It Takes Navigating Pain Wisely to Become A Non-Anxious Presence
You may remember the story of The Velveteen Rabbit. It’s a children’s book with a very grown-up theme – that we become real through suffering. I think of that story as we turn to the question that hangs over all of Friedman’s work.
In Part 1 and Part 2, we introduced Edwin Friedman and provided a summary of his most important book, A Failure of Nerve. His diagnosis rings true: that we are living in chronically anxious times. As does his prognosis, that if we desire to reduce the level of systemic anxiety in the teams we serve, then the most important way we can serve as leaders is to become non-anxious presences ourselves, even while acknowledging the perils and pitfalls that will surely attend this worthy endeavor.
But, of course, that raises the question: Ok, just how does one become a non-anxious presence?
Friedman’s path forward is problematic and ultimately unconvincing. His solution is to cultivate a spirit of risk-taking adventure, of rugged individualism. Like the explorers of old, Columbus and Magellan, one must be willing to break through to a New World, Friedman says.
Now, I’m not a professional historian, but I know enough about the story of Columbus to be wary if he’s our model of freedom. Even if we leave aside the issues of imperialism, colonialism, displacement of indigenous peoples, and distorted models of masculinity – and these are not inconsequential matters.
Friedman’s way forward, at least to my ear, calls for a super-human level of resilience. His call to heroic exceptionalism feels just that – exceptional. His remedy feels less like a recipe for relieving anxiety and more like a prescription for intensifying it, a point on which Mark Sayers seems to agree.
For all his brilliance, Friedman leads us to the edge, shows us how vital it is to become a non-anxious presence, and prepares us for the backlash that will surely come our way. But he leaves us hanging with the million-dollar question: how do I become a non-anxious presence?
The Only Way Out is Through
And here’s where Friedman does offer something that is ground-breaking. This one quote was worth the whole book. He writes:
“There is no way out of a chronic condition unless one is willing to go through an acute, temporarily more painful phase.
“This is another principle of emotional process…whether we are considering a toothache, a tumor, a relational bind [or] a technical problem…most individuals, and most social systems, irrespective of their culture, gender, or ethnic background, will naturally choose or revert to chronic conditions of bearable pain rather than face the temporarily more intense anguish of acute conditions that are the gateway to becoming free.
“But what is also universally true is that over time, chronic conditions, precisely because they are more bearable, also tend to be more withering.”
The healing that we say we want – it is going to be very painful. We must go through pain to be healed of our pain. Practically speaking, if you go to a counselor, you should expect to spend a lot of time and money and feel much worse before you start to get a little better. You will want to lose your nerve and go back to your own bearable, chronic condition. In the recovery community they have a saying: Don’t leave and miss the miracle!
The pain of transformation may be so acute, the test so severe, that you will feel like giving up. The cost-benefit analysis won’t compute. You’ll feel like you are suffering deeply with very little advantage to show for it. And Friedman prepares us. “There is no way out of a chronic condition unless one is willing to go through an acute, temporarily more painful phase.” Are you?
Remember, integral to our becoming a non-anxious presence is our ability to sit with others in their pain, even and especially when that pain is being directed back at us. The ability to endure the criticism. To listen attentively, not patronizingly. To stay connected. Be other-focused. The deliberate choice not to take offense even when what’s being said might be offensive. The choice to take in what’s being said, to receive it and consider the truthfulness behind it, even if it’s delivered in an unkind, unwise way, even if it’s overstated, or comes from vengeful motives.
It’s the ability to stay connected precisely in the face of painful feedback that for Friedman is the crucible. How are we possibly going to develop that capacity?
We can’t sit with others in their pain unless we are deeply in touch with our own, so deeply that we’ve become what Brant Hansen calls, “unoffendable.” But we will never become unoffendable without having gone through this “acute, temporarily more painful phase.”
We wish this were not true. We wish we could just read about this wisdom, learn it from a book. But, as Friedman points out, that’s not how surgery works. And surgery is required for our healing.
It is unnatural and highly counter-intuitive, to be told that the way to become a non-anxious presence is for us to pass through our own pain. But if you wonder why it is so rare to find someone who is a non-anxious presence, it’s because the path to get there is through this difficult wilderness of pain. As Henri Nouwen told us, “The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”
While pain is a crucial, non-negotiable element, pain by itself is not transformational. By definition, everyone deals with pain. What does it look like to “steward our pain” well, as Frederick Buechner called it?
The Wilderness of Pain
To answer the question comprehensively would be another essay, another book! Except to say that the Bible assumes each of our lives will be filled with anxiety. Admitting this is not a sign of weakness. It’s a measure of our willingness to embrace our humanity.
“Be anxious for nothing,” wrote the man who freely admitted his own anxieties, even in that very same letter (compare Phil. 4:6 and Phil 2:28). And if Paul is our guide, it should be a tremendous consolation to us that even he had to learn this: “I have learned,” he writes (Phil. 4:11). And where did Paul learn to become content in every circumstance? How did he become a non-anxious presence, if you will?
He said he learned this only after being imprisoned, “with countless beatings, and often near death,” lashed and beaten, shipwrecked and adrift, “on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.” Then he adds for good measure, “And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:22ff).
Apparently non-anxious doesn’t mean we are never anxious. It means we have learned how to be present with our anxieties.
Everyone these days talks about being present. What does it mean to be fully present? From a biblical perspective, we can’t be present for others unless we have learned to be present to ourselves. And we can’t be present to ourselves, until we are more rooted and grounded, more present to the God who is always present, “I AM.”
Catherine of Sienna said we can’t know who we are until we know who God is, and how God, in his unfathomable goodness, relates to us as we are, not as we should be. She’s saying the only way to become a non-anxious presence is to become more at peace in God’s presence. At peace with who we are, warts and all, in the presence of Jesus’ grace-filled eyes and perfect love.
Easier said than done. How we cultivate this presence, this peace of mind, is the question of spiritual formation. We can choose to exercise silence, solitude, sabbath, meditation. Like most exercises, they are not easy. No one falls into being a non-anxious presence. And yet, as Nouwen told us, alongside these practices, another variable is indispensable. The wilderness.
We have not been asked to pass through the same difficulties as the Apostle Paul. His calling was different (Acts 9:16). But sooner or later, in our desire to become who we wish we were, we must confront our inability to do what we want to do (Rom. 7:15). It’s one thing to say, “Oh, I know I’m a sinner.” It’s another thing to know, “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:25). It’s a terrifying time in a person’s life to come to the place of admitting, “I can’t.”
I’d like to learn how to become a non-anxious presence and be more fully present. But I can’t. In our anxiety, we reach for the all the old life preservers, preferring the unhealthy and mal-adaptive patterns of coping that have always before kept us afloat.
To mix metaphors, it’s only in the wilderness where we will learn, almost against our will, to say, “The LORD is my rock, and my fortress…my God…in whom I take refuge…my stronghold” (Psalm 18:2). To call God “my strength” is heroic. But this is not the heroism of conquest, like Magellan or Columbus. This is the heroism of what Frederick Buechner called a “magnificent defeat.” The wilderness is where our pride is humbled. The wilderness is where we learn that we are, after all, weak (Deuteronomy 8:2-3).
If we want to become compassionate peacemakers, we have to become more aware of our own emotional processes, lest we get pulled down into the quicksand of others’. The wilderness is where we confront our deepest fears, and realize, like Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, that the person we fear most is ourselves. The wilderness is where we begin letting God love our shadow-side. You can’t give presence if you don’t have presence.
The Pathway Through
If we endure this acute, temporarily more painful phase, it will almost always entail coming to terms with our past, and how our past, particularly our childhoods, still affect us today in such outsized ways. We must take the time to go back and to grieve, accepting that there are no short cuts, that maturity always takes time, because the process itself is integral to the healing, and we must recognize that maturity is not guaranteed – it is rare, but it is offered (Eph. 4:14, 1 Cor. 14:20). In short, if we will dare to sort through the pain of our own emotional processes, then we might also learn to say, “when I am weak, then I am strong,” (2 Cor. 12:10).
Then weakness becomes not a place to escape from but a safe ground to stand upon. Learning to boast in our weaknesses (and that is aspirational) makes our surrender glad. It makes our surrender to Jesus an anxiety-relieving release. We can finally name our anxiety and we finally know what to do with it. We can cast all our anxiety on Him because, through the wilderness, we’ve learned to trust that God really does care for us (1 Peter 5:6).
You may have read that verse before, even have it memorized. Why could we not before cast all our anxiety on Him? Because we had never before taken responsibility – response-ability – for our own emotional well-being. Passing through the wilderness and arriving at “The LORD is my strength” is where emotional maturity meets spiritual maturity.
Back to Your Family or Team
To relate this to your own organizational or family strife: this newly discovered weakness doesn’t mean you become passive. On the contrary, you can take the lead with a new sort of strength: I’m the problem here. Instead of reacting in fear, which most often looks like trying to control, you are learning to say, “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you” (Ps. 56:3).
That may look like choosing to get professional help. Most of us can’t learn how to be fully present without a wise and skilled helper beside us. For most of us, that means finding the wisest person we know and asking them to help us.
Healing looks like laying aside our normal coping mechanisms and enduring the “acute, temporarily, more painful phase” of grieving and forgiving and then grieving some more. Healing looks like entering into the wilderness of solitude and silence, and learning, finally, how to pray.
Wilderness seasons come into every person’s life. But if you want to help your family, your church, or your team, stop looking at outward symptoms, blaming others, fretting over what they did or need to do. They are not who needs to change here.
You have everything you need (Eph. 1:3; Phil. 4:19, 2 Peter 1:3). Don’t look outward, hoping the world will change. Focus on your own personal renewal. That’s your primary lever of influence: your own ability to be present for the sake of others. As we learn in our own pain to be “rooted and grounded” in the LORD’s loving Presence (Eph. 3:17), then we can sit with others in their pain, in compassion and with patience.
From an acute sense of our own worthiness and belonging, we can stay connected. Even when that pain is directed at us. It’s OK that they’re not OK, even when they are not OK with you. You don’t react. You don’t defend. You stay connected. Focused on them. You stay present.
You can bear with them in love, bear with them not liking you. Because you no longer need them to like you, which makes you free, maybe for the first time in your life, to care.
Questions for Reflection
We wrote these essays for leadership boards/teams who don’t have the bandwidth to wade through Friedman but who might benefit from his insights. It’s our hope that teams could use these as a resource in seeking health and healing for everyone involved.
- Are you deeply in touch with your own pain? How would you know?
- Friedman’s “test,” as it were, is your ability to remain a non-anxious presence. Do you pass this test? Would those who know you best say you are not predisposed to those five markers of anxious systems from Part 1?
- Are you able to be fully present with your family? Your staff? Ask others: would you describe me as someone who is fully attentive to your needs and to my own needs?
- How do you tend to manage your anxiety, or not?