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I first encountered the concept of societal regression in Edwin Friedman's book, A Failure of Nerve. If you have not read that book, it is well worth reading for your leadership development. It's based on the idea of emotional regression, which is when a system, typically a family, congregation or an organization, loses its ability to cope because anxiety increases and there's greater surrounding togetherness pressure to conform, which makes it more difficult to adapt to challenge, to respond in healthy ways to challenge.

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Now, what Bowen suggested is that this could actually happen to an entire society. That entire society could actually lose its ability to cope. According to Friedman in A Failure of Nerve, this would happen when several things occurred at the same time. First of all, anxiety would increase because people would be overwhelmed with the quantity and the speed of change. Additional factors include the fact that there are no longer scapegoats or symptoms that society can focus on together that absorbs the anxiety in the system.

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I listened to a lecture by Ted Beal, who is retired from the Bowen Center at Georgetown University, and he was talking about the development of our country in terms of family systems theory. He noted that we've always had a scapegoat or something to triangle, something to focus on. So typically it would be an internal scapegoat. And from the very beginning of our country, this was people of color, slaves of African descent and indigenous peoples.

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By scapegoating people of color, it gave the white majority in our country a way to focus their anxiety on this third party that helped to absorb the anxiety in the system and the anxiety that came from change. More recently, as Beal notes, it was the Cold War. It was communism in the 20th century. And he maintains that we lost a huge opportunity in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell because we no longer had communism as a common enemy and we had a chance to actually remake our society.

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But instead, it appears that without this common enemy, we started to get overwhelmed by the rapid change in our society. When we talk about regression, whether it's emotional regression in a family system, family of origin or in a congregational system, or we're talking about societal regression, an entire country, the question is how well is the system able to handle the tension between individuality and togetherness, as well as how well the system can respond to crisis? Finally, a system that is not in regression is able to produce well differentiated leaders, is able to produce leaders who are able to say what they believe while giving others the freedom to disagree.

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What both Bowen and Friedman would likely agree upon is that the fact that our societal system produced a not well differentiated leader like Donald Trump is a symptom of societal regression. Now, this is not about Donald Trump's politics. This is not about the Republican Party. This is about the kind of leader he is. And I've done several podcasts on the fact that he is a narcissistic leader, that he really cares only about himself and everybody else has to agree with him.

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I wrote a blog this weekend about the fact that he creates surrounding togetherness pressure for those that serve with him. And if they don't agree, then they are considered disloyal. What family systems theory would say is the reason that our country elected a leader like Donald Trump is that we are in a societal regression, that the anxiety has become so intense that this is one way that we are coping with it and we're not coping with it very well.

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The term regression is used because it indicates that we are going backward or even downward in an evolutionary sense in terms of the development of who we are as a species.

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Some of the principles that Friedman mentions in a failure of nerve are the ability to self regulate so that we can manage our own reactivity, the ability to adapt to strength rather than weakness, the ability to respond to challenge in a way that produces growth, and the maturity to allow for time for things to develop, not just wanting things to happen so quickly. Finally, Friedman maintains that the evolution of our species depends on the ability to maintain the integrity of the individual, that part of who we are as a people.

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We need to be a collective people. We need to be able to work together. That's how our species survives. But within that, we need to have the ability to be individuals. And that's where that tension between individuality and togetherness comes. But we know that self-differentiation is all about being able to be an individual while remaining connected to others in the system. So when the lack of that occurs, that would be considered regression. When it happens in a family of origin, a congregation, an organization or even in a country.

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Friedman talks about five characteristics of a chronically anxious system. I wrote a chapter in my book, Anxious Church Anxious People How to Lead Change in an Age of Anxiety, on these five characteristics. And I apply them to the church. But what I want to do this time is I want to apply them to our society and help us to understand what is happening in terms of the regression of our society.

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The first characteristic of an anxious society, and therefore a society that may be in regression, is reactivity. We can understand this in the societal sense as a cycle of intense reactions to one another and to events in the society.

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I think about this past Wednesday when Congress was receiving and counting the electoral vote and there were protests that ended up up on the Capitol steps and ultimately in the Capitol and how intense the reactions of people were. Now, it was a big deal. It's not something that most of us would have expected to see.

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I don't go on Facebook very much anymore, but just for fun, I decided to go on to Facebook and just scroll through and see how intense the reactions were. You can imagine how intense they were on both sides of the divide. A lot of blaming going on, a lot of reactivity. And that is a sign of an anxious society.

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Think about the reactivity that's occurred in COVID and the whole debate over the wearing of masks, whether kids should be in school and whether people should be free to run their businesses as they see fit. I'm not trying to take sides here. I want us to understand that when society gets overwhelmed by certain things, the intensity of the reaction is a sign that our anxiety is up and we're not handling it very well.

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The second characteristic of an anxious system and a society in regression is herding. This is where surrounding togetherness pressure wins out over the forces for individuality and everybody has to adapt to the most reactive, the least mature, among us.

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There is a sense in our society today that you must take sides and you are either with us or you are against us. This is a classic sign of herding. It seems that there is no such thing anymore as accepting people with whom you disagree, respecting people who hold different opinions. Right now it is hard to be in the middle because so many people want you to take a side. If you are looking for self-differentiated leadership, look at people who are willing to actually disagree with their own people in a way that holds the integrity of their beliefs more than giving in to the herding, to the surrounding togetherness pressure in the system and in our society.

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The third characteristic of an anxious system and a society in regression is blame displacement. This is not taking responsibility for yourself. It is triangling something else as a way to avoid responding to challenge in a healthy way. As I think about COVID, I think about how liberals want to blame Donald Trump for all the woes and Donald Trump wants to blame China. And how Tony Fauci is one of the few people who seems to be acting in self-differentiated ways. He has talked more about what we can do to take responsibility for ourselves and improve the situation.

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The fourth characteristic of an anxious system and a society in regression is a quick-fix mentality. This is having a low threshold for pain and constantly seeking a way out, a quick way out. The focus on a vaccine would be considered a quick fix mentality where as building up our infrastructure to respond to the virus, increasing testing and contact tracing, doing the social distancing and wearing masks, those are all things that will take more time but will actually give us something we can do until there is a vaccine.

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Thankfully, science has performed near miracles and the vaccine is available now, but it appears it's going to be some time. So we need to figure out what we can do to take responsibility for ourselves.

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If you think in the longer term, one of the things that we should be thinking about is how we build our capacity to respond to these types of situation in the future. That is the long term mentality. That's the mature mentality that we often apply to our own lives. When we're talking about taking care of our finances or taking care of our health. Sometimes, though, it seems as if as a country, we are looking for that quick fix and we're not willing to go through what needs to happen to get to where we need to be.

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Finally, the fifth characteristic of an anxious system and societal regression is the lack of well-differentiated leadership. It seems to me that at least on the national stage, well-differentiated leaders are the exception rather than the norm. People seem to conform to the surrounding togetherness pressure of their own political beliefs, of their own cultural beliefs. And in some ways, this is both a symptom and a cause of regression. Without well-differentiated leadership in a family, a congregation, an organization or a country, then this process of regression will continue and as it continues, it will produce fewer and fewer well-differentiated leaders.

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I wrote a blog post on Mitt Romney when he voted to convict President Trump in the Senate impeachment trial. It wasn't to praise him for his position, but to praise him for his ability to take a non-anxious stand of integrity in the midst of intense surrounding togetherness pressure. That, to me, is what self-differentiated leadership looks like.

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In some ways. I think Joe Biden was doing that in the Democratic primaries when there was pressure to move to the left. And yet he maintained that his best chance and the best chance for the party was to stay more to the center. It appears that he was right about that.

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It's not the content. It's the process that's going on. It's leaders who are willing to take healthy stands while staying connected to others in the system, especially those who are resistant or those who are on the other side. So the question is, if we are in regression, what can we do about it?

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I believe that if we are to reverse the regression that I see going on in our society, in our culture, then what we need to do is we need to learn how to lead through self-differentiation. It starts with each one of us being willing to take responsibility for ourselves, being willing to stay connected with those who think and believe differently than we do, being willing to act out on our principles, but at the same time not force others to agree with us.

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These are basic family systems principles, but they are so important nowadays. If we are able to create a movement of people who are willing to lead in this way, we can help break the cycle of anxiety, reactivity, blame, surrounding togetherness pressure, all these things work together to keep us locked in a battle between one side and the other. Somehow we need to find our way through. I believe each one of us can do that in our own way, in our own context, starting in our families, starting in the systems that we serve, whether it's a congregation or an organization, and being willing to share with other people why this matters.

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It won't happen quickly. We don't have the quick fix mentality. We are in this for the long haul. It will happen one relationship at a time, one system at a time. But this is what non-anxious leaders do. So go and be yourself.