Becoming a Non-Anxious Presence for Myself

Maintaining Peace in an Anxious World

Last week I had the opportunity to facilitate the fall faculty retreat for my colleagues at Columbia Theological Seminary. Academic institutions tend to use the word “retreat” as a label for an extra-long faculty meeting that’s just held in a different campus building. This year was only the second time in my 20-year faculty career that I’ve experienced a real retreat: time away from regular business where we could focus on strengthening our bonds and developing ourselves. This year, the Columbia president and dean gifted all my colleagues with copies of Sacred Self-Care. We spent two days in a lodge nestled in the Smoky Mountains, where I facilitated three workshops on self-care, boundaries, and cultivating a caring community. Don’t worry, I definitely rested a lot. I took naps, spent a few hours staring at the mist-filled mountains, and even joined my colleagues for a game of Taboo (watching a bunch of brilliant minds overthink Taboo is hilarious).

I write and teach about self-care because it reinforces my own practices and disciplines. I once heard Rev. Dr. Gardner C. Taylor refer to preaching as ministering to the afflicted when we ourselves are afflicted. Many preachers have experienced that moment where the sermon we’ve written preaches to us. That’s what happened to me in teaching last week.

In the boundaries workshop, I discussed the importance of self-differentiation. I used Edwin Friedman’s definition of the term from his classic book, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue: “Differentiation means the capacity of a family member to define his or her own life’s goals and values apart from surrounding togetherness pressures, to say ‘I’ when others are demanding ‘you’ and ‘we.’ It includes the capacity to maintain a (relatively) nonanxious presence in the midst of anxious systems, to take maximum responsibility for one’s own destiny and emotional being.” While I’ve heard and used the term, “non-anxious presence,” more times than I can count, something about it stood out to me this time.

Image from my cabin in the Smoky Mountains

Both therapists and pastoral caregivers strive to embody non-anxious presence when we provide care to others. Even as others share their stories of fear, anxiety, crisis, doubt, and despair with us, we strive to model calm, peace, and equanimity. Having a non-anxious presence means that even as we hear that pain, we are not carried away by it. We don’t make it our own. Instead, we offer a “safe holding space” in which people feel empowered to share their deepest pain because they know we are capable of holding it without succumbing to it and without judging them. We model non-anxious presence at the moment when people are feeling most anxious.

These days, it seems that the whole world is an anxious system, riddled with fears and anxieties about COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, global and local economies, gun violence, police violence, voting rights, climate crisis, and political upheaval. If you don’t feel anxious each time you drive on the highway, consider yourself lucky (just yesterday, 3 students at my son’s high school were killed in a traffic accident that claimed the lives of 2 other people). Much of the anger and aggression that we are witnessing in US society is the result of unaddressed and unmetabolized anxiety.

Higher education is an especially anxious system. Everyone is concerned about performing and evaluating performance. Faculty evaluate students, who in turn, evaluate faculty. Administrators evaluate faculty and staff. And accrediting bodies evaluate the entire institution. In theological education, we bear the added stress of preparing students for an unstable vocation. Church decline means fewer full-time ministry positions are available. And the increasing stresses and inordinate demands of congregational ministry make it less appealing option for seminary graduates, especially women, disabled, and LGTBQIA+ persons. In any conference on ministry, you’re likely to hear cautionary tales of pastoral burnout and ministry termination.

In the past few weeks, as I’ve been reflecting upon the dread that I feel at the start of the academic year, I’ve realized that what I’m feeling is trepidation about re-entering an anxious system. Friedman’s words stood out to me because they revealed what I need: to become a non-anxious presence for myself.

As a person who has a predisposition to anxiety, this is no small feat. Being hyper-attentive to the values, needs, and standards of academic systems is how I’ve earned degrees, written books, and earned tenure. Being highly empathetic is what called me to the vocations of therapist and pastoral caregiver. I can often intuit and respond to people’s anxieties when they are not consciously aware of them. Becoming a non-anxious presence to myself doesn’t mean that I won’t experience anxiety. Rather it means that I will work at not succumbing to anxiety that is not my own.

I don’t quite know what it looks like to do that. But I’m committing to a few practices.

1. Don’t believe the story of powerlessness. One of the things that makes a system anxious is when people feel dis-empowered to influence it or to control their role in it. This often comes up in the form of should, must, can’t, and have to messages. But these messages are often untrue and we often have more agency than we think we do. Over the past few years, I have been working at discerning where I have choice so that I can exercise it. And I am learning to question what my colleagues say we have to do, because inevitably it turns out that not all of us are doing the things that some of us think we all have to do.

2. Be clear about what is my work and my responsibility. Sometimes what draws us to a profession is not the work that takes up the majority of our time. I love teaching and writing, but I can spend far more time in meetings and doing administrative work, some of which is beyond my job responsibilities and has no bearing on promotion or merit raises. I can also spend a lot of time working on other people’s really worthwhile passion projects and ignoring my own. If I’m not careful, I can easily overextend myself and end up running from one deadline to the next. I’m trying to be more intentional about identifying my priorities and saying no to invitations that do not align with them.

3. Attend to and celebrate the positive. In an anxious environment, people complain a lot. Sometimes the complaints are merited. But they are rarely the only story. I want to be careful to cultivate my attention toward the positive aspects of my work, my family, and my life. After all, on the whole, I am incredibly blessed to do what I do and to be part of the communities that sustain and shape me.

4. Focus on my own well-being. We’re more prone to giving way to anxiety when our overall stress levels are high. I want to do what I can to lower my baseline stress. The best way to do that is practicing good self-care, especially my daily practices of meditation, exercise, getting good sleep, and laughter.

I have no idea if this will work. But I believe it is possible.