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Along the Journey  |  

Acute Anxiety in Systems

All systems experience episodes of acute anxiety—a response to episodic, reality-based threats or crises. Relatively stable, resilient, and high-functioning systems seem able to respond to episodes of acute stress and recover with minor trauma.

In contrast, chronically anxious systems—characterized by patterned alertness to imagined threats—which lack resilience will tend to be highly reactive in the face of acute anxiety. That is, they have little tolerance for challenges and lack the capacity for self-regulation or imaginative responses to episodes of acute stress.

Chronically anxious systems share the following characteristics:

(1) They make someone in the system responsible for someone else’s functioning;

(2) They are structured to inhibit the effectiveness of their leaders;

(3) They develop reactive, rigid, and predictable patterns for dealing with anxiety;

(4) They tend toward patterns of triangulation.

While assessing the emotional process at work at the systemic level is more helpful, observing how symptomology plays out in the individuals in the system can also be beneficial. When facing reactivity at the systemic level, congregational leaders must respond to how it affects the individuals in the system, who can serve as symptomatic expressions of the anxiety in the larger system.

Those individuals in the system who have a low capacity for self-differentiation and for managing their anxiety will tend to be the most symptomatic (i.e., the ones who “act out”).

Symptomology in Anxious Systems

Here are some truisms worth remembering when dealing with reactive individuals in a system going through acute anxiety:

The job of a leader in a system caught up in acute anxiety is twofold: first, self-regulation, and second, being attentive to the emotional process in the system and providing the function it needs of its leader.

Depending on the circumstance, the function of the leader can be anything from providing a corrective to acting out behavior; re-framing the issues from principled values, and missional perspective; empowering the calmer, more mature, more centered persons in the system; or merely providing the presence of the leader in the system (staying visible, defining self, and staying emotionally connected—even with one’s critics).


Israel Galindo is the Associate Dean for Lifelong Learning. He directs the Pastoral Excellence Programs of the Center for Lifelong Learning. To learn how to practice leading in anxious times, consider participating in the Leadership in Ministry program at the Center for Lifelong Learning.

Along the Journey Dr. G. & Friends