There was one on the coffee table, one near the TV, and several in the kitchen. One—waterproof—hung in the shower. My aunt gathered them all together and we stared down at them. “She didn’t like to be anywhere without a light in sight,” she explained.

Last year after my grandmother died, I stood in her apartment in Houston, surrounded by her things. A piano. Stacks of classic movies. A figurine of a white peacock. As I took in the room, my feelings of sadness were eclipsed by another thought: Why are there so many flashlights?

Mental illness is caused by a complex interplay of genes and environment, both of which are influenced by your caregivers. At some point, I stopped seeing the use of trying to tease these factors apart. Since both my genes and my environment are anxious, both roads lead to the same, inevitable destination. I am anxious because my family is anxious, as a unit.

When I was growing up, my father designated a hand towel for each person in our house, to prevent the spread of germs. He had a food-labelling system to ensure our food hadn’t spoiled. My great aunt (my grandmother's sister) told me once that she wasn't any fun at picnics because she overly fixated on having enough ice to keep the potato salad from going bad. My sister is ten years younger than me, and grew up when I was mostly out of the house. Yet we share nearly identical phobias: vomiting, swallowing pills, concerns around sickness, social anxiety, and perfectionism.

Anxiety is heritable, meaning that if you have family members with anxiety, you're more likely to have anxiety yourself. Wherever you look in my family, there are traces of anxiety. It lurks in every corner, like my grandmother’s flashlights. It's in our behaviors, our purchases, our fears, our Google search history, and the ways we connect with each other.

I was no longer puzzled. I don't obsess about flashlights, but other worries that pestered my grandmother were similar to those that crop up in my own internal monologue, like food contamination, sickness, and germs. Like my grandmother often did, I've wanted to cover surfaces before touching them, and repeatedly wash my hands. I've focused on peculiarities around how things need to be done, and in what order, and stressed about what others thought of me.

There, in the form of flashlights, was a symbol of my grandmother’s anxiety. What if the power went out? What if it happens while I'm in the shower? What if I need light, and I can’t reach the switch? Her solution was to buy more flashlights.

When I first heard about SPACE, it was a "gotcha" moment for me—finally, the proof I wanted that parents project anxiety onto their children as a result of their own unresolved issues. But as I learned more about it, I discovered that the SPACE program actually complicates this common desire to blame parents.

While we can't change our genes, this result shows that the interactions between anxious people, like parents and children, are important, and can be modified in ways that are beneficial. SPACE works by focusing on one specific interaction between family members: the changes in behavior parents make when trying to help and protect their children from their fears, which is called “ accommodation .”

Families may be making each other anxious out of an overwhelming desire to protect each other.

Until last year, there were almost no studies that tried treating parents alone for their children's anxiety, and none that compared that approach to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—the gold-standard anxiety treatment. In recent randomized trials and his ongoing research, Lebowitz is finding that SPACE works just as well as CBT, without a child going to a single therapy session.

But a program developed in the last few years at Yale University by psychologist Eli Lebowitz seeks to make good on this fact—that anxiety doesn't reside only in the individual—rather than use it as an excuse to submit to one's fate. It's called Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions, or SPACE . In 12 weeks, it helps children with anxiety disorders get better, not by treating them, but by treating their parents.

Lebowitz is a thin, brown-haired man with glasses with the calming nature of someone who frequently has to explain things to freaked out parents. We're sitting in a sparse room at Yale University's Child Study Center, where parents who start to notice their children acting differently—crying and being scared, refusing to go to school, afraid of being alone—come to seek help.

There's long been an interest in involving parents in an anxious child's treatment. The problem was, it didn't seem to help. "By and large, those experiments failed to find significant enhancement,” Lebowitz said. “Not to say children didn’t benefit, or parents didn’t benefit, in other ways. But the key question was, Would the child’s anxiety be more improved if you worked closely with the parents? and by and large, the answer was: not really.”

Accommodations from parents are the things they do in response to their kids’ anxiety, meaning that some level of inherent anxiety came first. SPACE reveals how anxiety isn’t merely passed down, but is thrown back and forth between parents and children, like a game of catch in the front yard. Further, it’s not just that parents are subjecting their kids to their own fears and neuroses. Families may be making each other anxious not by all drinking out of the same poisoned genetic and environmental wells but out of an overwhelming desire to protect each other.

“That’s true with all anxiety problems,” he said. “I’m impaired because I don’t want to feel anxious, and if my solutions are all built around not feeling anxious, then my impairment is likely to escalate rather than the opposite.”

There’s a difference between these accommodations and accommodations made for kids with physical or learning disabilities, which are entirely different. Most of the impairments in anxiety and OCD stem from a person’s unwillingness to experience anxiety, not an actual physical inability of some kind, Lebowitz pointed out.

“It seems like they're trying to make him less anxious by saying, 'Look, here, we're putting protections in place,'” Lebowitz said. “But from the child's perspective, if my parents are putting away the knives and keeping the dog away from me and making sure not to leave me alone with the dog—it seems like they also think that I'm dangerous.”

But these accommodations reinforced beliefs about the world that were wrong. One young patient of Lebowitz's was plagued with thoughts that he would stab his pet dog. When he told his parents about it, they separated him from the dog, so he didn’t have to worry about what might happen when he was left alone with it. They took the knives out of the kitchen.

His PhD dissertation was on families with a child with an anxiety disorder, where he found that anxiety-like behaviors could spread. One way was through accommodations, in which parents of children with anxiety and OCD were much more likely to get involved in OCD rituals, to try to help their kids avoid anxiety, or to allow them to change their daily routines, all in an effort to make the child's life easier.

Lebowitz said that it might have been what therapists were doing with the parents that led to no improvements. Often, they were training parents to become pseudo-therapists themselves, teaching them CBT concepts to try at home.

Any family or friend of someone with anxiety will recognize this pattern: My aunt accommodates my grandmother by buying her another flashlight. I reassure my sister that the salad dressing we've eaten hasn't gone bad. My father takes me to the doctor to be certain I don't have that obscure disease I'm worried about. We all feel better for a moment, but we don't learn a more useful lesson, which is that we're capable of facing the imagined danger we're avoiding. After learning about accommodation, I sometimes pictured my family stuck, as if in a Chinese finger trap, because we're all pulling so hard, exerting so much effort to accommodate our anxiety, that our surroundings have closed in around us tight.

“Parents are often expending tremendous amounts of time and energy to accommodate their children's symptoms,” Lebowitz said. “But the child's anxiety is actually getting more severe rather than less severe.” And so, Lebowitz decided to hone in on accommodations, to see if lessening them in a parent could help a child.

Children ask a lot of questions about why something is this way and not another. But questions from Ian, a seven-year-old who lives in a suburb near New Haven, had turned from gentle curiosity towards something darker. They were riddled with anxiety. He repeated the same ones, worded slightly differently. What's a disease? What's cancer? Am I going to get sick? How do I know I won't get cancer? Sometimes the questions were about other impending crises, like the weather—tornadoes, storms—or black holes.

We're exerting so much effort to accommodate our anxiety that our surroundings have closed in around us tight.

Once, Ian's mom, Aimee, heard Ian crying and she asked him what was wrong. He was fixated on future events, when he couldn't be sure what would happen. In one case, he was worried about how he didn’t yet know how to swim, but was going to go to his grandma’s house for the summer—a visit that was several months away.

“These things weren’t even happening,” Aimee said. “But he was obsessing over it.”

Mornings before school started to be difficult. Ian was nervous to go; at school small things would set him off, leaving him in tears. He started needing someone to sit with him while he fell asleep. Aimee and her husband heard about SPACE, and signed up to be part of Lebowitz's trial.