Anxiety Without an Object: Living in a World That Feels Unstable

Many people I speak with lately describe a similar experience: waking up, checking the news, and feeling a familiar drop in the stomach. Another headline about immigration raids. Another executive order issued without congressional consent. Another threat to democratic norms, healthcare access, or the most vulnerable people in our society. It may not be happening directly to you—but you’re watching it happen, day after day. What’s striking is not only the content of what we’re seeing, but the emotional position it places us in: alert, helpless, angry, guilty, and unsure where to put any of it.

The Effects of Watching

There is a difference between experiencing trauma directly and living in proximity to it—but that difference does not make the impact negligible. Repeated exposure to stories of family separation, threats to democratic institutions, or policies that benefit the powerful at the expense of the many can create a chronic state of emotional activation. People describe feeling on edge, fatigued, cynical, or numb. Others feel flooded with rage or grief they don’t quite know how to metabolize.

For many, doom-scrolling becomes both a compulsion and a form of self-punishment: If I look away, am I abandoning people who are suffering? If I stay engaged, why do I feel so overwhelmed and powerless?

This is often accompanied by guilt—guilt about relative safety, privilege, or comfort. Guilt about living a normal life while others are being harmed. Guilt that quickly turns inward and becomes corrosive rather than motivating.

Helplessness, Rage, and Moral Injury

What people are often describing beneath these feelings is a kind of moral injury: the distress that arises when the world violates deeply held values, and there is no clear way to stop it. Rage flares because something feels profoundly wrong. Helplessness follows when there is no obvious place for that rage to go.

From a psychodynamic perspective, these moments also stir something older and more internal. When the external world feels destructive or chaotic, it can activate our own fears about destruction—of safety, of meaning, of identity. Some people turn that destruction inward, becoming harshly self-critical or despairing. Others project it outward, experiencing intense anger toward figures of authority, institutions, or even other people who seem complicit or indifferent.

There can also be an uncomfortable recognition: that we are not only witnessing destruction, but capable of destructive impulses ourselves. History shows that fascism and authoritarianism are not sustained by monsters alone, but by ordinary people pulled into denial, compliance, or cruelty under pressure. Sitting with that recognition—without collapsing into shame or self-loathing—is deeply unsettling.

What Can We Do?

There is no single correct response to living through these times. Action, rest, protest, disengagement, conversation, limits on media consumption—all of these can be adaptive at different moments. What matters is not choosing the “right” coping strategy, but understanding why you are doing what you’re doing and how it affects you.

What therapy can offer is not relief from the reality of the world, but a place to think and feel without being overtaken. A space where helplessness can be named instead of acted out. Where rage can be understood rather than turned inward or projected indiscriminately. Where guilt can be explored—what belongs to you, and what does not.

In therapy, we can begin to differentiate between responsibility and omnipotence. Between caring deeply and believing you must absorb all the suffering you witness. Between staying awake to reality and living in a constant state of alarm.

Making Meaning Without Hardening

One of the quiet dangers of prolonged exposure to political and environmental threat is emotional hardening—becoming numb, cynical, or detached as a form of self-protection. While understandable, this often comes at the cost of vitality, creativity, and connection.

Psychodynamic therapy is interested in helping people remain emotionally alive without being undone. To hold complexity rather than splitting the world into heroes and villains. To tolerate grief and anger without losing curiosity about oneself or others.

Living through these times will shape us. The question is not whether we are affected, but how. Therapy offers a place to reflect on that shaping—to notice what is being stirred, what is being defended against, and what values you want to live from even when the world feels unstable.

For many people, simply having a space where these reactions make sense—where they are not minimized, pathologized, or rushed toward solutions—is itself a quiet form of resistance.