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Welcome to episode 145 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama, and today's episode comes from a presentation I did for week one of the Family Systems book Study. It is an overview of family systems theory and in particular, self-differentiation, surrounding togetherness pressure, self regulation, anxiety, emotional process, triangles, paradox, playfulness conflict of Wills all in about 17 minutes. Whether you have been listening to this podcast for a while or you are new to it, I think this is a great way to kind of put the entire understanding of family systems theory together.

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And I would like to give a shout out and thank you to Doctor Brian Ivory, who is leading the Family Systems book study and was the one who suggested that I might use this as a podcast episode. So thanks, Brian. And now without further Ado, here is Episode 145, Family Systems Theory, A Practical Overview.

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I kind of want to just give a couple of highlights of things that I think are worth sharing for most of you. Family systems theory is not new. I don't want to start at the very beginning, and even if it is new, I think perhaps what I can share with you will be helpful to illustrate some points. So I'm going to go through a couple of concepts, but I'm going to do that using two stories that come from my time in pastoral Ministry. I know Tom has heard these stories because he's been in trainings, and if any of you have taken my courses on the non axious leader, you might have heard these stories, but I think they're worth sharing again.

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But before I do that, let's just start back at self differentiation. I'll still mention self differentiation. Many of you did, and the idea of self differentiation is the ability to express yourself in a healthy way, right? To express what you believe, be true to your values, to be able to share your goals, what you want out of life, do it in a healthy way while remaining emotionally connected. And that emotional connection usually comes in the form of surrounding togetherness pressure . And surrounding togetherness pressure is this pressure to conform to these unseen, kind of unwritten, unspoken values of the system.

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And that could be your family of origin when they say nobody says it. But you've got to be at Thanksgiving dinner. And if you're not at Thanksgiving dinner, somehow you've expressed that you don't love your family. That is a kind of surrounding together pressure or in the Church, if the pastor spouse doesn't come to every service. Well, that's saying something about the Church. I was sharing a presentation. I did last week. That when I was in a two point charge. My wife only went to each Church every other week.

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She wasn't going to hear me speak twice. She would go to one Church one week and one Church the next week, and she got asked about that, and she kind of jokingly would say, Well, I can hardly stand to hear them once, let alone having to hear them twice. That would be an example of playfulness, right? But that's that surrounding togetherness pressure. And we are always experiencing this pressure. I've taken on new leadership roles. I'm in the Peninsula Delaware Conference of the United Methodist Church, which is the Eastern shore of Maryland in the state of Delaware, and have been doing leadership work in there for years.

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But now we've been asked to do leadership development work in Paula's conference in the Baltimore Washington Conference and our two conferences. Our two regions are now together under one Bishop, Bishop Latte Easterling, and I got a call the other morning from our director of Connectional Ministries, asking me what my intentions were to be at the Baltimore Washington conference, Bishop days on the District this week. She's been there are four regions. She's been in each region at 02:00 in the afternoon and 07:00 at night for an hour and a half, and I just had not planned to do that.

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I'm just over my head and I'm just thinking, oh, my gosh, can I do this? Can I do this? And this whole idea of pausing, right? The whole idea of if you can just pause and think about what's really important to you and then express that in a healthy way. It seemed like an hour. But I must have taken, like, 10 seconds. And then I finally said, I'm really swamped. If I could be released from that obligation, it would be great immediately. Consider it done a lot of times the surrounding togetherness pressure is not actually coming from the other person. The DCM, the director of Connectional Ministries, was just asking me what my intentions were. She wasn't trying to pressure me into it, but I'm feeling well. It's a new Bishop, and I want to be a team player and all of that. But in the end, being able to pause and think is really important. Daniel Conneman has written a book. Daniel Conneman is a behavioral psychologist. He got a Nobel Prize in this. And he wrote a book recently a few years ago called Thinking Fast and Slow and Thinking Fast is what he calls system one.

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It is our primitive brain. It's the one that automatically racks. It's the one that comes up with the fight or flight, and it's the one that when we have that anxiety that's surrounding together in this pressure, we almost always say the wrong thing or the thing that's not true to who we are, right. And sometimes we lash back because we're feeling threatened, or sometimes we give in because we can't stand up for ourselves. But he calls that system one. And if we aren't able to somehow pause the term Freeman uses, I like to use his self regulate if we can't regulate that system one, if we can't pause and just think and allow system two, which is our logical brain, our neocortex, our executive brain, all those terms.

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If we don't allow that system two, that thinking brain to take over, we almost never have a chance. We're almost always going to say the thing we don't want to say or just react in a way that really wasn't true to who we are. And Steven Covey uses the term integrity in the moment of choice, and integrity is being true to your values, right? It's being one. Your action is being one with your beliefs, and that moment of choice, I think, is something we actually have the opportunity to expand.

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We can create the pause long enough for us to think and then say what's really important to me here. And how do I express that in a healthy way? So as you go through this study and as you go through the material, I think that understanding of that cause that self regulation is one of the most important things you can do to translate what you're learning and to practice. So anyway, I have a couple of stories related to all this that I like to think tie a lot of these concepts and family systems theory together.

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So I was in my first Christmas Eve at a Church as a pastor and we decided we're going to do something new. This was back in the 90s, and we were going to have readers theater. So we're going to have four young people all dressed in black, sitting at bar stools with music stands, and they were going to read a dramatic reading of the Christmas story instead of the traditional lessons and carols that are typically done. And as I was walking into the Church, a woman came up to me and she said, I've never seen anything like this.

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This is not a Christmas Easter. I can't believe you're doing this. And anxiety just spewing at me. One of the concepts that family systems theory teaches us is it's process, not content, recognize the emotional process that's going on and then try to respond in an appropriate way. So what I realized immediately was okay, the way she is so anxious and so angry, something else is going on because a healthy person, somebody who's not upset, will just come and say, Pastor, I'm not really sure what's happening, but I'm uncomfortable with this, right?

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That's a whole different thing emotional process wise. They're expressing themselves in a healthy way. So I understood that something was going on, and I understood that was likely a triangle, right? When somebody is blaming you all stairs talked about blaming when somebody is blaming you for something, and it's really not you're really not the problem, right? You're just called blame displacement. You're the target of their anger or their frustration or their anxiety. You know that there's a triangle going on. So in understanding those two concepts, and I think partly to the Holy Spirit just being with me, I was able to not get into what we call a conflict of Wills.

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I was able to avoid getting into an argument with her about what the service, whether it was right or not. And I think you know right. As soon as you get defensive about something, you've kind of lost because you know how it is when you try to argue that you're right and somebody else is wrong, you get in that battle where nobody wins. People just get stuck because nobody wants to give in. So I was able to just say something like, I can always count on you to tell me how you think or how you feel, which is true, right?

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Rather than trying to argue with her or distance from her, just trying to affirm her oftentimes, one thing you can say is thanks for sharing. I appreciate your sharing. You're staying emotionally connected, but you're not getting into that conflict of wheels. So after the service, I asked our lay leader if this person was all right, just something was off. And did he know anything? And he said, Well, her daughter, who was in her early 20s, died two years ago Christmas, so that's the emotional process, right?

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She's still grieving. She's still hurting. And the easy target was the Christmas Eve service. Somebody asked me recently wasn't a triangle in the lay leader, but I actually wasn't triangling him because I just was asking for information. I was trying to get a read on what was going on. I wasn't asking him to do anything about it. If I had said, Would you go talk to her and straighten this out? That would be a triangle, right. But I just wanted to know what was going on.

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So what I did then was the next week I called her up and went and visited her. And that's another one of these concepts is when people are unleashing their anxiety on you. What you want to do is you want a distance, right? I don't really want to talk to you anymore because it's not fun. You're making life hard for me. But actually, what we want to do is actually move closer and connect in a healthy way. And so I went and visited and I said, I understand your daughter died two years ago.

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That must be tough. We just spent some time and she shared how she was hurting. I got to know her better since I was a newer pastor there, and we never talked about the Christmas Eve service. It never came up because it wasn't really the issue, right? The issue was the pain that she was going through that I didn't know about. But could be recognized in the way she was presenting herself in that situation. So to me, as a leader, being able to recognize these things help us to avoid kind of the pitfalls that happen, whether it's in our own family of origin or in our leadership setting, because what we find is that if we can remain a non anxious presence through that initial anxiety, through that initial upset, then we have a chance to really help people to take responsibility for themselves, to deal with their own stuff.

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And what is amazing is when you do that as a leader, when you walk alongside somebody without trying to tell them who they should be or what they should do, but just affirming who they are without also getting into that conflict of Wills, they work through their own stuff, and then they see you as an ally. They see you as somebody who's helped them, as opposed to got into a battle with them. I have seen that happen time and time again in my own Ministry context and the churches that I've worked in.

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So that's one particular story and then the other story I want to tell is also a Church story, but it's to illustrate the idea of paradox and playfulness. And this is kind of where the rubber hits the road, where when people are giving us that anxiety, when they're blaming us, when they're displacing their pain, and we don't want to get into a conflict of Wills, we don't want to get defensive, we don't want to give in. We want to be healthy and self differentiated. And the idea of paradox and playfulness is that paradox is we actually push in the other direction.

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Friedman calls it turning the wheels in the direction of this kid. And he shares about when his daughter was in high school and thinking about College. She was wanting to go far away to College, and he didn't want her to go. But he knew that if he tried to convince her not to go, that would actually cause her to want to go even more. The emotional process was something about her wanting to separate from mom and dad, right? What he realized was paradoxically. He should push her in that direction.

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He should say, yeah, go ahead, honey. And what he said about that was the hardest thing to do is to push someone we love in the direction we most fear. And what he meant by that was a lot of this is about our own fear, our own anxiety and not being willing to let somebody have the freedom to choose. But when we give somebody the freedom to choose and actually even say, yeah, go ahead. They actually then can make a healthy choice whether that is to go away or not go away.

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Playfulness, on the other hand, is this idea that just keeping things alight not getting so serious, but allowing the anxiety in the room to kind of reduce because we're a little bit humorous or we're not taking things so seriously. Then that also helps in those anxious moments. So in our tradition, in the United Methodist tradition, we have something called a take in. And when a new pastor is being introduced to a Church, our district Superintendent, who is our supervisory pastor, will meet with the personnel committee of the Church.

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And we'll say, this is the pastor we're assigning to you. Here's their resume here's, all that kind of thing. And then they bring the pastor in. And so I'm waiting to be taken in to meet the personnel committee. And the district Superintendent tells the committee that the new pastor has an earring because I have an earring. I got at 1095. I had been a pastor for five years in my Church, and I thought, Well, I don't know why. I don't think I thought this, but I think subconsciously I thought, Well, they've gone very far in accepting new people.

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I guess I wonder what they'll think of it if their pastor gets an earring and I got my ear pierced and nobody said anything. But anyway, so then I went to this new Church, and the DS tells them the pastor has an earring. And there was a woman who just went ballistic, right? I'm not going to have a pastor with an earring. If we have a pastor with an earring, I'm going to leave and go to another Church. And there's a woman who was sitting next to her who is one of the most nonxious presence I've ever met.

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She's now with God in heaven. And she looked at this woman and she said, Well, we'll miss you. That is paradox. And that is playfulness, right? Because just the way she said it is deadpan. I wasn't there. But when they described it to me, I could hear her say, it just that kind of deadpan. Yeah. Go ahead. But the paradox is yeah, go ahead, that's your choice. It's paradoxical, because when we care about somebody, we want to pull them back in. Right? We want to say no, don't go.

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We want to try to convince them they shouldn't do it. But that gets us into the conflict of Wills. And so being able to give people the freedom of choice actually is empowering not just to them, but to us as well. But it's all about what we're feeling inside and the ability that we have to be able to let people make their own choices, give people the freedom to define themselves because part of self differentiating is being okay with who we are. So okay with who we are, that we can be okay with other people, however they are.

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That is my presentation for the opening of the Family Systems book study that I gave just a couple of weeks ago, and that ending there about being so okay with who we are so that we can be okay with other people as they are to me that's the essence of non anxious leadership. So I hope you found today's episode helpful and I hope it will help you to be a more effective and non anxious leader. That's it for episode 145. If you have found this episode helpful, please share it with someone else that you think might want to grow as a nonanxious leader.

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And don't forget to connect with me atthenonanxiousleader.com and share your feedback, your questions and comments, and especially your success stories or your challenges until next time. Thanks and goodbye.