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Welcome to Episode 229 of the Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. Today's episode comes from an article I ran across by Kathleen Smith from the Bones Center for the Study of the Family. It's called The Cycle of Overfunctioning and Distancing. And if you follow this podcast, you know that I have found Kathleen Smith to be a go to writer on Family systems theory. She's very insightful. She writes in very plain language. And it's not that I want to copy her, but I love taking her stuff and unpacking it for you. I will put a link to her article. It's on Substack in the show notes. Edwin Friedmann noted that there is a sweet spot to emotional space. If we get too close, there can be reactivity. Either the other can get defensive or argumentative or actually adapt, just give in without differentiating. The first of those would be considered close but conflicted. In other words, people can be very close, but then they can also be arguing because perhaps one is trying to tell the other what to do. One is over functioning in the other's emotional space. The second example would be considered fusion, where one person basically is calling the shots and the other is just giving in.

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And so the two are fused. There's really no emotional differentiation between them. And while this may seem like a workable arrangement, it typically is for a long time. But then the one who is under functioning, the one who's adapting will at some point get resentful and things will blow up. In either situation, there is too little emotional space and it is not healthy for differentiation. It's not healthy for the relationship system. On the other hand, when there is too much emotional space, reactivity can occur as well. And typically we find this in the form of pursuit or criticism. Pursuit is simply when one who is feeling the emotional distance and wants to close the emotional space is contacting the other. Hey, how can we get together? Hey, what are you doing? And the one who is distancing finds this annoying and wants to distance even more. And then criticism is actually a push for togetherness. When somebody is feeling too distant emotionally and they don't know how to close that gap in a healthy way, they can start criticizing the other. So the sweet spot in emotional space is being able to remain connected, being able to stay connected to the other without closing the emotional space by over functioning, by taking responsibility for the other.

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And this really requires us to be able to manage our own anxiety about the other person's functioning. It means that we need to be able to manage our own anxieties so we can let the other take responsibility for self. In Smith's article, she talks about her own pattern where she'll get excited about something and throw all of her energy into it, and she starts over functioning for others and wonders why they aren't getting excited. Now, she doesn't say that one of the primary reasons is because of her over functioning. Nobody likes to be to be told what to do. Nobody likes to be told what to get excited about. And so what her over functioning is actually doing is vaporizing healthy emotional space by taking responsibility for the other. Smith does note that over functioning by one will promote under functioning by the other and vice versa. What she means by this is that if I am over functioning for you, you're going to resent it and you're going to actually continue to under function. You're not going to respond by stepping up unless you're being very adaptive. And likewise, if you are under functioning and I'm getting anxious about it, I am likely to start to over function because I cannot manage my own anxiety and let you be responsible for your own life.

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Anyway, Smith notes that when the other starts under functioning, she gets frustrated and pulls back or checks out completely. She distances emotionally because she's frustrated with the other for whom she's been over functioning and who now under functions and she finds it easier to disconnect. The big idea here is that over functioning and distancing are two sides of the same coin. Each is a way that we deal with our own discomfort, our own anxiety. Either we over function because we are unable to let the other take responsibility for self because it makes us anxious to watch them do what they do, or we distance ourselves because we are unable to watch what we perceive as a train wreck of their life. The challenge is to figure out how we can take responsibility for self and nobody else. Smith uses the term staying responsibly connected instead of being irresponsible over involved. Murray Bowden used the latter term, being irresponsibly over involved, which is another way to describe over functioning because it's irresponsible to over function for another because it eliminates healthy emotional space and doesn't allow the other to take responsibility for self. We might also say that being responsibly connected avoids being irresponsibly disconnected.

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It avoids distancing too much, which I noted, can also result in reactivity. So the question is, if we are feeling anxious about another person's functioning, how can we stay responsibly connected? In her sub stack article, Smith gives many examples of what it looks like to stay responsibly connected, and I want to go through them and unpack them for you. So the first is staying connected even when you're frustrated with people. So frustration is your own feeling and taking responsibility for that without trying to change the other is a real challenge. I find in cases like this, I need to regulate my own temptation to tell the other what to do and to just show them that I care. In the cases where I get really frustrated, then it is important to differentiate. It's important to say, I'm frustrated about this, but I know that you are going to take care of it, or I know that this is your responsibility and I can't do anything about it. I find in general, though, if I can manage my own anxiety and avoid telling the other person I'm frustrated, it gives them enough emotional space so that they can take responsibility for self.

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Not always. The more irresponsible somebody is, the more under functioning they are, the harder this is. But over time, I believe that you can actually give them the space, give them responsibility for themselves, let them experience the pain and consequences of their choices, and perhaps they will ultimately take responsibility for self. No matter what, we have to understand that we can't make them do it. The second example of remaining responsibly connected is not taking on tasks just because no one else is doing them. And this is very, very difficult because what we want to do is we want to jump in and take over. But this is often, by definition, over functioning. This often happens to the pastor or a leader in a church because they feel like something needs to get done and it's not happening. And rather than just letting it go undone and letting the entire system experience the consequences of things not happening, they feel the need to jump in. But as they do that, what they're doing is promoting the under functioning of everyone else. You've probably heard me give the example of when a woman in a church I served decided she could no longer do the newsletter, and we didn't have a newsletter for several months, and people started coming to me and saying, boy, I sure missed the newsletter.

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The question would be, Would I jump in and do it? Or would I jump in and do it, or would I distance and say, I have nothing to do with it. And what I was able to do is stake responsibility connected by saying, I missed the newsletter, too. So I was showing that I cared, but I was also showing that I was not going to jump in and do it. And after six months of not having a newsletter, two women actually jumped in and decided to do it together. One was actually responsible for gathering the content, and the other took responsibility for the newsletter layout. Another way we can stay responsibly connected is to pay attention to the patterns in the relationship system instead of focusing on people's personalities or their individual functioning. Another way to state this is instead of saying, Why is so and so not doing this?, or Why is so and so doing it this way? To look at the system and say, What in the system is promoting this type of functioning? I have a coaching client who has said that they are serving in what has always been a pastor centric church.

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So over the years, the pastor has been the center of all the decisions and all of driving everything that happens. And so people start to depend on the pastor instead of taking responsibility for where God is leading them to do things in the church. Rather than blaming individuals in the system, it's healthier for the pastor to say, How can I help create emotional space where people start to think about how they might take responsibility for self and for leadership? This will typically involve allowing them to experience the pain of when nobody takes leadership. Another example of staying responsibly connected is managing your own reactivity in a responsible way. Another way of saying this is being able to regulate, to self regulate, and to be aware of what's going on inside of you. What is making me feel anxious here? How can I stay connected to the other without over functioning? How can I show them that I care while giving them healthy emotional space? This leads to the next example of remaining responsibly connected, which is working on one on one relationships with people. The goal here is to try to create and maintain healthy emotional space in a way that enables the other to take responsibility for self, and if there is reactivity, to avoid a conflict of wills.

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I find the best way to do this is to have conversations with the other in areas that are unrelated to your own anxiety. If they have a passion or a hobby, ask them about that. Be curious. Want to get to know them. Ask them about the things that matter to them, like their family or their job or whatever else might be going on in their lives. Be curious. Ask open ended questions and avoid telling them what to do. At some point, the area of anxiety may come up for you and that's when being curious, asking those questions is actually the most important thing you can do. I had a conversation recently with somebody who has the exact opposite position of me on the issue that is splitting my denomination. I'm not going to tell you what that is. You probably know what it is, but it doesn't really matter because it's process, not content. Anyway, I stayed in curious mode. I kept asking him questions. He shared where he stood, but he didn't try to tell me what I should believe. This was a way that we could stay responsibly connected. Another way we can stay responsibly connected is to think about how we want to take responsibility for self and for the group.

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In other words, what is our own level of responsibility for the functioning of the group and what are we willing to do about it? This is where the idea of reflection and preparation are really important because when we reflect on how we want to take responsibility for self and what we think our responsibility to the group is, then we can prepare ourselves to differentiate. We can prepare ourselves to thoughtfully and non anxiously say what we believe we need to say. Going back to the newsletter example I gave earlier, I didn't do this, but perhaps if I were thinking about, okay, what do I want to do in terms of taking responsibility for self? Well, I don't want to do the newsletter, and so I'm not going to give in and say I'm going to do it. What is my responsibility to the group? I can say something like, Well, I think we all miss the newsletter, but until we can find somebody who's willing to do it, I think we're going to have to be willing to live without it. I believe one responsibility a leader always has to the group is to share what they believe their sense of the situation is without telling others what to do or what to think.

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People want to know what the leader thinks. They want to know what the leader believes or where they think we should be going, but they need to have that healthy emotional space. They need to be able to also be able to think for themselves and decide for themselves. That is, I think, what it means as a leader to be responsibility connected, which leads to Smith's last suggestion on how to remain responsibility connected, and that is to treat others as people who have their own thinking about how to contribute. This is what I mean when I say you can say what you believe as a leader, but give people that healthy emotional space to decide where they think they fit in, where they think they can contribute, or even whether they agree or disagree. To me, the most important concept here for non anxious leaders is the idea of creating healthy emotional space. As a leader, it's not your job to tell people what to do and what to think. That's over functioning, and if you do, you will get resistance. Instead, your job is to tell people what you believe, where you think God is leading, and then to stay connected in a healthy way, giving them the space that they can make a decision for themselves.

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If you say, This is where I think we should be going, and if you don't agree with me, forget you, then that's distancing, that's cutting off, and that's not remaining emotionally connected. This is a hard thing to do. It is more art than science, and we are likely to get it wrong as often as we get it right. But if we are aware of what it means to have healthy emotional space, we have a better chance of leading effectively into an uncertain future. That's it for Episode 229. You can connect with me at thenonanxiousleader.com. If you have found this episode helpful, please share it with one other person that you think it will help. I would greatly appreciate it. Until next time, thanks and goodbye.