I was recently in a family meeting and could feel the tension crackle. We were discussing two of the commonly acknowledged hot-button issues for families with businesses (which are control, career, communication, culture and cash). In this case the family was discussing one the rawest combinations of these – career and cash. The father had appointed one of his children to run the company and his son was being paid well. His siblings resented his position, didn’t believe he was truly qualified and were upset by the amounts he was being paid. Bruce (the dad) had made the choice unilaterally. Kathy (his wife) was feeling the already fragile family fracture and was deeply concerned. Eric, the CEO apparent, was a bit oblivious to what was going on. And his four siblings were each having their own reactions to Eric’s privileged position. They were also reacting to the fact that they had never been close their dad but had desperately wanted his approval.
The Anxious Family
It is an understatement to say that this was a very anxious family. Murray Bowen, a great guru in family systems work, saw anxiety as the central dynamic in families. Healthy families handle anxiety well and unhealthy families don’t. Bowen recognized that anxiety in family systems is not, in the final analysis, individual. Anxiety does show up in individuals, but these individuals are holding and expressing the anxiety of the system as a whole. For example, the anxiety Kathy is feeling is indeed Kathy’s, but she is holding onto it and expressing it on behalf of the family system. Bowen also observed that, in unhealthy families, the individuals are mushed together – taking on more responsibility than they should for each other. The technical term he used for this enmeshment was “lack of differentiation”.
The families I work with are often high anxiety systems. They have anxiety about each other, about themselves individually, about the future and about the past. When they come together they act out this anxiety in a number of ways.
The Human Responses to Anxiety
What are the human responses to anxiety? Most of us can easily name the first two: fight and flight. And isn’t this what members of families do? We see family members routinely engage in outright conflict or flee the scene as quickly as possible. The other two lesser known responses are flocking and freezing. Flocking is what people do to “process” what is making them anxious – they find others to be with or talk to in order to sooth their anxieties and find the balance they need to address the problems they face. And, in the final reaction to anxiety, some people simply freeze with that deer in the headlights look.
Making It Personal
To see this for yourself, look at your own behavior. The next time you get angry or agitated or feel a deep need to flee a situation, try to identify the deeper anxiety that is behind your response. For most of us it is not hard to see. We usually find that our outward reaction is externalizing an inner state of anxiety or fear and that we are often much better off addressing that anxiety directly. When we do, the urge to fight or flee or flock or freeze diminishes and our behavior becomes far more productive.
So what do we do with families that are anxious?
There is no one approach, but the following are some of the ideas that I have found tremendously useful.
- Slow down. This is absolutely the single biggest and most important intervention I know of. When anxiety crops up, things speed up. Speech moves faster and is more reactive. Assumptions get made. People fall into the scripts of the past. Everything accelerates in ways not unlike the action after a ball is snapped in the NFL. If I had to pick only one skill to walk into a room with as a facilitator, it would be the ability to gracefully and naturally slow things down.
- Get curious. The ground rules I bring to each family gathering change with the family. The ground rule that shows up more often than not is “get curious”. Why? Because if you are curious about the other person, it is difficult to be so focused on yourself and your own anxiety and reactivity. Curiosity becomes a tool of self- management. It shows up as asking questions of observation (“Isn’t that interesting, I wonder way this person is – or I am – so bent out shape?”), to questioning assumptions (“I wonder what this person really wants?”), to examining potential responses (“I wonder how this person could be more effective and not so out of control?”) It also shows up as asking questions of the other person: questions like: “Why do you feel that way?”, “What is it that you want behind this position you are taking?”, “What would make you happy?”, and “Are you feeling heard?”
- Get formal. It often helps anxious systems to introduce a formal process. In tense conversations I will use everything from talking sticks (where no one has the floor unless they are holding a “sacred” object) to using active listening techniques (which must be taught) to highly structured conversations (which are too complex to describe here, but follow a highly scripted process).
- Empower. Anxiety is often grounded in a lack of control of both a person’s internal states and the external circumstances. Giving people the tools of internal state management are critical. Mindfulness techniques and voice dialog work are helpful. In group work, appreciative inquiry, gracious space and the art of hosting and harvesting impose processes that tend to sideline anxiety. These allow people to gain control of themselves. In addition to this inner work, people must be given external power as well. This is done by coming to agreements. In agreements by adults, there is no agreement if there is not a “meeting of the minds”. Agreements thus require the consent of all parties either to the content of the agreement itself or the process by which the agreement is created (for example, majority vote in larger families is an agreement about how the family arrives at agreements when consensus is not possible). In smaller families, it is imperative that the family takes the time to gain real consensus and enough buy-in to move forward. So long as people feel that they have some control, they tend to be less anxious. With this power must come responsibilities, but that is a subject for another day.
We have only scratched the surface of how to address anxiety in family systems. By way of practical application, I would encourage you to think about the role anxiety plays in your own family with respect to your spouse, your children and in you. My guess is that you will be hard pressed to find any major issue in your marriage or your parenting that is not rooted in some form of anxiety. Many families spend almost all of their time addressing the manifestations of this anxiety rather addressing the anxiety directly. If this is true of your family, it is almost certainly true of any client or family you are dealing with.
— January 14, 2013