Intro To Failure of Nerve

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 height="100%"><tr> <td valign="top" width=210 BGCOLOR="#99CC99" TEXT="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="1552c963.jpg"> <div> <A HREF="mailto:wmeades@gmail.com" TARGET="_top" TITLE="mailto:wmeades@gmail.com"><U><IMG SRC="6799c150.png" border=0 width="156" height="21" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></U></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="http://practicalspirituality.wordpress.com/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://practicalspirituality.wordpress.c"><U>Practical Spirituality Blog</U></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="counseling.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Pastoral Counseling"><U>Making an Appointment</U></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="printableform.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Forms"><U>Information Form</U></A> </div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="map.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Directions to Office"><U>Map to My Office</U></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="speaking.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Speaking and Teaching"><U>Speaking and Teaching</U></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="enneagram.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="The Enneagram"><U>The Enneagram</U></A> <A HREF="enneagram.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="The Enneagram"><U> </U></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="http://www.wfmhc.org/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.wfmhc.org/"><U>Waco Foundation for Mental Health Care</U></A></div> <div> <B>____________________</B></div> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Practical Spirituality"><U>Home</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="aboutme.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="About Me and My Work"><U>About Me and My Work</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="personalspiritualdevelopment.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Personal and Spiritual Development"><U>Personal and Spiritual Development</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="helpfularticles.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Helpful Articles"><U>Helpful Articles</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="booksummaries.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Book Summaries"><U>Book Summaries</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="counseling.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Pastoral Counseling"><U>Pastoral Counseling</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="premarriage.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Premarriage Counseling"><U>Premarriage Counseling</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id332.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Practical Spirituality Newsletter"><U>Practical Spirituality Newsletter</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="clericus.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Clericus"><U>Clericus</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id523.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="DS Parenting Class"><U>DS Parenting Class</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="http://centexintergroup.org/schedule/schedule_local.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://centexintergroup.org/schedule/sch"><U>Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings Schedule</U></A></div> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> From <U>A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix</U> by Edwin Friedman (An edited manuscript made available after Dr. Friedman’s death in 1996)  The manuscript is available through The Edwin Friedman Estate/Trust, 6 Wynkoop Court, Bethesda, MD 20816, 301.229.4319.  Call for the price and to order.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>INTRODUCTION</B></div> <bR> <div> In Five Stages of Greek Religion, Gilbert Murray suggested that after Socrates had "disillusioned" his society, Greek civilization was around the corner from the Renaissance. But, he said, they seemed to panic at the prospect and, instead, bought new myths. In a chapter entitled "A Failure of Nerve," he wrote:</div> <bR> <div> <I>The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other superstitions always at hand; and the mind that desires such things, that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.</I></div> <bR> <div> I will describe a similar "failure of nerve" affecting American civilization today. But, I will add, when anxiety reaches certain thresholds, "reasonableness and honesty" no longer defend against illusion, and then even the most learned ideas can begin to function as superstitions.</div> <bR> <div> I believe there exists throughout America today a rampant sabotaging of leaders who try to stand tall amidst the raging anxiety-storms of our time. It is a highly reactive atmosphere pervading all the institutions of our society—a regressive mood that contaminates the decision-making processes of government and corporations at the highest level, and, on the local level, seeps down into the deliberations of neighborhood church, synagogue, hospital, library, and school boards. It is "something in the air" that affects the most ordinary family no matter what its ethnic background. And its frustrating effect on leaders is the same no matter what their gender, race, or age.</div> <bR> <div> It is my perception that this leadership-toxic climate runs the danger of squandering a natural resource far more vital to the continued evolution of our civilization than any part of the environment. We are polluting our own species. The more immediate threat to the regeneration, and perhaps even the survival, of American Civilization is internal, not external. It is our tendency to adapt to its immaturity. To come full circle, this kind of emotional climate can only be dissipated by clear, decisive, well-defined leadership. <B>For whenever a "family" is driven by demand-feeding, what will also always be present is a failure of nerve among its leaders. (Bold by Eades)</B></div> <bR> <div> This book is for parents and presidents. It is also for CEOs and educators, prioresses and coaches, healers and generals, managers and clergy. It is about leadership in the land of the quick fix, about leadership in a society so reactive that it cannot choose leaders who might calm its anxiety. It is about the need for clarity and decisiveness in a civilization that inhibits the development of leaders with clarity and decisiveness. It is for leaders who have questioned the widespread triumphing of data over maturity, technique over stamina, and empathy over personal responsibility. And it is for anyone at all who has become suspicious of the illusions of change—suspicious of the modern fashion wherein solutions, as well as symptoms, burst upon us in every field of endeavor (management, healing, education, parenting) and then disappear as unexpectedly as they had first appeared, only to be supplanted by the fad of another "issue" or cure, sending everyone back to square one.</div> <bR> <div> The emphasis here will be on strength, not pathology; on challenge, not comfort; on self-differentiation, not herding for togetherness. This is a difficult perspective to maintain in a "seatbelt society" more oriented toward safety than adventure.</div> <bR> <div> This book is not, therefore, for those who prefer peace to progress. It is not for those who mistake another's well-defined stand for coercion. It is not for those who fail to see how in any family or institution a perpetual concern for consensus leverages power to the extremists. And it is not for those who lack the nerve to venture out of the calm eye of good feelings and togetherness and weather the storm of protest that inevitably surrounds a leader's self-definition. <B>For, whether we are considering a family, a work system, or an entire nation, the resistance that sabotages a leader's initiative usually has less to do with the "issue" that ensues than with the fact that the leader took initiative. (Bold by Eades)</B></div> <bR> <div> It will be the thesis of this work that leadership in America is stuck in the rut of trying harder and harder without obtaining significantly new results. The rut runs deep, affecting all the institutions of our society irrespective of size or purpose. It even affects those institutions that try to tackle the problem: universities, think-tanks, and consultants. For there exists a connection between the stuckness that leaders experience and the stuckness in the thinking processes of those who would get them unstuck.</div> <bR> <div> In the pages that follow I will show that America s leadership rut has both a conceptual and an emotional dimension,  which reinforce one another. The emotional dimension is the chronic anxiety that currently ricochets from sea to shining sea. The conceptual dimension is the inadequacy of what I shall refer to as the social science construction of reality. This construction fails to explain these emotional processes, much less to offer leaders a way of gaining some separation from their regressive influence.</div> <bR> <div> By the social science construction of reality I mean a world view that focuses on classifications such as the psychological diagnosis of individuals or their "personality profiles" and sociological or anthropological niche (categorized according to culture, gender, class, race, age, etc.) rather than on what will be emphasized in this work: the emotional processes that transcend those categories and that all forms of "colonized protoplasm" share in common, irrespective of those differences. This applies in particular to the tension between the forces for self and togetherness; the reciprocal, adaptive, compensatory functioning by the partners to any relationship; and the evolutionary consequences of self-differentiation for both that individual and other members of his or her community.</div> <bR> <div> These two dimensions of America's leadership rut, the conceptual and the emotional, are inextricably linked. The emotional climate of a society affects not only the models it conceives and clings to; it also influences what information we consider important and which issues attract our attention.  In neither case, therefore, can the way out be obtained simply by developing some new method for "tinkering with the mechanics," or by redoubling our efforts to try harder. The way out, rather, requires shifting our orientation to the way we think about relationships, from one that focuses on techniques that motivate others to one that focuses on the leader's own presence and being.</div> <bR> <div> In the first part of this book, I will describe the emotional processes in society that I see affecting the functioning of "parents and presidents." And I will show how our denial of those processes in both families and in society at large (1) erodes and devalues the individuation necessary for effective leadership, and (2) influences the very way we conceptualize leadership problems to begin with. Then, in the second part of this book, I will present new ways of understanding leadership that are applicable to all families and institutions, taking those emotional processes into account and emphasizing the importance of the leader s own self-differentiation.</div> <bR> <div> Ultimately, however, the purpose of this book is less to enlighten than to embolden.</div> <bR> <div> <B>My Experience</B></div> <bR> <div> These views on leadership and American society did not burst upon me in some "Eureka" moment of insight. They evolved gradually during 40 years of teaching and practicing in a spectrum of fields that included various branches of the helping professions, the military, management, business, and government. This pool of experience has afforded both a long-range and a broad-based perspective, with nodal moments of awareness.</div> <bR> <div> I will describe in these introductory pages how my experience increasingly raised doubts in my mind about the usefulness for leaders of the social science construction of reality; how those doubts eventually led me to reorient my views on leadership; and some of the radically new perspectives for leadership training that came out of that reorientation to reality.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Forty Years Of Observation</B></div> <bR> <div> I have lived and worked in the Washington Metropolitan area for almost four decades. During this period I have watched families and institutions recycle their problems for several generations, despite enormous efforts to be innovative. The opportunity to observe this "persistence of form" was provided by my involvement in the major institutions designed by our civilization to foster change: religion, education, psychotherapy, and politics (I have been here since Eisenhower). That experience included 20 years as a pulpit rabbi, an overlapping 25 years as an organizational consultant and family therapist with a broadly ecumenical practice, and several years of service as a community relations specialist for the Johnson White House helping metropolitan areas throughout the United States to voluntarily desegregate housing, before Congress passed appropriate civil rights legislation.</div> <bR> <div> Eventually, the accumulation of this experience began to show me how similar all of our "systems of salvation" are in their structure, the way they formulate problems, the range of their approaches, and their rationalizations for their failures. It was, indeed, the basic similarity in their thinking processes, despite their different sociological classifications, that first led me to consider the possibility that our constant failure to change families and institutions fundamentally has less to do with finding the right methods than with misleading emotional and conceptual factors that reside within society itself.</div> <div>      </div> <div> For example, having been in the rare position of working in the fields of both healing and management I could not help notice that the batting average in the war on cancer and the batting average in the struggle to heal chronically troubled institutions is remarkably similar, with cancer perhaps a little ahead. I have been struck by how families, corporations, and other kinds of institutions are constantly trying to cure their own chronic ills through amputations, "strong medicine," transfusions, and other forms of surgery, only to find that, even when successful for the moment, the excised tumor returns several years later in "cells" that never knew the "cells" that left. "New blood" rarely thwarts malignant processes, anywhere. Indeed, with both cancer and institutions, malignant cells that appear to be dead can often revive if they receive new nourishment. Or, to put the problem another way, when we say something has gone into remission, where do we think it has gone?</div> <bR> <div> I came to see that malignancy is rarely only a physical state; it is almost always the perversion of a basic life principle. Ignoring the emotional processes connected to systemic disease process, either in an organism or an organization and whether one is an oncologist or a business consultant, will rarely produce a lasting cure. In both medicine and management, administrative, managerial and technical solutions seldom alter emotional process fundamentally.</div> <bR> <div> Another experience that contributed to my doubts about the adequacy of our society s traditional models for helping leaders was that although I was quite knowledgeable about what conventional social science theories have to say about marriage and child development, over the long run I was constantly fooled in my expectations of how children would grow up, how marriages would turn out, and what organizational ventures would succeed. In addition, I was continually bewildered by the fact that the same values that motivated people to do good work in society often did not seem to operate in their closest personal relationships. It was, in fact, the consistency of my inability to predict the future course of relationships in families and institutions over the course of several decades that first led me to question the adequacy of the social science construction of reality and eventually led me to wonder if an intended source of enlightenment had become, in fact, a force for denial.</div> <bR> <div> What other crucial variables, I began to ask, had conventional models in the field failed to take into account? For example, if one serves a congregation in Bethesda, Maryland—the site of the National Institutes of Health and the Bethesda Naval Hospital, a hub for think tanks of every imaginable stripe, and the bedroom community for thousands of lawyers, administrators, physicians and other scientists—then there is a good chance that most of your congregation are either therapists or in therapy. Over the years, I often witnessed successful results from the various forms of counseling individuals experienced, either in the form of symptom relief or increased capacity to function better. But I also saw from my three-generation perspective that these various forms of therapy generally did not succeed in preventing family emotional processes from passing the problems of one generation on to the next.</div> <bR> <div> This has remained constant, from my perspective, no matter what new form of therapy became fashionable, what symptom became faddish, or how any traditional counseling approach was re-invented. It was almost as though all forms of therapy succeeded only in helping people acquire new characteristics; and, as is well known, acquired characteristics are never inherited by the next generation unless they enter an organism s germ plasm. What did it take, I began to ask myself, to get into the "germ plasm" of family or organizational emotional process?</div> <bR> <div> A third observation that contributed to my questioning traditional social science models was my experience with families from many different cultures. As Washington is a Mecca for people from all over the world, sooner or later I came into contact with families from a very broad spectrum of backgrounds that included every habitable continent on the planet—literally, the "four corners of the earth." Although the social science construction of reality tends to emphasize how families differ from one another, I began to see that knowledge of what they have in common could be more important, as a basis both for promoting change and for enabling leaders and consultants to recognize the universal elements of emotional process found in all institutions as well as in all families.</div> <bR> <div> Rather than assuming that a family s cultural background determined its emotional processes, I found it far more useful to see culture as the medium through which a family s own unique multigenerational emotional process worked its art. I began to see that stripping families of their cultural camouflage forced family members to be more accountable for their actions and their responses to one another. I also saw that once one focused on how families were similar rather than on how they differed, it was possible to see universal "laws" of emotional process that were obscured by becoming absorbed in the myriad data on family differences. And later I found that this principle applied to other kinds of institutions as well.</div> <bR> <div> For example, as I began to focus on emotional process rather than cultural background, it eventually became obvious to me that whatever the nature of a family s customs and ceremonies, the universal problem for all partnerships, marital or otherwise, was not getting closer; it was preserving self in a close relationship, something that no one made of flesh and blood seems to do well. (I eventually came to define my marriage counseling, no matter what the cultural mix, as trying to help people separate so that they would not have to "separate.")</div> <bR> <div> Another universal principle of family life transcending cultural or ethnic differences seemed to be that whatever their affliction, individuals who are cut off from their families generally do not heal until they have been reconnected.</div> <bR> <div> Similarly, there seemed to be three universal laws regarding the children of all families that transcended their cultural and sociological characteristics. One is that the children who work through the natural problems of maturing with the least amount of emotional or physical residue are those whose parents have made them least important to their own salvation. (Throughout this work, maturity will be defined as the willingness to take responsibility for one s own emotional being and destiny.) A second universal is that children rarely succeed in rising above the maturity level of their parents. (This principle applies to all mentoring, healing, or administrative relationships.) And a third universal, which also applies to all leaders, is that parents cannot produce change in a troubling child, no matter how caring, savvy, or intelligent they may be, until they become completely and totally fed-up with their child s behavior.</div> <bR> <div> Soon I began to realize that cultural camouflage also obscured the universality of emotional process in institutions. For example, frequently, the leaders of a church would come to me seeking techniques for dealing with a member of the staff or a member of the congregation who was acting obstreperously, who was ornery, and who intimidated everyone with his gruffness. I might say to them, "This is not a matter of technique; it s a matter of taking a stand, telling this person he has to shape up or he cannot continue to remain a member of the community." And the church leaders would respond, "But that s not the Christian thing to do." (Synagogue leaders also tolerate abusers because it s the "Christian" thing to do.)</div> <bR> <div> Overall, this long-range perspective brought me to the point of wondering if there were not some unwitting conspiracy within society itself to avoid recognizing the emotional variables that, for all their lack of concreteness, are far more influential in their effects on institutions than the more obvious data that society loves to measure. Perhaps data collection serves as a way of avoiding the emotional variables.</div> <bR> <div> After all, the denial of emotional process is evident in society at large. If, for example, we succeed in reducing the number of cigarettes smoked by our nation s youth but do nothing to reduce the level of chronic anxiety throughout the nation, then the addiction will just take another form, and the same children who were vulnerable to one kind of addiction will become easy prey for the as-yet unimagined new temptation.</div> <bR> <div> It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of terrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality. According to the latter, families are different from nations, profit-making corporations are different from non-profit corporations, medical institutions are different from school systems, one nation's infrastructure is different from another's; and so on. Yet whether we are considering any family, any institution, or any nation, for terrorism to hold sway the same three emotional prerequisites must always persist in that relationship system. First, there must be a sense that no one is in charge—An other words, the overall emotional atmosphere must convey that there is no leader with "nerve." Second, the system must be vulnerable to a hostage situation (i.e., the leaders must be hamstrung by a vulnerability of their own, a vulnerability to which the terrorist</div> <div> —whether a bomber, a client, an employee, or a child—is always exquisitely sensitive). And third, there must be among both the leaders and those they lead an unreasonable faith in being reasonable.</div> <bR> <div> From an emotional process view of leadership, whether we are talking about families or the family of nations, these three emotional characteristics of a system are the differences that count.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> Indeed, the universality of the emotional process conditions that support terrorism also transcends another social science category: the era. Concerns similar to today's were evident in the early years of this nation, as can be seen in the Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in 1789 to support the ratification of the new Constitution. The authors argue for the vital importance of a strong executive to counter what they call the danger of "factionalism" (by which they mean subversion, not dissent) in the new republic that was about to come into being. Despite the misgivings over authority engendered in many by the earlier experience with King George, they assert that the health of a democracy is in far greater jeopardy when its leaders are weak than when they are strong.</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <I><B>one additional section:</B></I></div> <bR> <div> Here are four major similarities in the thinking and functioning of America's families and institutions that I have observed everywhere, and which I believe are at the heart of the problem of contemporary America's orientation toward leadership:</div> <bR> <div> 1.     A regressive, counter-evolutionary trend in which the most dependent members of any organization set the agendas, where adaptation is constantly toward weakness rather than strength, thus leveraging power to the recalcitrant, the passive-aggressive, and the most</div> <div> anxious members of an institution rather than toward the energetic, the visionary, the imaginative, and the most creatively motivated.</div> <bR> <div> 2.     A demeaning and devaluing of the individuation that goes into self so that leaders tend to rely more on expertise than on their own capacity to be decisive. Consultants (to both families and organizations) contribute further to this denial of individuation by offering administrative, managerial and technical solutions instead of promoting their clients  capacity to define themselves more clearly. It may well be that the rise of the consulting profession in our time (including therapists) is symptomatic of a general failure of nerve and loss of decisiveness on the part of leaders (including parents).</div> <bR> <div> 3.     An almost panicky obsession with data and technique that has become a form of substance abuse, turning professionals into data-junkies and their information into data junkyards. This obsession is enabling decision makers to avoid or deny the very emotional processes within their families, their institutions, and within society itself that might be contributing to their institution's "persistence of form." (The phrase persistence of form is borrowed from biologists who try to understand the uncanny self-organizing ability of some embryos that produce the same whole organism even after some of their parts have been re-arranged or cut away.)</div> <bR> <div> 4.     A widespread misunderstanding about the relational nature of destructive processes in families and institutions that leads leaders to assume that toxic forces can be regulated through reasonableness, love, insight, role-modeling, inculcation of values, and striving for consensus rather than by taking the kind of stands that set limits to the invasiveness of those who lack self-regulation. As I shall elaborate below, this is essentially an immunological phenomenon: the latest understanding of immunity is that warding off what is intrusive is a byproduct of its fundamental purpose, insuring the integrity of an organism.</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>