Take our Generalized Anxiety Disorder Test

Find a therapist to overcome anxiety

Another person’s anxiety can activate unconscious patterns rooted in early attachment dynamics.

Emotional absorption may reflect a past need to regulate others to feel safe in chaotic environments.

Our urge to soothe others may mask a deeper fear of helplessness and emotional disintegration.

Anxiety therapy helps increase emotional differentiation and tolerance of relational vulnerability.

Becoming anxious in response to another person’s anxiety 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.

This experience is usually not only about being empathic, 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-level emotion but a form of internal communication and, for many people, often an unconscious enactment 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 More Than a Feeling

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........

© Psychology Today