We all experience anxiety at various levels throughout our lives, and when someone close to us develops anxiety, we want to offer support: for instance, if our spouse, partner or loved one develops anxiety, we want to help them manage their anxiety in any way we can.
Anxiety may be minor, like worrying we’re running behind for an appointment or a coffee date with a friend. It may be major, like the anticipation we feel before a big work interview, a work presentation, or concern over big events in the lives of our friends, partners, or family members.
However, when anxiety escalates and interferes with our ability to perform typical daily tasks or meet our daily responsibilities, it reaches the threshold for clinical diagnosis. Statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) show that just over 30 percent of people in the U.S. receive an anxiety diagnosis in their lifetime, with around 23 percent reporting anxiety with severe impairment.
The good news is that anxiety is treatable, and with the right combination of therapeutic techniques and support, people with anxiety can learn to manage their symptoms and live a full and productive life, based on their proactive choices, rather than their anxiety.
At Crownview, we work with a wide variety of patients with various mental health diagnoses, including but not limited to anxiety disorders, mood disorders, schizoaffective disorders/schizophrenia, personality disorders, and self-harm/suicidal ideation. Many of us also have direct experience with anxiety – through personal connections and otherwise – which informs our clinical work and helps us with tips like those we suggest below.
What to Do When Your Partner Has Anxiety
Before we share our tips, we want to remind people that although anxiety is not contagious in the way a cold is contagious – you can’t catch clinical anxiety – spending significant time around someone with an anxiety disorder can increase your chances of having anxious thoughts or feeling anxious. That’s normal: we pick up on one another’s moods.
In most cases, we’re particularly sensitive to our partner’s moods and emotions, and it would be unrealistic to say the way they think and feel has no impact on us. On the contrary, how they feel is very important to us, which is why you’re reading this article.
Therefore, if you have a partner with anxiety, we encourage you to check yourself, too: to support them, you need to come from a calm, relaxed, supportive place. Sometimes what your partner needs is just to look at you and see you as their rock, before you say or do anything at all. That’s where to start: you can act as a grounding rod for them, and that means you need to be solid, yourself.
Next, try these six tips.
How to Help Your Partner With Anxiety: Five Tips
1. Unconditional Love and Support, Plus Teamwork
Here’s something we suggest you say out loud, often: “I’m here for you. I see you. I love you. I’ll help you work through this.” Anxiety can make an individual – even someone with an abundance of friends and family – feel lonely and isolated. Their anxiety may scare them, which can be embarrassing. Their anxiety may embarrass them, which can degrade their self-esteem. When you step up and say “No matter what’s going on with you, I’m here. I’ll support you through your anxiety – and anything else – no matter what.” Sometimes knowing someone has your back can change everything, and give a partner the confidence they need to move forward with hope and optimism.
2. Validate Without Enabling
Sometimes we love our partners to a fault.
Yes, your partner needs you to see and understand what they’re going through. They need to know you empathize and want to help in any way you can. As you do this, it’s important to work to defuse rather than promote their symptoms. For instance, when your partner comes to you for support, you can help them without inadvertently enabling them. What that means is that the best support includes an element of reflecting responsibility for their symptoms back to them. Think of the adage “live in the solution, rather than the problem.” You can help your partner by acknowledging their anxiety and offering proactive ideas for working through their symptoms.
3. Language Matters
When your partner is anxious and worked up, avoid saying things like “What’s your problem today?” Try something like this: “Is something happening with you today?” When they’re having a panic attack, please avoid saying “Calm down.” That never works. Try suggesting a mindfulness exercise, taking a walk, or having a comforting snack or meal. Also, when they’re very anxious, saying things like “Everything is okay,” rarely helps. What helps is using words like “I’ll work through this with you.”
4. Create Personalized Systems – And Stick to Them
When your partner as anxiety, or any clinical mental health disorder, supporting them can, over time, undermine your own mental health – unless you set healthy boundaries. If you overextend yourself, you can become tired, irritable, and unhappy. You may start to resent the fact your partner needs your support – and you may feel guilty about having those feelings.
The best way to avoid this is by setting clear boundaries and sticking to them.
To understand your boundaries, you need to understand yourself. Identify when supporting your partner taxes you too much and make a plan with your partner to tell them when you need to take a minute for yourself, after which you can listen/help/support them. If you make a plan like this, it’s essential to stick to it. Your reliable presence and consistent behavior can empower them to manage their anxiety independently, which is the real goal in any partnership: two people mutually reinforcing one another to be the best possible version of themselves.
5. Help Them Find Professional Support
For a person with clinical anxiety, professional support can make all the difference. There are several types of professional treatment and support available, including medication, psychotherapy, and complementary supports like mindfulness-based psychotherapy. We’ll review two types of psychotherapy here – cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and leave anti-anxiety medication and complementary supports like mindfulness for a different article.
We’ll start with CBT.
How CBT Helps Anxiety
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) focuses on a technique called cognitive reframing or cognitive restructuring. For people with anxiety, a CBT therapist helps them develop new ways of experiencing the things that trigger anxiety. A CBT therapist can help a person see the world in an entirely new way. When we can see things from an alternative perspective, anxiety decreases. CBT also teaches patients to challenge and reframe negative, worrisome thoughts into positive, productive ones.
Next, DBT.
How DBT Helps Anxiety
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) was developed by a skilled CBT practitioner to help patients who are extremely reactive, emotionally. A DBT therapist can give patients with anxiety the practical skills they need to manage/de-escalate panic attack and other symptoms of anxiety. These skills can make a big difference in the life of a person with anxiety, an enable them to process their symptoms and emotions while reducing the immediate disruption they cause.
That’s the end of our list of suggestions about how you can help your partner manage anxiety. But we’re not done sharing things we think it’s important for you to know. We mention setting boundaries, which is critical – we’ll talk more about that, below. We also discuss two types of psychotherapy, which can help people with mild and moderate anxiety. We’ll share information about two additional approaches that can help people with severe anxiety: exposure response prevention therapy (ERPT) or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).
First, more on boundaries.
Take Care of Yourself: You Need to Be Your Best Self, Too
When your partner has anxiety, it’s easy to get swept away by what’s going on with them. Their emotions may be big, powerful, and at times, overwhelming – for them and for you. Please remember that your emotional life is every bit as important as theirs. Also remember this:
In equal partnerships, partners support one another equally.
We don’t mean you have to keep some kind of support ledger and make sure the amount of support you give one another balances mathematically. What we mean is that when things get out of balance, they don’t feel equal – and that can breed negative emotions. Relationships go through phases and stages. Think of it like this: when one partner has a cold, the other one goes to the store for juice, soup, and cough drops.
Then, when the other gets sick, the situation flips.
When your partner has a mental health disorder, you may spend a period of time helping them heal. While you do that, you need to take care of yourself and do things you know promote your positive mental health. Your partner will support you in every way they can during their recovery, and when they learn to manage their symptoms, they’ll be able to offer you more emotional and psychological support, too.
We think you get the idea. To help your partner, you need to help yourself, and if things feel unbalanced, be patient: with time, they can heal, become whole, and your relationship can return to a place of harmony and balance.
Now we’ll briefly discuss two modes of psychotherapy for people with severe anxiety. First, we want to discuss one more thing that helps reduce anxiety in a partnership.
A Peaceful Home Can Help Your Partner Manage Anxiety
One excellent way to decrease anxiety is to create a peaceful and relaxing home. Cooperate with your partner to make this happen. Collaborate to decide what peaceful and relaxing means to both of you. For some, that means spotless counters and no dishes in the sink. For others, that might mean curios and knick-knack and occasionally leaving dishes in the sink. Also, remember that for some people, clutter can increase anxiety, but for others, clutter can be comforting. It’s up to you and your partner to decide what a peaceful home means to you, and take steps to make that happen in a way that works for both of you. We encourage you to consider things like increasing the amount of natural light in your home and adding houseplants, both of which promote relaxation and reduce anxiety.
Psychotherapy for Severe Anxiety: Unique Approaches
In some cases, standard treatment for anxiety with CBT or DBT is not sufficient. If your partner tries standard psychotherapy with CBT and/or DBT and does not experience substantial symptom relief, they may benefit from treatments such as exposure response prevention therapy (ERPT) or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).
Exposure Response Prevention Therapy (ERPT)
During ERPT, patients identify the primary situations that trigger their anxiety, and in a stepwise, progressive manner, the therapist exposes them to thoughts of those situations in a controlled environment, while simultaneously teaching them how prevent the go-to safety and avoidance techniques that cause problems. Over time, the patient can learn to manage their triggers efficiently and productively, which reduces disruption and improves overall quality of life.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is an effective modality for patients with a history of trauma and/or patients diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and can also help patients with severe anxiety. In EMDR sessions, a therapist guides the patient through a structured series of exercises that combine bilateral eye movements and/or physical interventions like tapping with the activation and subsequent desensitization of specific thoughts/memories in order to reprocess them in a healthy manner.
When standard psychotherapy is ineffective for your partner with anxiety, you may want to suggest they talk to their provider about ERPT and/or EMDR, which may help when other approaches don’t.
Supporting Your Partner: Resources for Anxiety Treatment
To learn about the various types of anxiety diagnoses identified by mental health experts, and the types of treatment for anxiety we offer at Crownview Psychiatric Institute, please navigate to the What We Treat section of our website and read this page:
Anxiety Treatment at Crownview Psychiatric Institute
If you read this article and decide your partner needs professional support for anxiety, please don’t hesitate to contact us today. Our team of skilled, experienced therapists offer a wide range of innovative therapies that can help.
Gianna Melendez
Jodie Dahl, CpHT