumed by it, or rushing to solve or avoid. From the power of pausing to the ability to ignore, we’ve culled 26 simple, actionable measures for gaining a sense of control and living a meaningful life. Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted?
Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
Please follow us on Google to support usUnited States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News: You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Hill Country residents reliving anxiety caused by 2025 floodResidents experiencing flooding on Thursday similar to 2025’s catastrophic July 4 event describe a new sense of preparedness but the same intense anxieties.
Read more »
SNL Separation Anxiety: SNL Season 38 Took On Homer's The OdysseySNL Separation Anxiety: This week, we look back at Season 38 Episode 4 (October 13th, 2012) and SNL's own take on Homer's The Odyssey.
Read more »
5 Work Personality Traits That Are Actually Forms Of AnxietyAre you a people pleaser or a perfectionist? Read this.
Read more »
Weather Why's: Why are there more flooding events in New York City?Another flooding rain event in New York City!
Read more »