Why Someone Else’s Anxiety Makes Us Anxious

The experience of becoming anxious in response to another person’s anxiety is familiar for many people. Whether it is the urgency in a friend’s voice, the visible distress of a partner, or the quiet 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. Anxiety is not merely a surface-level emotion but a form of internal communication, and often an unconscious enactment of early relational dynamics. 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 experience, but it can also be a very disturbing and disruptive experience. While many people have the understandable wish to make it go away, it can be important to understand it more deeply 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 of fear, including the fear of being judged, abandoned, retraumatized, or psychologically annihilated.

When 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.

Early Relationships and the Drive to Co-Regulate

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 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.

Similarly, growing up in a family with blurry boundaries between self and other, marked by patterns enmeshment and undifferentiation, might lead the child to feel that their sense of identity is contingent on the needs or feelings of others. In such cases, another person’s anxiety does not feel external. The other’s emotional state feels as indistinguishable from our own, leading to a kind of emotional contagion that is difficult to parse or resist.

These early adaptations form relational templates and attachment 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 if we are not directly in danger, our old templates might get activated: “I need you to be okay so that I can be okay.”

Sometimes this template may be expressed in rescuing, caretaking, 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, 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 whole personality.

Anxiety 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.

The Intolerance of Helplessness

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 (in)capacity to tolerate helplessness is linked to early experiences of emotional abandonment, inconsistency, or chaos. When one could not control the environment or our caregivers’ behaviors or affective states, helplessness became associated with danger, isolation, or shame. 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 to do something becomes 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.

How Can Anxiety Therapy Help?

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy 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. If you would like to start this process with one of our Chicago therapists, please contact us today.

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Photo credit: 8 verthing