Why Do We Absorb Other People’s Anxiety?

Some of us seem to absorb other people’s anxiety or stress. Someone in our surroundings feels irritable, panicky, or disappointed, and we spend the rest of the day feeling unsettled, as if their mood became lodged within us. Some people come to anxiety therapy because they feel overwhelmed by feelings that do not seem entirely their own.

This kind of emotional sensitivity, how we seem to take in someone else’s anxiety, can be confusing. Some people might think of this as an intense for of empathy, or externalize the cause to their nervous system’s reactivity. However, this tendency may also reveal something about unconscious attachment, internalized relationships, and the difficulty of maintaining a secure sense of self in the presence of another person’s distress.

When the Other’s Feelings Enter the Self

Humans are relational beings from the very beginning. This means, among other things, that we are never emotionally disconnected from others. In fact, our sense of self develops in relation to another mind. We depend on our caregivers to metabolize fear, frustration, hunger, and helplessness – both others and our own.

An anxious, intrusive, withdrawn, or overwhelmed caregiver may leave us with feelings that overwhelming to carry alone. That sense of overwhelm can persist into adulthood, dormant for the most part until it is reawakened by situations that evoke earlier relationships.

As a result, another person’s stress can feel so personally destabilizing. It may be hard to just experience it as “they are anxious.” Unconsciously, it may trigger old relational patterns in which our own anxiety was the natural response, for example if we felt like our safety depends on managing the other person’s mood. In this sense, emotional contagion is not just about absorbing an external mood, but about reactivating something that we already carry in our inner world.

Anxiety as a Signal of Relational Threat

Freud described anxiety not only as fear, but as a signal: a warning that something dangerous to our psyche may be approaching. In emotional contagion, the signal may be about a relational threat: the possible loss of love, rupture of attachment, exposure to blame, or collapse of a needed bond.

We may unconsciously experience the other person’s irritation or disappointment -even if they are not directly aimed at us- as opening the possibility of rejection, abandonment, humiliation, or aggression. This kind of situation might evoke old ways in which we felt responsible for other people’s moods in order to preserve a sense of safety. For example, we may have the fantasy that if we absorb the other person’s stress and anxiety, we can release them from such feelings, reducing the sense of relational threat.

Only relying on relaxation or cognitive reframing during anxiety therapy does not usually get at these deep-seated conflicts. We may absorb the other person’s anxiety as a way to preserve the attachment and remain connected, while at the same time struggling to have separate emotional life. Setting emotional boundaries, for example saying “this feeling belongs to them, not to me” is not easy when not absorbing the other person’s distress may unconsciously feel like abandonment, selfishness, or loss of love.

Identification and Loss of Boundaries

Another way to understand emotional contagion is through identification, which is usually another way to sustain an attachment with others. We may unconsciously take in aspects of the other person’s emotional state as a way of staying close to them. This may not require the experience of relational threat, but because sharing the feeling may create the illusion of connection.

This is especially true when the boundary between empathy and responsibility has been blurred. For example, some people learned during childhood that love required attunement to the caregiver’s fragility. We became skilled early on at reading shifts in mood, softening conflict, managing disappointment, or preventing emotional escalation.

As an adult, we may appear caring or perceptive, but that might only be part of the story. Internally, we may feel burdened, resentful, or strangely absent from our own life. What was an adaptive strategy, left us with a constricted sense of self, not free to have our own experience but feeling what everyone else is feeling before we know how we feel ourselves.

How Anxiety Therapy Helps

In psychodynamic anxiety therapy, the work is to understand why another person’s emotional state has such authority over one’s own. As we just discussed, this experience cannot be merely addressed by changing our thoughts or setting behavioral boundaries. It involves a number of unconscious processes that we are deeply invested in.

Anxiety therapy can create a space in which these conflicts, identifications, and obligations can become thinkable rather than simply enacted. As these patterns become clearer, anxiety contagion can be understood not merely as a symptom, but as a message from an older part of the self.

Therapy helps separate past from present. At Fermata Psychotherapy, anxiety therapy attends to the deeper emotional meanings beneath symptoms: the unconscious conflicts, attachment histories, identifications, and internalized relationships that shape how anxiety is experienced. If you find yourself absorbing other people’s stress, we can help you understand not only how this happens, but why it has felt so necessary. If you are interested in starting this process, please reach out today.

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Photo credit: Bob Brewer