[00:00:00.000]
Welcome to Episode 303 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. This week, I am traveling, so I am doing a rebroadcast of one of the most popular episodes. But before we get into that, if you are new to this podcast, you can connect with me at jack@christian-leaders.com. You can get more resources at thenonanxiousleader.com, and you can subscribe to my Two for Tuesday email newsletter, either on the website or through the link in the show notes. This rebroadcast 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 put the entire understanding of family systems theory together.

[00:01:44.560]
I would like to give a shout out and thank you to Dr. 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 303, Family Systems Theory: A Practical Overview.

[00:02:06.750]
I 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, and so I don't want to start at the very beginning. Even if it is new, I think perhaps what I can share with you will be helpful to illustrate some points. I'm going to go 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 course is on the Non-Anxious Leader, you might have heard these stories, but I think they're worth sharing again. But before I do that, let's just start back at self-differentiation. Alastair mentioned self-differentiation. Many of you did. And the idea of self-differentiation is the ability to express yourself in a healthy way, 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.

[00:03:24.470]
And surrounding togetherness pressure is this pressure to conform to these seen unwritten, unspoken values of the system. And that could be your family of origin when they say, nobody says it, but you 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 surrounding togetherness pressure. Or in the church, if the pastor's 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. 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. She 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. We are always experiencing this pressure. I've taken on new leadership roles. I'm in the Peninsula our 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.

[00:04:53.160]
But now we've been asked to do leadership development work in Paula's conference, in the Baltimore, Washington conference. Our two conferences, our two regions are now together under one bishop, Bishop Littrelle Easterling. 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, there are four regions. She's been in each region at 2:00 in the afternoon and 7:00 at night for an hour and a half. I just had not planned to do that. 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, 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 10 seconds. 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.

[00:06:16.700]
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 Kahneman has written a book. Daniel Kahneman is a behavioral psychologist. He got a Nobel Prize in this, and he just wrote a book recently, a few years ago, called Thinking Fast and Slow. And thinking fast is what he calls system one. It is our primitive brain. It's the one that automatically reacts. It's the one that comes up with the fight or flight. And it's the one that when we have that anxiety, that surrounding together in this pressure, we almost always say the wrong thing or the thing that's not true to who we are. Sometimes we last 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 Friedmann uses, I like to use this, 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.

[00:07:37.290]
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 Stephen Covey uses the term integrity in the moment of choice. Integrity is being true to your values. It's your actions being one with your beliefs. That moment of choice, I think, is something we actually have the opportunity to expand. 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 that pause, that self-regulation, is one of the most important things you can do to translate what you're learning into 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. I was in my first Christmas Eve at a church as a pastor, and we decided we're going to do something new.

[00:08:54.110]
This was back in the '90s, and we were going to have readers' theater. So we were 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. This is not a Christmas Eve story. 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 inappropriate 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 is not upset, will just come and say, Pastor, I'm not really sure what's happening, but I'm uncomfortable with this. That's a whole different thing. Emotionally, 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.

[00:10:16.530]
When somebody's blaming you, Alastair has talked about blaming. When somebody is blaming you for something, and it's really not... You're really not the problem. You're just the it's 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. 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. I was able to avoid getting into an argument with her about what the service, whether it was right or not. I think you As soon as you get defensive about something, you've 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. 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? And rather than trying to argue with her or distance from her, just trying to affirm her. Oftentimes, the one thing you can say is, Thanks for sharing.

[00:11:38.210]
I appreciate your sharing. You're staying emotionally connected, but you're not getting into that conflict of will. After the service, I asked our lay leader if this person was all right. Just something was off, and did he know anything? He said, Well, her daughter, who was in her early '20s, died two years ago at Christmas. That's the emotional process, right? She's still grieving. She's still hurting. The easy target was the Christmas Eve service. Somebody asked me recently, Well, wasn't I triangling 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. But I I just wanted to know what was going on. And 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 to distance, right? I don't really want to talk to you anymore because it's not fun.

[00:12:52.390]
You're making life hard for me. But actually, what we want to do is actually move closer and connect in a healthy way. I went and visited and I said, I understand your daughter died two years ago. 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. We never talked about the Christmas Eve service. It never came up because it wasn't really the issue. 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. To me, that's as a leader, being able to recognize these things help us to avoid 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. 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 well without also getting into that conflict of wills, they work through their own stuff, and then they see you as an ally.

[00:14:21.140]
They see you as somebody who's helped them as opposed to got into a battle with them. And I have seen that happen time and time again. And in my own ministry context and in the churches that I've worked in. That's one particular story. Then the other story I want to tell is also a church story, but it's to illustrate the idea of paradox and playfulness. This is 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, we don't want to get into a conflict of wills. We don't want to It's offensive. We don't want to give in. We want to be healthy and self-differentiated. The idea of paradox and playfulness is that paradox is we actually push in the other direction. Friedmann calls it turning the wheels in the direction of this kid. 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.

[00:15:34.010]
The emotional process was something about her wanting to separate from mom and dad. What he realized was, paradoxically, he should push her in that direction. 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 it a healthy choice, whether that is to go away or not go away. Playfulness, on the other hand, is this idea that just keeping things light, not getting so serious, but allowing the anxiety in the room to reduce produce because we're a little bit humorous or we're not taking things so seriously, then that also helps in those anxious moments. In our tradition, in the United Methods tradition, we have something called a take-in. When a new pastor is being introduced to a church, our district superintendent, who's our supervisory pastor, will meet with the personnel committee of the church and will say, This is the pastor we're assigning to you.

[00:16:58.250]
Here's their resume, here's all that 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 it 1995. I had been a pastor for five years in my church, and I thought, well, I guess, 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. I guess I wonder what they'll think of 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. 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 was one of the most non-anxious presences I've ever met. She's now with God in heaven. And she looked at this woman and she said, Well, we'll miss you.

[00:18:05.200]
That is paradox, and that is playfulness. Because just the way she said it, this deadpan, I wasn't there, but when they described it to me, I could hear her say it, just a 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. We want to say, No, don't go. We They want to try to convince them they shouldn't do it. But that gets us into the conflict of wills. 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.

[00:19:05.850]
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. 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 303. I will be back next week with an all new episode. Remember, you can connect with me at jack@christian-leaders.com and find more resources at thenon-anxiousleader.com. If you have found this episode helpful, please share it with someone else who might benefit. If you have not done so already, please leave a review on your podcast platform of choice. I very much I appreciate it. Until next time. Thanks and goodbye.