Anxiety in Community: Anxiety and Relationships

Sharon Wegscheider Cruse, Janet Woititz, Judith Viorst, Melody Beattie, Steven Carter, Julia Sokol, John and Linda Friel, and Henry Cloud are best known for their insights on anxiety and relationships. Their insights on codependency, boundaries, shame, control, and adult children of alcoholics greatly help us understand the roots of anxiety and its effect on relationships.

Melody Beattie’s book Talk, Trust, and Feel⁸ describes how individuals troubled by separation anxieties go through various cycles, behaviors, and thought processes indicative of these anxieties. This results in unhealthy relationships. Such relationships may be abusive, codependent, addictive, or unhealthy in other ways. The people in these unhealthy relationships are afraid either to be alone or to be too close to others, and they thus are not able to enjoy healthy relational intimacy with others.

Healthy relational intimacy is based on the ability to learn how to develop trust in the unhindered verbalizing and sharing of feelings in relationships. As Beattie noted, when individuals are not able to "talk, trust, and feel" with others, anxiety increases. In response, defense mechanisms arise. If the anxiety is not released by talking, trusting, and feeling, anxious individuals will develop patterns of acting out their anxiety in behaviors. The maxim, "What is not talked out is acted out" describes this phenomenon.

Acting out often disrupts, upsets, and destroys relationships in families and churches. If uninterrupted, individuals may also begin acting out in defiance in their relationship with God. This "acting out" is one major cause for unusual and seemingly inexplicable behaviors ranging from uncontrolled rage to verbal and physical abuse. Unfortunately, this acting out may also be evidenced in misconduct by pastors, leaders, and parishioners who choose not to engage in healthy talking, trusting, and feeling with their spouses and, instead, engage in inappropriate relationships.

Giving a "Voice" to Relieve Anxiety

In their best-selling book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, Roger Fisher and William Ury apply the principles of the Harvard Negotiation Project to relationships and organizations. One of Fisher and Ury’s most important urgings to leaders is to give people a "voice" to express their feelings as a means of reducing anxiety. In relational terms, giving people a voice is really inviting them to healthy relationships in which they can talk, trust, and feel.

Unfortunately, not everyone has the capacity to express his or her "voice," much less use it appropriately. In some cases, giving voice to individuals enmeshed in addictive emotional processes may make as much sense as allowing an abusive, intoxicated person a public forum by which to attack others with impunity. The more he or she talks, the more absurd the situation may become. This increasing absurdity will almost certainly result in greater anxiety for all present.

8. Melody Beattie, Talk, Trust, and Feel (New York: Hazelden/Ballantine, 1991).