Coping with Anxiety: How Emotions Affect Relationships

Relationships can provide emotional support, companionship, and intimacy, but they can also create an environment that breeds discord and anxiety. Make no mistake, relationships can be tricky to navigate, and unfortunately, no instruction manual exists that covers all the methods for doing it right. A good start for healthy togetherness, however, is healthy separateness.

The Self-Sabotaging Nature of Emotional Fusion

One of the strongest indicators of relational and emotional maturity is a person’s ability to remain untriggered by the things that others say and do. I am not suggesting one develops a cold, emotionally unavailable or distant sort of defense posture. Instead, I am advocating for an emotional strength that inhibits being baited by another’s expression of anger, frustration, or even despair. This ability to remain separate from another person’s emotions is referred to as differentiation.

The fundamental nature of relationship is connection. Closeness. We care about our friends or partners, and we want to make them happy. Their opinions matter to us. Connectedness without differentiation, however, leads to relational discord. Invariably, our emotions can become too intertwined with the emotions of our loved ones. In the field of psychotherapy, this phenomenon is referred to as emotional fusion.

Emotionally fused couples often experience a kind of reactionary communication style. One spouse, for example, might be experiencing difficulty at work, which contributes to a depressed mood and withdrawal from connecting. The other spouse, reacting to her partner’s withdrawal, becomes anxious about the relationship and either begins to self-protect and withdraw in kind or becomes demanding of his engagement. A differentiated person, on the other hand, can continue to move toward her spouse in confidence, knowing that his withdrawal has little to do with their relationship.

Coping with Anxiety

When we are gasping for air and believe our partner alone holds the oxygen tank, it seems counterintuitive to turn toward another source for what we need. And yet, this is the nature of emotional fusion; it not only reveals but often perpetuates our experience of anxiety. Differentiation, on the other hand, protects us from the belief that our well-being is completely in the hands of another equally needy person.

Learning to self-soothe is of paramount importance in coping with anxiety. We do not have to give power to the words and opinions of others nor let them define our worth or significance. Loving ourselves well also means knowing that someone else’s bad day does not have to become ours.

According to John 10:10, Jesus came so that we might have life – abundant, vibrant, overflowing life. But He never intended for us to find that life in other people. When we become emotionally fused and look to others to be the air we breathe, we stop allowing God to be our ultimate source of life.

How do we become more differentiated? We must learn to recognize when someone else’s words, actions, or responses have evoked an anxious reaction in us. We often become hurt, for example, when we give someone a gift that they end up not liking. Should we take this personally? Their dislike for the present does not necessarily mean the person dislikes us, does it?

Being able to separate our sense of well-being (i.e. I’m an okay and worthwhile person) from someone’s reaction to us (i.e. She clearly doesn’t know I dislike chocolate) is a fundamental task of differentiation.

Relational Anxiety

When people rely on their partners for their emotional well-being, they abdicate responsibility for their emotions and create a no-win situation in the relationship. Looking again at the gift-giving analogy above, an emotionally fused person might interpret their spouse’s lackluster response to the gift as rejection.

Their behavior (e.g. pouting) then becomes a manipulative ploy to elicit a more acceptable response from their spouse so that they no longer feel rejected. A differentiated person, on the other hand, would acknowledge her disappointment that the gift was not appreciated but would understand this as an acceptable reality.

Dr. David Schnarch, in his book Passionate Marriage, illustrates the anxiety that results from emotional fusion. “When your spouse is your support system,” he writes, “you have to keep an eye on him or her at all times. If he or she ‘moves’ emotionally or physically, you immediately feel off-balance, even threatened. That’s when you become preoccupied with issues of ‘trust’ because any unilateral shift is a violation of sorts. In contrast, partners whose sense of stability comes from themselves are aware of, but relatively unaffected by, one another’s shifts” (2009, p. 164).

Situational Anxiety

When anxiety stems from sources other than interpersonal relationships, it is considered situational anxiety. Speaking in public, driving in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, or deciding to switch careers mid-life all might elicit anxiety in an individual. Becoming emotionally mature and differentiated involves learning to quiet oneself in these intense moments by exercising control over one’s emotions.

Schnarch purports that “self-soothing involves turning inward and accessing your own resources to regain your emotional balance and feeling comfortable in your body….[it] is your ability to comfort yourself, lick your own wounds, and care for yourself without excessive indulgence or deprivation.” He goes on to say, “Self-soothing involves meeting two core challenges of selfhood: (a) not losing yourself to the pressures and demands of others, and (b) developing your capacity for self-centering (stabilizing your own emotions and fears)” (pp. 170-3).

The Truth about Differentiation

Pursuing differentiation does not mean becoming emotionally sterile or void of feeling. One can still be acutely aware of others’ opinions and emotions without allowing their own to be altered in kind. Differentiation can be illustrated by a chameleon walking into a blue room; he recognizes the room’s color, shape, and smell – even how it feels to be in such a room – and yet he does not become blue himself.

Schnarch does not offer a how-to program for becoming more differentiated. God’s Word, however, shows us where to find life and power and love in the only place that can truly satisfy us. His Spirit gives us the strength to stay calm in the face of fear, the patience to return kindness for harsh words, and the truth that can war against any false belief we may embrace. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV).

Christian Counseling for Anxiety

In relationships, we strive for connectedness. But when that togetherness comes at the cost of individuation – a being at home with oneself – we risk both our relational well-being and our emotional health as well. A professional Christian counselor can help you discern if your anxiety may be rooted in emotionally fused relationship patterns and can help you take the next steps for growth.