Anxiety is real. As our previous posts pointed out, when anxiety is present, the part of our brain that creates thoughtful responses shuts down. This allows the reactionary part of our brain to take over. Since the presence of anxiety is inevitable, our strategy must be to learn to recognize how we react to anxiety so that we can learn to manage it.
In our previous post, Recognizing Your Reactivity to Anxiety: Overfunctioning/Underfunctioning, we shared how anxiety can lead some people to take on more responsibility than is reasonably theirs while others will take on less responsibility than is reasonably theirs. In this post we will attempt to explain what triangling looks like within a system.
What is Triangling?
Triangling occurs when anxiety is passed from one person to the outsider. The outsider is someone or something not directly involved in the situation where anxiety is present.
A common way triangling manifests as a reaction to anxiety is when two individuals are in conflict with one another and one or both of the individuals triangle an outsider into the conflict instead of handling the offense directly. The outsider is not there to help resolve the conflict but simply to spread the “weight” of the anxiety in the moment. Anxiety gets dumped rather than resolved.
Let me illustrate. A friend of mine says something that hurts me. Instead of going to my friend to deal with the issue, I go to a third person to complain about what my friend did to me or to get sympathy for what happened. That is triangling.
Processing conflict with an outsider is not inherently bad. It becomes a problem when the outsider who is triangled is unable to stay differentiated. In that case, the outsider takes on anxiety from the situation or is being used as a way to avoid the situation where anxiety is present.
The outsider is not always another person. Many times the outsider can be work or a hobby. For instance, a husband and wife have fought recently. Triangling occurs when the husband spends excessive time at work to avoid the anxiety present in his marriage.
Here is an easy way to recognize if you are reacting to anxiety by triangling. Simply ask yourself, “Am I using someone or something to avoid getting present to my anxiety?”
Triangling is…
• Unnecessarily including another person into your conflict
• Giving more attention to a third party, a job, or a hobby in order to avoid anxiety
• Being short or angry with someone or something that is not involved in the situation creating anxiety
