Before You Blame Yourself (or Your Boss)

As anxious achievers, we’re very focused on the “I.”

Why am I so stressed?

Why do I care so much what people think?

Why am I having such a hard time with this person?

Why can’t I stop worrying about work?

As a recovering workaholic who has spent much of her life worried about going broke, letting people down, or somehow failing spectacularly, I am very good at turning the spotlight inward. Most of us are. We’re taught to think of our challenges in individual terms. If we’re unhappy, anxious, stuck, or struggling in a relationship, we assume the answer lies somewhere inside us.

But one of the most liberating ideas I’ve encountered in recent years comes from therapist Kathleen Smith and her insights from Bowen Family Systems Theory. The basic premise is deceptively simple: human beings do not exist in isolation. Almost everything we do is in response to a relationship, a group, a team, a family, or a larger system.

That shift in perspective has changed how I think about anxiety, leadership, conflict, work, and even politics.

Systems thinking views groups of people as living entities that are constantly trying to do two things at once: solve problems and move forward, while also managing tension and regulating themselves. Suddenly, instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” or “What’s wrong with them?” you start asking, “What’s happening in this system?”

That question alone can be enormously relieving.

We live in a culture that loves labels. I’m anxious. I’m an introvert. I’m a people pleaser. My boss is toxic. My coworker is difficult. My family is dysfunctional.

Sometimes those labels are useful. But they can also keep us from getting curious about context — and the systems that are impacting us.

Smith encourages people to look less at fixed identities and more at interactions. What happened right before you became anxious? What is happening in the relationship? How is the system functioning? How does one person’s behavior influence everyone else’s?

The goal isn’t to avoid responsibility — it’s actually the opposite. It’s to develop a broader perspective that allows us to respond more thoughtfully.

One of my favorite questions from Smith is simple, yet challenging:

“How much energy do you spend trying to be what other people want? How much energy do you spend trying to make other people what you want?”

Most of us could probably answer: quite a lot.

We spend enormous amounts of mental energy trying to manage other people’s perceptions, reactions, feelings, and behavior. We want our boss to appreciate us. We want our colleagues to understand us. We want our partners to communicate differently. We want our children to make good choices. We want everyone around us to be predictable and reasonable.

And then we wonder why we’re exhausted.

Smith asks an even more important follow-up question:

“How much energy is left for self, for figuring out who you want to be and for giving other people the space to do the same thing? How do you get some of that energy back into how you operate and how do you make decisions that are about what you think is the right thing, or the next thoughtful thing versus the thing that’s going to keep people happy or keep them from getting upset?”

Those questions hit hard because anxiety often makes us intensely relationship-oriented. Smith, a self-described anxious overachiever, notes that these feelings pop up when something important is happening professionally.

“I’ve really noticed this every time I have a book about to come out because my anxiety goes up. Something big is about to happen, I don’t know what’s going to play out and I just automatically see that relationship orientation grow up. I start to focus a lot more about what people are going to think of me.”

When anxiety rises, our attention shifts outward. We become more focused on the group. We monitor reactions more carefully. We look for signs of acceptance or rejection. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense. Human beings survived because we belonged to groups. Being cast out was dangerous. Our brains are still wired to pay attention to social cues, especially when uncertainty increases.

This is one reason why impostor feelings can become so intense during periods of change or growth. We tend to treat impostor syndrome as evidence that we’re secretly unqualified. But what if it’s also a reflection of how deeply we want to remain connected to the group? Of course we worry about what other people think. Of course we wonder whether we belong. Those are profoundly human concerns.

The trouble starts when we mistake our heightened vigilance for objective reality.

Smith describes noticing this dynamic in organizations. After a tense meeting, someone might find themselves obsessing over how others responded to a comment. The immediate conclusion is often personal: someone disagrees with me, someone is angry with me, someone doesn’t respect me. But another possibility is that anxiety is elevated across the entire team. Everyone is feeling uncertain. Everyone is watching one another more closely. The anxiety isn’t originating with one individual, it’s circulating through the system.

That’s a very different story. It’s also a much more useful one because it creates curiosity where blame would normally take over. And that brings us to one of the most counterintuitive ideas in Bowen theory: blame is often stabilizing.

We usually think of blame as a problem, but blame serves a psychological function. It simplifies complexity. It gives us a reason for why things feel uncomfortable. If I can identify the person causing the problem, I no longer have to sit with uncertainty.

As Smith puts it: “We love to have someone to blame and certainly at work we love to have someone to blame. But often it’s about what questions am I not asking myself? Blame is a very stabilizing force.”

The same can be true of conflict. When two people are locked in a struggle, each person gets to believe that the other person needs to change. There is a certain comfort in that position. It relieves us of the harder work of examining our own reactions, choices, and patterns.

Smith puts it this way: “Both people think the other person needs to change and that’s a way of getting sort of comfortable.” The comfort is real, but it’s temporary.

What I’ve come to appreciate about systems thinking is that it offers a different set of questions. Instead of asking, Why is my boss like this? Why is my coworker so difficult? Why am I unhappy?, we can ask: What is happening in this relationship? What role am I playing? What choices do I have? How is anxiety moving through this team, this family, this organization?

Those questions don’t always produce easy answers — but they tend to produce better ones.

And they remind us that while we are responsible for ourselves, we are never operating alone. We are constantly influencing and being influenced by the systems around us. Sometimes understanding that is far more helpful than finding someone to blame, including ourselves.

With Feeling,
Morra