The Anxiety Isn't Yours (Until You Make It Yours)

Althea put down her latte and opened her laptop. It was a few minutes after nine, and she'd already had three conversations on the way in from the parking lot. The screen flickered and landed, as usual, on a picture of her family. She typed her password and the machine came to life. A quick peek at her calendar, and she was on to email. As she scanned the subject lines, one jumped out immediately. "Unacceptable," it read. Nervously, she opened the note. The writer introduced herself as a donor. Her father had been a volunteer at the organization for years, and when he died, she sent a gift in his memory. In return she had received an acknowledgment, but it was the standard form letter, with no condolences for her loss or any recognition that it was a memorial gift. She had been quite offended by the letter and asked not to be contacted again.

Althea felt herself flush. "That's embarrassing," she thought. With her next thought came anger that such a mistake had been made. Then the fear that maybe it had happened more than just this once, and that other people had been too hurt or angry to write. Finally, she imagined what this woman was saying about the organization to her father's other friends, and to her neighbors.

That email was not addressed to the development office, even though that's where the problem started. It came to Althea because her name is at the top of the letterhead, and in most organizations that's how anxiety travels. It rarely goes where it belongs. It goes where it finds a place to land, where somebody will pick it up.

Murray Bowen spent his career watching this happen in families, and Edwin Friedman carried the idea into congregations and organizations. Their insight was simple and a little unsettling. Anxiety isn't a feeling that lives inside one person. It moves through a system the way weather moves across a region, pooling in whatever low places it can find. Often the lowest place is the leader, because the leader is the one everyone assumes will do something about it.

So it arrives looking personal. It has her name in the To: line. It uses words like disappointed and hurt. In the moment it reads like a verdict on her leadership, when really it's the system doing what systems do, passing along something it didn't know how to hold.

Here's the part to watch out for. The anxiety in that email isn't Althea's yet. It becomes hers at a specific and recognizable moment, usually within a few seconds, often before she's aware of choosing anything at all.

You can tell the handoff has happened by what comes next. Embarrassment arrives first, hot and quick. Then the urge to fix it, and not gently, but in some decisive way that proves this will never happen again. Then, in the background, a drop in trust. The development team that seemed perfectly competent yesterday now looks like a place where things fall through the cracks. None of those reactions is unreasonable, which is exactly what makes them so persuasive, and so dangerous.

Watch where the anxiety goes once she picks it up. It came up from the donor, and now it heads back down, heavier than before. A new rule that every acknowledgment letter crosses the CEO's desk. A tense meeting with the development director. A team that learns, without anyone saying so, that mistakes travel straight to the top and come back down as control. The system learns something from that too. Next time it will send its anxiety upward even faster.

The mouse just hovered there over the reply button. An apology seemed appropriate, maybe even deserved. But what could she say to a grieving daughter that would acknowledge her loss and alleviate her hurt? Althea decided to think on it. Of course, something had to be done, but what? Should she forward the letter to the development office with a request for a meeting to discuss it? Or maybe with just a terse (and ominous) "FYI"? Clearly a mistake had been made, and one that couldn't be allowed to happen again.

The key detail is easy to miss. The original failure was a generic response to someone's grief. A person sent a gift in memory of someone they loved and thought the organization did, too. What came back was a letter that could have gone to anyone.

Anxiety that has become yours tends to reproduce the original failure. A fast, forceful response from the CEO's office might feel like the opposite of a form letter, but if it's driven by Althea's embarrassment, it's still answering the wrong person. The donor asked not to be contacted again. The urge to reach out anyway, to apologize thoroughly and make it right, has more to do with Althea's need to feel settled than with the donor's loss. It would be a second form letter, better written and signed by someone more important.

None of this means the problem isn't hers. She leads the organization, and how it treats grieving donors is her responsibility. But owning the response and carrying the anxiety are two different things, even though they feel identical when the email first lands. Friedman, especially in A Failure of Nerve, described the leader's work as staying connected to the system while declining to be absorbed by its anxiety. That's harder than it sounds. It means taking the donor's hurt seriously, taking the team's mistake seriously, and still refusing to let either one decide how she feels about herself.

In the end, Althea realized that this one email was serious, and that it needed to be addressed, but that it was not an emergency. Nobody needed to have the hammer come down on them for this one mistake. Maybe she would write back to the donor, and maybe somebody else would. Maybe nobody would. That was a decision to make when she was less embarrassed. She would see the development director at their one-on-one later in the week. She'd bring it up then, and they'd figure out what needed to change. For now, she took a deep breath, held it for a few seconds, and let it go.

The anxiety will keep arriving. It will come with your name on it, through your inbox, your phone, the person who catches you in the hallway after the meeting. Most of it started somewhere else. Some of it belongs somewhere else. The work of this season begins with noticing the moment it's handed to you, before you've decided to take it.

That moment is small, often just a few seconds long. It's also the one place where a leader still gets to choose what to carry.

Whose is this, really? And what would change if you answered that question before you answered anything else?

More will emerge.

For now, this is enough.