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Welcome to Episode 102 of The Non-Anxious Leader podcast. I'm Jack Shitama, and before we get into today's episode, I want to share with you about the family systems theory study that starts on Tuesday, January 12th. It is a 12 week study. It's absolutely free. You get a free copy of the book and it takes place in the Non-Anxious Leader Network, which is also free to join. You can get the details at network.thenonanxiousleader.com. I will also post a link in the show notes. And if you are not a member of the network, just request to join. Then once you are in, go to the Courses link on the left hand side bar and you can ask to join the family systems book study. Now, without further ado, we are going to get into the topic of emotional intensity.

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My son had a teammate in youth sports who was almost always the best athlete on the team, but his dad was intensely involved. Sometimes he was the coach, which made it even worse. You would say he was one of those parents who lived vicariously through his child's achievement.

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Sadly, this kid never played any varsity sports in high school. His grades always kept him off the team. You might say that he was not smart enough or motivated enough, but family systems theory would suggest that his schoolwork became the third leg in a triangle between him and his dad. It was a way of rebelling against his dad's emotional intensity towards his own sports performance.

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By failing, he rebelled and the focus became his grades instead of sports. Of course, the grades were about the sports, but by getting poor enough grades, he could keep his dad at bay. I've lost track of this young man, so I don't know how it all worked out. But hopefully for him he was able to sort things out.

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According to family systems theory, a child will have the least ability to influence the emotional process in a family when they are the ones through whom the symptoms of the system occur. This makes it even more difficult because family members will tend to focus on the problem with the child, which enables them to avoid their own responsibility in the situation. This is what happened with this young man.

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A self-differentiated person would say, "Dad, I know you care about my sports, but I feel that you are too involved. I'd appreciate it if you would give me some space to be my own person here. I like when you cheer for me, but I feel that if I have a bad game, I'm disappointing you."

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Now, what kid is able to say this to his or her parents? In fact, how often are any of us able to speak in these terms? The symptom that arose in this case was the son's grades. By focusing on this, the dad was able to put all the blame on the son without realizing that it was his own emotional intensity that contributed to the situation.

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Remember, this is about emotional process, not content, the content for an intense focus on a child can be anything. In this case, it was sports. But it could be academics, music, dance or any form of achievement. It could also be about trying to mold the child in the parent's image rather than letting the child become herself or himself. When parents focus too intensely on a child, it is likely to create heightened anxiety in the system. Then, when any challenge occurs, the anxiety increases and the ability of the parents to manage the challenge decreases. Nobody gets the problem they can handle.

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A challenge becomes a problem when the anxiety in the system is so great that people in the system have difficulty handling it. Friedman put it this way on page 101 of Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue, "Focus on a child's symptom, therefore, is not only part and parcel of the family's "disease'" it is that symptoms, natural manure."

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In other words, the intense child focus is not only the issue in the system, it will increase when symptoms occur, such as poor performance, rebellion, substance abuse, various forms of self-harm, etc., because the anxiety will heighten, causing the symptom to get worse, not better.

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The key to lasting change in situations like this is to defocus the parental concern on the child, which actually is the cause of the problem to begin with. The way out is for the parents to self-differentiate from the child and from each other, if a couple, and/or from their own parents, therefore decreasing the intensity of the relationship with their child. This creates emotional space that enables a child to function more as a self while also de-focusing on the child's symptom.

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The idea here is that the child-focused emotional intensity is a triangle for other uncomfortable relationships, whether that's the parents between themselves or one or both of the parents and a parent of their own. Going back to the story, I share it, it's possible that the father had unresolved issues with his own father and rather than self-differentiated with that father, he focused on his son's sports. Remember, process, not content.

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The intensity wouldn't have to be about sports. It could be about being responsible for the family or getting a job or fill in the blank when he had emotional intensity from his own father. But he then turned that around and focused on sports with his son. I'm not saying that this is what happened, but this should give you an idea of how child-focused families triangle the child because of unresolved issues somewhere else.

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When there is emotional intensity of this type in a child-focused family, it is almost always on a particular child. In fact, this young man had an older brother, but there was never a problem with that child. For some reason, a parent or parents can allow their own emotional intensity to focus on a particular child, and that then creates this heightened anxiety in the system.

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To understand how this works and how to work through it, it's helpful to look at a case study from Generation to Generation. This case study is on pages 107 and 108, and it is called "Clearing the bases." This is based on the idea that Friedman posits that taking care of the symptom when it shows up in a situation like this, in a child-focused family, in an emotionally intense relationship, is only 25 percent of the problem. He calls that a single, a one base hit and that the parent changing his or her relationship with their own parent is the home run. So this is the example, "Clearing the bases."

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"The Meyers came in concerned about a child who was preanorexic. She had lost 10 pounds in a month. Within several weeks, however, mother's anxiety had been considerably reduced and she was able to see her daughter as petulant rather than sick. Then, through paradoxical techniques, she was able to stay loose about her anxiety, able, for example, to serve her daughter absurdly small portions and warning her about calories when she was hungry. The child began to eat regularly again. We now have the family on first base."

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Let me stop and interject here that the process that was going on here was the focusing of the mother. So the mother became less intense with the child, less worried about the child, and actually used paradox to create emotional space with her daughter. She started actually pushing her daughter in the direction that she didn't want her to go. "Go ahead, eat less if you'd like. I'll serve you smaller meals." Back to the case study.

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"The wife then began to focus on her marriage and many hidden conflicts came to the surface. In the course of counseling, father was seen alone and encouraged to work on a relationship with his widowed mother, whom he treated in a distant but protective manner. He succeeded in changing that relationship. The family was now on second base"

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Now stopping here again, what we find happening is that there was a triangle between father, mother and the daughter and it was actually the father's response to the mother that enabled her emotional intensity with her child. So as he reworked his relationship with his own mother, he was able to stop being involved in that triangle. That meant that the mother had to deal with her own relationship with her child. Back to the case study.

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"Without her husband's efforts to dampen her anxiety, this time, she was forced to take responsibility for her own anxiety and as a result blamed him less for her discontent. The family was now on third."

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So here we see this cascade of self-differentiation. Father takes responsibility for himself and reworks his own relationship with his mother. Then mother takes responsibility for herself and stops blaming father. Back to the case study.

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"At this point, the wife became motivated to understand her own chronic anxiety and, in working on her relationship with her mother, was able to differentiate her own basically happy view of life from her mother's constant pessimism. Home run. There is little likelihood now that her daughter will become anorexic, even though she may refuse to eat from time to time. The focus that equates mere disappearance of a symptom in a child with a fundamental change in the system leaves a lot of families on base."

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Translating what Friedman says there is that so many times when we are dealing with this kind of emotional intensity and there is a symptom that occurs, a challenge that occurs, we think that the disappearance of the symptoms takes care of things. But as this case study shows, it is the reworking of our own relationships, and our own response to challenge and anxiety, that enables permanent, positive change to occur.

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So how does this apply to the non-anxious leader? Let's get to that now. Understanding emotional intensity in child-focused families can help us be a better parent if we have kids. It can also help us to rework our own relationship with our parents if there had been emotional intensity there. But as far as a non-anxious leader goes, this is relevant because the same emotional process that takes place in a child-focused family, that emotional intensity that occurs and results in problematic children is relevant for leadership in congregational families and other organizations.

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When there is a problem child in the system, whether a family , a congregation or an organization, it is a sign of emotional process in the system, and the leader can help to model a healthy response, even if the leadership anxiety contributed to the symptom to begin with. So here are two main takeaways.

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The first is that when you are a leader in a system, you can consider yourself as a parent for the people you lead. The application here is that to the extent that there is too much emotional intensity on a particular person in the system, or even a particular part of the system, such as a program area, there is potential for symptomatic behavior.

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The role of the leader in this case is to learn how to be a non-anxious presence and how to take healthy non-anxious emotional stands while staying focused on the mission of the organization. If you're too concerned about a particular person or program in the system that will lead to emotional intensity that can increase anxiety. This will likely result in symptomatic behavior that can turn a challenge into a problem.

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The second takeaway is learning to recognize emotional intensity as an emotional process clue. To the extent that somebody else is intensely focused on something in the system, this is a clue that they are triangling an unresolved issue from somewhere in their own family of origin or somewhere else in the system. In other words, they are uncomfortable with something, an unresolved issue, and they are triangling something else in the system. That could be a program in the congregation. It could be a person in the congregation. It could be a person in the organization.

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But when they are too emotionally intense, they are triangling some unresolved issue in their own family of origin, in their own system. Think about the person who invests all her or his emotional energy into the life of a church. This can seem like a great thing because they do so much, but it's also a sign that they are displacing unresolved issues into the congregational system. This can get even worse when they focus on you as a leader in an unhealthy way.

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They can do this by putting unreasonable demands on your performance or they can go in the opposite direction and adore you as a leader. And either way, they are not defining themselves. They're not self-differentiating, but they are defining themselves in relation to you, either as your critic or as your adoring follower. It's important to be careful in the latter case because those who put you on a pedestal are the ones who most quickly can turn around and kick that pedestal out from under you.

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The key for you as a leader is the ability to take non-anxious emotional stands, to be self-differentiated, to be a non-anxious presence, to be a non-anxious leader.

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Unlike a child or a teenager who doesn't have the emotional maturity to do so, so they react or they adapt to the emotional intensity of their parent, you are more mature. You understand self-differentiation. You understand what it means to lead as a non-anxious presence. This enables you to be prepared for the sabotage that will occur when there is emotional intensity and you are paradoxical.

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When you are a non-anxious presence there will be sabotage. But if you can maintain that non-anxious presence and create emotional space through the sabotage, through the increase in emotional intensity in the system, you will actually enable the other to take responsibility for her or his own issue.

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That is the way through this type of emotional intensity. Self-differentiation is always the key and leading through self-differentiation is even more critical in situations where someone's emotional intensity is focused into the system that you lead.

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That's it for Episode 102, I hope this has been helpful for you with your own parents, or if you have children, your own children, and certainly as a non-anxious leader.