THE SHIFT

The Anti-Anxiety Skill Nobody Talks About

Your partner’s in a bad mood, and within five minutes, you are too. You didn’t mean to catch their emotion—it just happened.

We are all prone to emotional contagion, a phenomenon where people automatically “catch” the moods of others. Studies in affective neuroscience show that mirror neurons and limbic resonance make humans highly sensitive to the emotional states of those around them.

Psychiatrist Murray Bowen also observed this fusion phenomenon in families. He discovered that anxiety, in particular, doesn’t stay put—it flows through relationships like an electric current, especially in close systems: parenting, friendships, marriages, leadership roles, and even workplace teams.

This is adaptive in some contexts (like empathy), but when unchecked, it can fuse your emotional system with another person’s, reducing clarity, autonomy, and genuine presence.

The antidote, Bowen believed, is differentiation—the ability to balance emotional and intellectual functioning, and to maintain autonomy while staying connected to others.\

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Differentiation has two dimensions: intrapersonal and interpersonal.

• Intrapersonal differentiation is the ability to separate thinking from feeling. It’s noticing anxiety, frustration, or sadness, and then choosing your response—rather than letting the feeling dictate your behavior.

• Interpersonal differentiation is the ability to stay emotionally connected to others without losing your sense of self. You can be present with someone’s anger or sadness without absorbing it, without trying to fix it, and without retreating entirely. You maintain closeness while protecting your own emotional integrity.

The Paradox of Connection

The goal isn’t to achieve perfect separation from the emotional fields around you. Even highly differentiated people “catch” some emotional waves. The difference lies in awareness and choice.

Back to the partner scenario: your partner comes home from a long day, and you can feel the energy shift—their eyebrows are furrowed, they’re barely responsive, and you hear audible sighs as they put their things away.

Most of us would instantly feel tension rise—a mix of irritation, anxiety, and confusion. If you’re poorly differentiated, your thoughts and feelings tangle:
“Did I do something wrong? Are they going to be like this all night? Why can’t they just calm down and talk to me?”
Maybe you try to fix their problem, please them to make the tension disappear, or pull away entirely.

No matter your default response, the issue is the same: you abandon your own self-state in the process.

To act in a more differentiated way, we can draw from philosopher Martin Buber, who argued that authentic relationships (the I–Thou connection) arise when two individuals meet as fully realized selves—not as extensions of each other. When one self fuses with the other, the relationship becomes instrumental rather than genuine.

Connection thrives on presence and clarity—which means staying anchored in your own state of being.

Next time, try this:

Notice the tension and your immediate bodily and mental response. Are you tensing up? Trying to fix? Retreating? Awareness is the first step toward control.

Label what’s happening. Try: “That’s their anger, not mine.” Or ask yourself: “Which part of this is my reality, and which part belongs to them?”

Hold empathy with perspective. You can care deeply while recognizing what emotions are yours to carry—and which are not.

The more grounded you are in yourself, the more deeply you can connect with others.

THE ESSENTIALS

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