Chronically anxious families and societies and church communities have five key characteristics. These characteristics come from Edwin Friedman's book A Failure of Nerve. The page notations in parentheses are from A Failure of Nerve.
Reactivity
Instead of self-regulation, the regressed society, family or church community is characterized by reactivity. Communication is characterized by ‘you’ statements (‘you are so pig-headed!’, ‘you are just like her!, You are the problem.). Highly reactive systems are a panic in search of a trigger.
Friedman sees this same reactivity within American society, where people constantly interfere with others’ self-expression, react to them on a hair-trigger, take disagreement far too seriously, and ‘brand the opposition with ad hominem personal epithets (chauvinist, ethnocentric, homophobic, and so on)’ (64).
Leaders dealing with systems that are reactive often become less imaginative and eventually are worn down to the point that they just “go through the motions”. By leaders Freidmen includes parents, CEOs, janitors and managers. A leader is a person who has the capacity to manage their own anxieties and self-differentiate.
Herding
The regressive society, family, church community will exhibit a herding tendency. It will tend to ‘reverse the direction of adaptation toward strength, and it winds up organizing its existence around the least mature, the most dependent, or the most dysfunctional members of the “colony”’ (67). In such a system people are emotionally fused in an ‘undifferentiated togetherness’.
An appeasement strategy is often employed with disruptive members in order to be ‘inclusive’, while sabotaging those who would stand up to them. The herding tendency will bend over backwards to accommodate people who are focused on their rights, rather than responsibilities, and attack the person who seeks to take an unaccommodating and self-defined position, presenting them as cruel, selfish, or insensitive. This is so predictable that being called such names is usually a sign that you are moving in the right direction.
This herding tendency cripples parents and leaders who seek to be decisive, which involves being willing to give things up. The rightness or wrongness of our decisions largely depends on what we do after them. However, in the emotionally regressive society the potential leader is unlikely to be able to stand firm when they make a decision. The herding tendency will often elevate leaders to god-like status and then sabotage the leaders' direction. This often will break the leader resolve and reduce them to trying to keep the peace.
Friedman remarks: It has been my impression that at any gathering, whether it be public or private, those who are quickest to inject words like sensitivity, empathy, consensus, trust, confidentiality, and togetherness into their arguments have perverted these humanitarian words into power tools to get others to adapt to them.
Leaders dealing with herding will become indecisive because they feel tyrannized by the sensibilities of others. They function to sooth rather than to challenge and seek peace instead of progress.
Blame Displacement
The chronically anxious system seems to lack an immune response, and so becomes wholly focused on the outside agent, as it lacks the ability to limit its invasiveness. One aspect of this is the encouragement of blaming, rather than ‘owning it’. This is seen in the focus on ‘you’ statements mentioned earlier: such statements displace the problem by blaming the other party and generally illustrate the anxiety, helplessness, and perhaps even ‘emptiness’ of the person expressing them (76). Such families will constantly blame some internal or external party or issue rather than ‘own’ themselves and their relationships.
This blame displacement leads to a constant focus ‘on pathology rather than strength’, and an inability to harness inner strengths to address weakness. Such families fail to recognize that trauma often has less to do with the crisis or ‘impacting agent’ than it does with the emotional processes that organize the family’s life and shape its response.
The leader dealing with blame displacement will often select or focus on the least mature in the system. Those with the greatest amount of integrity will often not be selected for leadership opportunities.
The Quick-Fix Mentality
The chronically anxious family is impatient and puts its trust in technique over maturity, believing that its problems can be solved in a linear fashion. They have a low threshold for pain, arising from their lack of motivation to get on with life, a low threshold that drives them into the arms of people offering quick fixes. To the extent that we are motivated, our threshold for pain increases. This is important for dealing with others: ‘raising our own threshold for the pain another is experiencing can often motivate the other to take more responsibility for his or her life’ (85). Increased sensitivity to the feelings of others is not the solution that it is commonly presented to be. If our threshold for other people’s pain is too low, we can cause their threshold for it to lower as well (counsellors’ low threshold for the pain of couples can increase the possibility of their marriages failing).
Chronically anxious families almost invariably lack a leader who won’t give into their demands. When such a leader arises, they will tend to undercut the leader. Often then the group will search for a quick-fix. Such as a parent just taking the toys away from all the kids or a company announcing a new program or policy to “fix” the situation. Taking toys away and new policies are a quick-fix that temporarily lowers the anxieties of others. Often leaders can become obsessed with technique and method which is an aspect of our addiction to the quick-fix. This obsession has the tendency to transform professionals into hacks.
Leaders dealing with a quick-fix situation will often not challenge themselves to grow. They will go with whatever will satisfy the masses and lower the anxiety instead of challenging themselves to work through the issues.
Poorly Defined Leadership
All of the characteristics of the chronically anxious system already mentioned lead to create the poorly defined leader. The poorly defined leader is led around by crisis, lacks the distance to gain clear vision, and is reluctant to take a clear stand. In the chronically anxious society, the leaders chosen will tend to be immature, without the capacity to resist sabotage, reactivity, and dysfunction.
Friedman remarks that, the ‘single most important factor’ that he has noticed in his extensive experience distinguishing families that recover from crisis from those that don’t was the presence of a well-defined leader. By ‘leader’ he doesn’t refer to someone who dictates to others, but to ‘someone who can maintain the kind of non-anxious, well-principled presence’ that he has described (89).
What is always absent from chronically anxious, regressed systems is a member who can get himself or herself outside of its reactive, herding, blaming, quick-fix processes sufficiently to take stands. It has to be someone who is not so much in need of approval that being called “cruel,” “cold,” “unfeeling,” “uncooperative,” “insensitive,” “selfish,” “strong-willed,” or “hard-headed” immediately subverts their individuality.
Finally, I think that several of the observations about regressive societies could be applied to various Christian contexts. For example many churches exhibit an undifferentiated togetherness, which provides a hyperconductive context for anxiety and a hyperreactive posture. The emotional process of anxiety can be traced in the evangelical obsession with the spiritual quick fix and the obsession with theological certitude.
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