Anxiety and Disaffiliation

 The cure for anxiety is love, not leaving.

Those of us who have lived for even the last 60 years, have seen a vast amount of social change in our lives. And the pace of social change has been picking up in the last 30 years, so really it affects everyone. 

Moreover it cuts across so many aspects of our daily lives and ways of understanding who we are that it is difficult to figure out why its happening. Billy Joel had it right, "we didn't start the fire, it was always burning since the world's been turning. . . we we are gone it will still burn on and on . . ."

A result of this constant change is what psychologists call free-floating anxiety, which is most unpleasant and even debilitating. So how do you get over  it, this free-floating anxiety? 

What commonly happens in an organization or family is that people look around and try to pin their anxiety to one particular cause that can be fixed or eliminated. If two or more people agree on the same cause, then you have a process called triangulation: everyone pointing their finger at the same thing, person, or people.

This then suggests an immediate cure for the anxiety: either change/repair of the thing or person, or get rid of it or them. Bingo, anxiety gone, right? 

It never works. The thing or person that you identified as the problem is actually just a manifestation  of the same rapid social change causing your anxiety. It isn't the cause.

American society (like all human societies) has always had LGBTQ+ persons. Rapid social change simply created the conditions by which they could come out of the closet and assert their presence and their right to their identity. The same thing is true about questions and doubts around religious doctrines and practices.  They neither arise from, nor actually cause anxiety-producing social change. They are simply manifestations of generic qualities of being human.  

If an organization is big enough, it is impossible to maintain the process of triangulation. You just can’t keep everybody’s finger pointing in the same direction for a very long period of time. People discover that their fingers are pointing at one of their friends, or one of their relatives, or a pastor that they really loved, or fellow members of their Sunday school class, or even themselves. 

And yet we don’t quit pointing fingers. We engage in more and more desperate efforts to find a common enemy that everyone can blame for their anxiety, so that there is some course of action that might cure that anxiety. But the more different things you point at, the harder it is to achieve a consensus about who, or what needs to be fixed or expelled. Eventually you have a buffet of disgruntlement but no consensus about what is making everyone sick. 

And that inevitably leads to another strategy for dealing with free-floating anxiety. That strategy is to blame the anxiety on the entire organization or family in which is being experienced. And then to decide to remove one’s self, and therefore escape the anxiety, or as some call it chaos. We believe if we can get out of the madhouse of whatever family or organization we are in then we can take charge of our lives, bring things under control and leave behind this pervasive anxiety.

It will not work. You can’t leave it behind or kick it out. The anxiety is never just a characteristic of the organization or family that we are in. It arises from rapid social change in the entire society we are part of. Change is in the air we are breathing, the culture we are part of, the language we speak, and even the thoughts we think. We can no more escape it than a fish can escape water. We all live in the shockwaves of a future approaching more rapidly than we can bear. 

But even change isn't the cause of our anxiety. The anxiety we feel in the midst of rapid social change comes from within. Change is just change, an inevitable part of being alive. Anxiety is a malformed response to change, a very personal and inner response. So the solution to anxiety can be found only within ourselves, and not in other people or other things that can be fixed or expelled, and certainly not in running away. We can and must leave behind abuse from within a family or organization. But we can cure anxiety only by looking within ourselves.

For those of us who are United Methodist, and, indeed for those of us who are Americans, it would be a good time to review our spiritual practices. To look within ourselves, and our relationship with God to find the resources to live with equanimity in the midst of constant social change. 

The chief among the resources is love. Love casts out fear, not people, and that love is what can cure our anxiety. Love, not escape, soothes the anxious mind. 

Those of us who are Wesleyan should know that this love is not a vague sentiment. It is the constant engagement between God’s calling, our hearing, and our action in concretely meeting the needs within and beyond our fellowship; which is the love we return to God who comes to us as our neighbor in need.

We cannot expel or run away from our anxiety, but we can overcome it through enacted love, returned to God by a community of service and praise.