[00:00:34.100]
Welcome to Episode 288 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama, and I am excited that we are doing something new. That is an interview with Dr. Kathleen Smith. We spent about an hour, and I'm going to break that up into four episodes. Now, before I get into that, if you are new to this podcast, you can contact me at jack@christian-leaders.com. If you ever have questions or ideas for new episodes. If you want to subscribe to my Two for Tuesday email newsletter, you can find the link in the show notes or go to thenonanxiousleader.com. Now, without further ado, here is episode 288, An Interview with Dr. Kathleen Smith, Part One of Four.

[00:01:24.980]
I am here with Dr. Kathleen Smith, who is an author, licensed therapist, and on relationship systems. She's an associate faculty member of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, where she teaches clinicians, clergy, and business leaders in the center's training programs. Kathleen earned her undergraduate degree at Harvard University and graduate degrees at George Washington University. She's written two books. I have both of them. The first is Everything Isn't Terrible, Conquer your Insecurities, Interrupt your Anxiety, and Finally Calm Down. What a great title. Then Most recent one is, True to you, a Therapist's Guide to Stop Pleasing Others and Start Being Yourself. At the time of this recording, it's only been out for a week, correct?

[00:02:10.880]
Yes, it's a brand new baby.

[00:02:13.540]
Yeah. Now, I also want to say Kathleen has a free Substack newsletter. It's called the Anxious Overachiever, which I love, and I think it compliments the non-anxious leader topic very well. She has over 11,000 subscribers, and there's a premium edition that's only $5 a month, and I gladly pay it. I want to encourage you to do the same, and I'll put a link to all these resources in the show notes. Welcome, Kathleen.

[00:02:40.360]
Thank you for having me.

[00:02:42.040]
It's great to have you. I'm going to start from the beginning. How did you get into Bowen theory?

[00:02:49.320]
I was an anxious grad student here in DC at George Washington University in a doctoral program for counseling, and I needed an internship placement. That's that time in your education where you're furiously trying to find a place that's a good fit. I heard about this mysterious place over in Georgetown called the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. I learned a little bit about Bowen theory, just taking a family therapy course, which you have to do. They said, Okay, well, we might let you intern for us, but we need you to work on yourself in your family and do coaching with somebody for a year and do our postgraduate program for a year before we'll let you loose in working with people. I thought that was really interesting because nowhere else had that requirement It was like, Will they take my free labor or not? There wasn't anything expected of me in working on myself. I just started to read about the theory and was just instantly hooked and saw some of the ideas and concepts and patterns at work in my own family and in other places in life. I just was very curious about this way of thinking about human behavior.

[00:04:09.700]
I said they haven't been able to get rid of me since. It was just a theory that worked for me and I never wanted to stop thinking about and learning about. That's how I stumbled into it.

[00:04:24.240]
You actually had to do family of origin work just to get the internship? Yeah.

[00:04:30.950]
It wasn't like they needed me to function a certain way, but they just wanted to see that people were committed to doing that thinking. You have to make a family diagram, sometimes called a genogram, meet with somebody on the faculty there who once a month to think about your relationships and your challenges and what you want to do with yourself. And that was tremendously useful for me. In a way that a lot of the individual theories I had learned about in school just didn't speak to me that way. I found myself going back to my interactions with friends or with family, and there were just ideas that I can immediately pay attention to and apply and I call it playing ball in that way that made working on myself really fun in a lot of ways and helped me not be so hard on myself for doing what humans do. And so it was just tremendously useful.

[00:05:37.020]
What was it like to do your genogram for the first time?

[00:05:41.450]
For a long time, when I took the family therapy class in grad school. I just hadn't been particularly interested in it. I think I said things like, Oh, my family's fine. We're okay. Probably the most significant event was my mom died when I was in college. But other than that, I thought, We're chugging along. We're doing okay. We don't have some of the challenges that other families have. I'm more interested in what's going on with people individually and what their goals are. But then once I saw the patterns begin to light up, it was just infinitely interesting to me. But initially, I hadn't thought there was much to be seen there. It turns out I couldn't have been more wrong.

[00:06:36.900]
Well, we all have something to see, right? Yeah.

[00:06:39.320]
I think that just reflects what's in the culture. We have this very individual focus on who are you What is your best self in that capacity? What is your personality type? What is your leadership style? It's all about the individual. Man, that just really denies our nature as social creatures and how much do we miss out on when we're just focused on that individual piece.

[00:07:08.570]
We don't live in a vacuum, do we?

[00:07:10.680]
Right.

[00:07:14.150]
When you As you started to discover about yourself, one of the things I've learned is that we all have our go-to automatic reactions. What did you learn about yourself? What are your go-to responses?

[00:07:29.630]
I I have a couple. I think first and foremost, I'm an only child, and sibling position is an important concept in Bowen theory. I could see how that plays out in my day-to-day life, not just in my family. I'm very cozy and comfortable doing things on my own, not leading folks in that way. But I also really like being over with what's going on to some extent. I come from many generations of women who were over-involved with their churches and really got a boost in their functioning out of that. I think of my mom, both of my grandmothers, they were tremendously helpful in a lot of ways. But I also think that that help had a lot to do with managing their own anxiety. And so that's a very comfortable spot for me in is to take over and say, Oh, I'll do this I'll do all of this for you. If I'm leading a meeting, let's say, at my own church, it's very easy for me to come out of that meeting, and everything on the to-do list is for me, and everybody else has just been along for the ride. That's a growing area for me, and I know a lot of leaders, a lot of helpers struggle with that.

[00:08:50.750]
I think that being alone and working or being over-responsible and then burning out and cutting out for a while are what my autopilot looks like. So therein lies the opportunity to do something different.

[00:09:09.000]
So you go from one extreme to the other. You're really involved, maybe too emotionally too close in terms of emotional distance, and then you distance to recharge.

[00:09:23.400]
Absolutely. To say, I'm done. I'll see you guys in a year or two, and I'll be back in doing everything. What's that third way if those two things don't really serve you as well? How do you be a part of something without being over-responsible is a real challenge.

[00:09:42.330]
Yeah. Especially if you feel capable and competent and feel like you have something to contribute. You talk about interrupting your responses. Could you unpack that a little What does that mean? How do you help people do that?

[00:10:07.460]
I think it's useful to think about how much of our own functioning is just automatically driven and emotionally driven. I don't think of that as a bad thing. We've only got so much, let's say, cognitive energy to be thoughtful about what we do day to day. But I think it's helpful to look for those opportunities to where that, what I call that autopilot, is it really serving you? And to develop a flexibility in how you operate and how you relate to other people. What I just described view as that tendency to be over-involved and then to cut out in distance. I'm on the lookout for ways to interrupt that. Is that an opportunity to sit in a meeting and not volunteer to do something, but to be interested in people's ideas and connected to them? That's a great opportunity for me because it's hard. Or to move towards somebody when it's very comfortable to stay distant from them and then That doesn't mean I calm down. Often the opposite will happen. But that is a way of developing... In systems thinking or in Bowen theory, what's called this versatility. The more people in a system or in a congregation or an organization or a family that you have operating with that versatility.

[00:11:39.500]
You can just solve problems in a much more creative way, a much less rigid way. Or even if one person is taking on that effort, I think it makes a big difference. But you have to look for those day-to-day opportunities to interrupt what's automatic.

[00:11:58.700]
Right.

[00:12:00.010]
When you talk about versatility, is that a function of differentiation or is it different in some way? That's a good question.

[00:12:08.840]
I think often if you ask yourself what your best thinking is about who you want to be, it doesn't necessarily reflect what's automatic for you. Maybe for some people it does. That's great. Good for them. I'm glad that they're lucky in that way. But not for me. When I think about how I want to show up and represent myself in relationships, it does reflect that versatility. I do see where it's useful sometimes to step up and be a leader and take charge, and other times where it's useful to let other people use their gifts and their ideas. It is connected to differentiation of self in my mind.

[00:12:59.050]
Yeah, because it seems like it's almost always connected to intention. You don't naturally do it because if you're versatile, you actually have to think about how how do I show up as my best self in this particular situation. And so, yeah, that's really helpful. So going back to this idea of family of origin and examining your own, the patterns that happen and the generational transmission, what would you suggest to somebody who's first, they're like, Oh, this is really helpful. I'm getting what this is talking about. What would I do next? How do I get started doing my own work?

[00:13:41.410]
I think anything that can help you get factual about your own family and their functioning. Who do you need to talk to? What information do you need to get? Because often we've been told particular stories about why people are the way they are or how people are. Maybe we've made those stories ourselves or we get them from certain people we have access to. And so talking to other people, asking those who, what, where, when, how, questions not the why questions so much. This is work that I've done. When I was working on learning about the paternal side of my family, I made a list of every stressful event that had happened since around the my grandparents were born. Man, when you look at that list, you go, We're doing pretty well. It definitely gives you an appreciation for what people were up against and helps you think differently about how things shake out, how people end up functioning in a certain way to keep things chugging along. People tend to want to focus more on the feeling side of things, the narrative side, because we're natural storytellers. That's what we do as humans. But I think just gathering hearing those facts, getting curious, assuming that there are things that you don't know or that there's more to the story than just what you were told, just that openness, I think, can be really helpful for people.

[00:15:15.080]
Versus going in with one particular agenda. I'm going to figure out why my mother functioned in this way. I think you're just setting yourself up to miss out. I'm learning a lot.

[00:15:31.620]
You're already almost just blaming her, right? Instead of trying to understand the system. When you did that, how did you define a stressful event? Did it have to be a pretty major thing, like somebody dying or somebody losing a job? Or could it have been, I didn't make the 10th grade play or something? I guess that's stressful, too, though, right? Yeah.

[00:15:54.340]
Anything that would... Big life things that would generate anxiety. Things like illness, death, A house burning down, losing a job, substance use things, just the typical stuff you would look for that would be challenging for a family. Noticing when you get clusters of those events and how does that shake out over time and how does that even more questions about what was going on.

[00:16:34.330]
When you work with clients, I'm assuming you're encouraging them to have conversations with family members. How would you suggest or what are you What do you suggest to them when they run into people who don't want to talk?

[00:16:50.430]
I think just recognizing how the distance has served the family to some degree and to recognize that it is a in some ways to not relay information to people. There's certainly a cost to that. But I think when people can get focused on more about managing themselves when they're curious and not so much the other person they're approaching, often they will have more success versus the difference between, Oh, I'm going to tiptoe around this person because they might get upset with me asking this question, and I'm just going to be open and curious and see what I get. There's a difference between those two approaches, and you're going to make more progress with some people than with others. And that's just more data. That's more facts about people's functioning that's useful to have.

[00:17:50.230]
That's it for episode 288. I'll be back next week with part two of this interview with Kathleen Smith. And if you have found this podcast helpful, please share it with somebody who might benefit. And please leave a review on your podcast platform of choice. Until next time.