(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "Anxiety in Community." Be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the next primary section of this report, "Addiction and Anxiety.")

Anxiety in Community

Certainly the church is not the only anxious community in our society. Instead, it is one of the many anxious communities that make up what may be a largely anxious society. Yet every congregational leader must deal with anxiety in individuals and in relationship systems. In Looking in the Mirror, Lyle Schaller notes that demographic data suggest that one can expect about three percent of the individuals in any organization to be extremely dysfunctional, a statistic I’ve learned to use as a coping mechanism. Simply by saying "three per hundred" I remind myself to maintain a healthily differentiated perspective when encountering these anxiety-driven behaviors in the church.

Separation Anxiety

If, as Weiser indicates, unresolved separation anxiety is an undeniable basis of psychological trauma, one can expect that much of the anxiety of the church is centered around separation anxiety. Interestingly enough, both systems practitioners and many psychologists agree with this diagnosis. Rabbi Edwin Friedman is the author of the highly acclaimed application of family systems theory to congregational life, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue. Echoing Bowen’s research in family systems theory, Friedman claims that all conflict is the result of imbalanced and unmet expectations of closeness (fusion) and separateness (distance). In other words, conflict is the result of people’s anxiety of either being too close and too controlled or too distant and abandoned.