The Dq Life Blog

You can regulate your nervous system perfectly and still burn out. If you keep absorbing stress that doesn’t belong to you, self-care alone won’t fix it.

Jess should have been the epitome of calm. A yoga devotee, skilled in breathwork and conscientious about sleep, nutrition and exercise, she understood autonomic regulation better than most. And yet she was signed off sick, floored by panic attacks and unpredictable floods of tears. Inside her yoga studio, she could find serenity. The moment the door opened, a wave of stress and anxiety overwhelmed her.

The problem was not her nervous system. It was her relational system.

Jess’ mother regularly vented her frustrations about Jess’s father. Being kind and responsible, Jess would listen, mediate, try to help. Her mother would leave those conversations feeling calmer and relieved. Jess would not. She left carrying the hot potato of stress she had just been thrown, weighed down by a situation she was entirely powerless to resolve.

As Edwin Friedman observed, “stress is less the result of some quantitative notion such as overwork, and more the effect of our position in the triangle of our relational systems.” Jess was not burnt out because she was doing too much. She was burnt out because of where she was sitting in the relationship dynamics around her.

“Stress is less the result of some quantitative notion such as overwork, and more the effect of our position in the triangle of our relational systems.”

Edwin Friedman

Why self-care doesn’t prevent burnout

The dominant conversation about burnout focuses on the individual nervous system: regulating threat responses, enhancing vagal tone, or asking everyone else to create a safer, more co-regulated environment. Bowen Systems thinking invites us to do something different: to understand how stress moves through the relational systems we inhabit, and to take responsibility for our part in that movement. This shifts us from reactively managing the symptoms of our stress response to transforming its source.

How other people’s stress affects your health

We do not experience stress in isolation. The adrenaline flooding one person’s system does not stay contained within them. It travels through our social nervous system, the relational survival system that typically operates beneath our conscious awareness. A parent’s unprocessed anxiety shapes the health and well-being of their children. A leader’s chronic stress impedes the functioning of an entire team. Whole families and organisations play games of hot potato as they throw the stress between people in patterned and predictable ways.

What is triangling in relationships?

“I finally knew one way through the impenetrable thicket which is the family emotional system.”

Murray Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice

The clearest way this plays out is through what Bowen called triangles. When tension rises between two people, a third is automatically pulled in. Their involvement temporarily reduces the anxiety between the original two by redirecting it to the third. But because triangling simply passes stress along, it leaves the original issue unresolved, waiting to re-emerge again (like a game of Whack-a-Mole), and it loads stress onto the triangled individual. They find themselves carrying tension that does not belong to them and that they therefore have no power to resolve.

This was the root of Jess’ chronic stress. As Edwin Friedman wrote: “If we get caught in the middle of an unresolved issue between two others, we will wind up with the stress in their relationship.” For Jess, only a direct and honest conversation between her parents would shift things. Every time she stepped in, however caringly, she relieved just enough pressure to make that direct conversation less necessary. She was not helping. She was inadvertently maintaining the problem while carrying its tension herself.

“If we get caught in the middle of an unresolved issue between two others, we will wind up with the stress in their relationship.”

Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation

How to stop absorbing other people’s stress

This is where Bowen Systems thinking parts company with the broader well-being conversation. The goal is not to reduce the stress in our environment, though that is a welcome side effect. The goal is to build what we call Differentiation Quotient, or DQ: the capacity to remain grounded, clear and genuinely connected to others even when the system around us is running at high anxiety. In doing so, we transform the atmosphere around us.

This is not the same as detachment, and it is not about becoming less caring or less present. It is asking you to increase your own capacity to remain distinctly yourself within the pull of the system, so that you stop absorbing stress that does not belong to you, stop inadvertently maintaining the dynamics that generate it, and stop passing it on to the people around you.

This is more challenging than adopting another individually focused stress-reduction routine, but it is also much more powerful, because when we adjust our relational functioning, we positively impact whole relationship systems in our personal and professional lives.

Individual self-care remains important: it regulates and restores us. But, as Jess discovered, it will only take us so far if we return straight back to the same relational dynamics that generated the burnout and overwhelm in the first place.

The Stress Contagion Quiz is a good place to start understanding how these dynamics show up in your own patterns.

References

Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

Friedman, E.H. (1985). Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue. Guilford Press.