Are Individual Responses to Anxiety Predictable?

Typically, individuals deal with their anxiety in whatever way they believe they have dealt successfully with it previously. When anxiety strikes, some people find that denial is effective in minimizing their anxiety. Others may respond to anxiety by becoming aggressive. Anxiety may cause still others to become passive. It can also trigger passive-aggressive tendencies or the use of indirect communication patterns, such as triangling. There are also those who get a "rush" from anxiety; when there is no reason to feel anxious they create one to experience the rush.

Whatever approach one uses to address anxiety, several things are certain. The first is that when an anxious situation is presented, many people prefer to react to the anxious situation than address its cause and explore solutions. For example, the anxiety produced by a financial shortfall may cause people to react by undermining the leadership. If they wished to address the cause of the anxiety, they would respond by developing constructive steps for resolving the shortfall in the short and long term.

Even more certain is that whatever patterns have been used to manage anxiety in the past will, by default, continue to be used over and over again. Because these anxiety management approaches "work" for the individual, they are repeated. To the extent that they are repeated, they may become habitual and, by inference, predictable.

One pastor, in an attempt to enliven a sense of vision in his unhealthy congregation, shared a vision for ministry much like one that was realized in his previous church. His previous church saw the vision as an opportunity and a challenge to direct congregational renewal. The present church, however, became anxious. Within three months, the ruling board demanded the pastor’s resignation. The pastor knew that his predecessor was also forced out. After further investigation, he discovered why: the congregation experienced vision as a trigger for anxiety. Their "predictable" way of managing it was to remove the cause of anxiety—in this case the pastor.

Like individuals, congregations demonstrate a certain, almost predictable, "sameness" in their responses to anxiety. These responses, as in individuals, can be recognized as recurring patterns throughout the congregation's life cycle. If, as Freud said, "the child is the father of the man," the recurrent patterns by which a congregation will manage anxiety will be fairly well established during its childhood. For many congregations, this begins to take a definite, recognizable form somewhere around their fourth or fifth year of existence. By their tenth year, these patterns of managing anxiety can be strongly entrenched. Perhaps this helps explain why church planters have recognized that new churches that stop growing or fail to grow after their eighth year have only a miniscule chance of becoming vibrant, growing congregations.

There are also relationships between individual and congregational patterns of dealing with anxiety. In particular, there is often a direct relationship between the way dominant individuals in the congregation manage anxiety and the way the congregation as a whole responds to anxiety.

For example, in one healthy congregation with which I have worked, key leaders are forward-minded, flexible, and supportive of healthy vision. This is due in large part to the personal style of the main patriarch of the congregation. Because he is forward-minded, flexible, and supportive in his private life, his influence has become the dominant mindset of the congregation. As a result, the introduction of change, vision, or anything that would transform the organization is by default considered from the perspective of a forward-minded, flexible mindset. Because of this healthy approach to anxiety, the congregation continues to prosper with an ever-enlarged sense of vision, growth, and vitality in its mission.

In one unhealthy congregation I have observed, reactivity and verbal abusiveness by one or two dominant individuals has become the congregation’s "preferred" dominant pattern for dealing with anxiety. During a major congregational conflict, one such member publicly attacked the pastor with anger and abusive language. The pastor was devastated. He couldn't understand what he had done to deserve such treatment—until the next morning when he visited the hospital after learning that the spouse of the abusive individual had had a heart attack the evening before. As the pastor entered the cardiac intensive care unit he was shocked to find the parishioner who had attacked him shouting at her husband’s physician, revealing a pattern in her response to anxiety—abusiveness.