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Welcome to episode 253 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama, and we are going to get right into today's episode. But before we do, I do want to mention that if you are trying to contact me, you can reach me at jack@christian-leaders.com, and you can find more resources at

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thenon-anxiousleader.com, where you can also sign up for my two-for-T Tuesday email newsletter that will put leadership resources in your inbox every Tuesday morning. One principle of family systems theory is that we cannot make another person responsible. In fact, the more we try to make another person responsible, the less responsible they will get. I recall sitting in the stands at a Little League game and overhearing a mother complain that she was still writing her son's school papers. He was a sophomore in college. I doubt that writing his papers was making him more responsible.

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Whether it's a family member, a congregant, or a team member, the more we over function, the less likely they will be to increase their own functioning. And while cajoling and over functioning create dependency, guilting and scolding work no better. The latter shifts the focus from the others functioning to our own reactivity. That is, when we yell at someone, it will shift their focus to resenting you for the pain you are inflicting on them and shifted away from their lack of responsibility. In Generation to Generation, Family Process in Church and Synagogue, Edwin Friedmann writes, There is, however, a way to be our brother's keeper, to manifest responsibility for a fellow human being without getting stuck in a triangle between that person and his or her failure to be responsible. It is called challenge, but it requires one to non-anxiously tolerate pain and sometimes even to stimulate pain, thus forcing the other to increase his or her threshold. I recall watching a video of a Freeman lecture where he said he has a bias towards challenge over comfort. This means not over functioning, and this is different than scolding and berating. It is setting healthy boundaries, knowing where you end and the other begins, while at the same time staying emotionally connected to the other.

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This is the most difficult thing because we either want to disconnect and say we're done with the other, or we can't help getting in their business because we can't bear to see them fail and experience pain. How does this work? I find the following case study from generation to generation helpful in illustrating challenge over comfort. However, I'll note before I start that while generation to generation case studies are drawn from Freeman's counseling practice, they are modified for teaching purposes. They're not literal accounts of specific events or individuals, but represent situations encountered in his practice and the relevant family systems principles. This case study is called a stimulus for motivation and can be found on page 49 of Generation to Generation. A woman found her husband coming home from work ever more tipsy. Her anxiety increased. She tried everything she could do to keep him sober, from constant warnings in the morning to harangues in the evening. As in all such emotional triangles, her own stress increased and her husband seemed to feel more freedom to drink. I'm going to stop here to unpack this first part because I think it's important. The triangle here is the woman, her husband, and his drinking.

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This is a responsibility triangle. Presumably, he is experiencing some discomfort in their relationship and he turns to drinking as a way to stabilize it. This shifts the focus away from trying to figure out how to function in healthy ways between him and his wife to a conflict of wills over his drinking. The husband's drinking increases the wife's anxiety, who is likely warning him in the morning, don't stop at the bar on the way home, or don't drink too much if you're going to stop at the bar. She's also likely to get reactive in the evening when he comes home tipsy or drunk. This shifts the husband's focus to resenting that his wife is trying to tell him what to do, which makes him feel justified in his drinking. Or, as Friedmann puts it, he seemed to feel more freedom to drink. After all, in his own mind, he's probably thinking, With a nagging wife like this, I definitely need a drink. I should also note that the husband's need to drink may have started as another triangle. That is, he could have been uncomfortable with his work, a boss, a parent, or his disappointment with his career progress, among other things.

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Remember, it's process, not content. And he turned to drinking to avoid his own discomfort. This would have created two interlocking triangles with him and the center. The original triangle of the person or issue that he couldn't deal with himself and his drinking interlocked with a triangle that included his wife, himself, and his drinking. Now back to the case study. Worried that she might be left a widow with two children, she was encouraged to get out of the triangle between her husband and his symptom to shift the pain by telling him when he was not drunk in as calm a manner as possible, Honey, I've been thinking things over. I have decided that you have a right to drink all you want to enjoy life to the hilt and to risk it. After all, it's your life. I would like to stop nagging you, but I've got a problem. It's fairly clear to me that you probably won't make it for too much longer, and I don't want to be stuck with a mortgage and the car payment. So I'll make an agreement with you. If you will agree to triple your life insurance, I will agree never to mention your drinking again.

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Friedmann closes his case study by writing, sticking someone with the pain of responsibility for his or her own destiny is far more sobering than giving the person black coffee afterwards. There are three things I want to note in this case study. The first is that the wife is defining herself in a non-anxious way. Instead of allowing her own anxiety about being a widow to fuel her reactivity, she is coached to calmly express it to her husband in terms of getting stuck with a mortgage and car payment. Second, she leans into paradox. Instead of doing what we would normally do, which is to try to change the other or just give in, she actively says she'll agree to never mention his drinking again. This is paradoxical. It's the opposite of what we think we should do because it seemingly lets him off scotfree. However, the third thing is there is a string attached. There is a boundary that she is setting. She is saying she'll agree to let him drink as much as he wants as long as he triples his life insurance. This is giving him back responsibility for his own issue and getting out of the triangle.

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You're probably asking, what does the wife do if the husband doesn't agree? If that's the case, then she needs to be willing to take a stand. In this case, it might be saying she's going to leave unless he gets it together. As I mentioned in her original paradoxical stand, she was defining herself. And that's what one continues to have to do when taking a non-anxious stand. She might say, I've been wrong to try to change you. I can't do that. It's your responsibility. However, I can't take this anymore. Therefore, I'm unwilling to accept your behavior. If things don't improve dramatically in a month, then I will begin the separation process. Of course, she'll need to prepare for the inevitable sabotage. He may try to get it together, but there is a likelihood that at some point, he'll have a real bender. At the moment of truth, after one month, she needs to be able to move forward with the separation process rather than have a failure of nerve, and she needs to be able to do it in a non-anxious way, that is, being a non-anxious presence, staying emotionally connected. I love you, honey. This makes me sad, but this is what I have to do.

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The point is that pain and responsibility are inextricably linked. The husband does not have to feel the pain of his own drinking. His wife is feeling it. There is a triangle there. And until she gets out of that triangle and sticks him with the pain of it, which may include not being with his wife and kids, then he will not likely take responsibility. Or perhaps he will triple his life insurance and then decide that he can continue to drink. Who knows? But either way, that's not something that the wife can control in this situation. She can only control her own response. And to the extent that she allows him to continue without experiencing any pain, then he's not likely to take responsibility. Perhaps my own example of dealing with a responsibility triangle will help you to understand the relationship between pain and responsibility. My wife and I raised four children, and two of them are heavy sleepers. When they reached their teen years, this became difficult because I would have to wake them up repeatedly if they had any chance of making the bus and being on time for school. I would go in in plenty of time and wake them up and they would acknowledge me.

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But then I would come back 10 minutes later and they were fast asleep. This would continue repeatedly until the moment came when either they got up and made the bus or they kept sleeping and missed the bus. Along the way, I would get reactive. I would be yelling and screaming at them to get up, which I'm sure made them feel even less motivated to get up. And then if they missed the bus, I would be seething as I drove them to school so they wouldn't be late. My reactivity did not help the situation. You'll notice the responsibility triangle. It was me, my child, and them having enough responsibility to get up and make the bus on time. You'll also note that I got reactive, that I would yell and scream, and I would over-function. If they missed the bus, I would take them to school. It's a pretty bad combination of reactivity and over-functioning. It might not surprise you that I'm a heavy sleeper. When I was in high school, my dad used to have to wake me up repeatedly to get me to school on time. One thing I've noticed is that the things about my children that annoy me most are the ones that remind me most of myself.

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The sad thing about my example is that this happened twice with two of my children. I did it once, I worked through it, and then the second time it took a while before I realized this was happening again and I needed to change my functioning. I was not allowing them to experience the consequence, that is the pain of their decision. That is, to miss the bus would mean that they would be late for school, but because I would take them to school, they were not experiencing that pain. I needed to reconnect pain and responsibility and get out of the responsibility triangle. What I realized was it was my own threshold for pain that was not high enough because I didn't want them to be late for school. I did not want them to affect their chances of doing well in school. And so even though they were being responsible, I was over functioning and taking them to school. How did I get out of the triangle? I took a non-anxious stand. I said, I'm going to wake you up in time to make the bus. I'll even wake you up again if you'd like me to.

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But at a certain point, if you missed the bus, I'm not going to take you to school on time. I will take you to school when I go to the office at 9:00, which means you're going to miss first period. Yeah, yeah, dad, sure. Right, no problem. I'll make the bus. And I don't remember all the exact details, but I do remember that there were times that they still missed the bus. And that's when the sabotage came. Because if I said, I'm not taking you to school until 09:00 AM. There would be the yelling and screaming. What dad are you? How could you do that? I'm going to miss first period. Do you want me to get bad grades? I'm sure I gave in at least once, maybe more than once. But eventually I was able to take a stand. The interesting thing is that those kids knew exactly what buttons to push in me, and it wasn't like they thought about it. It just came naturally. I think that's part of what it means to be in a family. I did ultimately learn to stand my ground and to be a non-anxious presence and just take the kids to school late.

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They weren't happy about it, and I had to work to not respond reactively or to over function. But in the end, they ultimately learned to start getting up in time to make the bus. This is how the responsibility triangle works, and it works the same for families, congregations, or organizations. When your own anxiety about someone else's functioning lowers your threshold to the pain of watching them fail, it's possible, even likely that you will get sucked into a responsibility triangle. The challenge for the non-anxious leader is to first recognize the triangle, then be intentional about how to get out. It's not easy work. At first, it takes self-awareness about what's going on inside of you. Then it takes preparation. So you can be intentional in those anxious moments so that, in the moment of truth, you can be a non-anxious presence and not have a failure of nerve. That's it for episode 253. If you have found this episode helpful, please share it with somebody else and go on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. Until next time, thanks and goodbye.