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You know your business needs to change, but you’re caught in the emotional and relational dynamics that are holding you back. Welcome to Noble Metal, the podcast that helps you forge a new kind of leadership. Host Phillip Weiss, a seasoned executive coach and organizational consultant, reveals how to become a more resilient, deliberate, and less-anxious leader.
Through powerful insights based on Bowen Theory and systems thinking, you’ll learn to navigate complex workplace relationships, manage challenging strategic issues, and lead your team to sustainable change. Get the clarity and tools you need to forge a new path for your business.
Ep10
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Distancing Under Stress
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[00:00:00]
Phillip Weiss: Welcome to Noble Metal, where we explore leadership at work and in life. Through the lens of Bowen Family Systems theory. Today we are talking about a superpower. We all think we have the power to disappear. So we are right in the middle of a small five part series where we're explore, we're exploring the five reactive patterns under stress that we humans love to [00:01:00] engage.
The first was increased togetherness. We're under stress. Some people move even closer together. Then we looked at. Classic conflict where for some people, and in some contexts, they move toward each other under stress, but today we're gonna dig into distancing and cutoff and like I said, the power we have to actually disappear.
At least try to.
Distancing Under Stress
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Phillip Weiss: Think about the last time someone really got under your skin. Maybe it's a mother-in-law who critiques your parenting, or a boss who carbon copies your entire department on a quote friendly reminder. In that moment of heat, what might be your first instinct? For some of us, it's to exit.
It's like, you know, I'm just not gonna deal with this. I don't want to deal with this. In 2026, we have a whole vocabulary for this, and sometimes we call it protecting our peace. We quote unquote, no-go contact. We set [00:02:00] boundaries fine and good, and look, sometimes boundaries are vital for safety. But today I want to challenge a trend.
I want to look at this through the lens of Bowen Family Systems theory, which I think is gonna be very helpful here.
Bowen Theory Fight or Flight
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Fight Or Flight Patterns
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Phillip Weiss: Murray Bowen, the father of this theory, notice that when togetherness pressure in a group gets too high, when it feels like you're being swallowed up or controlled. Most humans do one of two things.
They fight or they bolt. So it's the classic fight or flight. When we bolt though, we in, in Bowen theory, we call it distancing or emotional. In some cases it can go as far as cutting off emotional cutoff, and it, it feels like freedom in the moment feels like a relief. But as we're going to discuss today, that relief is often what.
I might call a maturity trap because if you don't learn to grow up in relation to difficult people, you end up just taking those same raw nerves into the next relationship. [00:03:00] So grab a coffee, which I did here earlier. We're gonna, we're gonna talk today about why staying in the room, so to speak, even spiritually, emotionally, intellectually.
Is the hardest, but sometimes maybe the most rewarding work that a leader can do.
C Suite Cutoff Story
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Workplace Cutoff Story
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Phillip Weiss: I want to go back in time when I, I'm thinking about some of my a particular experience I had when I was in hr. I was one of the senior leaders and. Two very senior C-Suite people needed to be working together extremely closely.
And here's the deal, these were both really good, high functioning people who came to really disagree with each other. So really nice guys and very smart, very competent, very, as I think about it, you know, was kind of thinking about this today. These were just really capable people. So they disagreed and this became so much so that they actually stopped speaking with [00:04:00] each other, and this went on for several months.
So total and complete cutoff. So question for you. Do you think that people on their teams noticed? Do you think that they felt it? Yes, and yes, and yes. They absolutely sensed it. They felt it. And even if you didn't already know something about systems theory, you would know that this trickled all the way through the organiza.
Both of those organizations, the end result was one of them losing their jobs.
Silos and Bind and Blind
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Phillip Weiss: This maybe sounds like an extreme case, but really it's, it's so common and honestly as I was thinking about this, these, it's these kinds of behaviors that I just described that help silos to form. So first you have the intense togetherness of each of these groups.
We are right, they're wrong. And this creates a what Jonathan Het in [00:05:00] his book that I recommend called The Righteous Mind. Jonathan Haidt, H-A-I-D-T re. He calls this phenomena bind and blind. They bind together, we bind together, and then we become blinded by other perspectives that might come in because we're shutting them off.
We're blinding ourselves to potentially new data. So this idea of silos forming you, you kind of bind you blind and then you distance, we are right, you are wrong, and we separate from you. Classic silo behavior.
Curated Relationships Trend
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Curated Relationships Myth
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Phillip Weiss: So we have this idea today that our relationships, I think to some extent should be like a curated gallery.
In other words, only the people who support us or inspire us and match maybe our vibe, get to stay on the wall. So as I'm sitting here today, I live in downtown Chico, Chicago. I am literally looking. Over Grant Park to the Art Institute of [00:06:00] Chicago, which is one of the world's greatest museums. And sometimes I just love to walk up the street, go there and just kind of get into the moment with paintings and, and, and art.
And definitely there are things that I would put on my wall and definitely there are things that I wouldn't, but sometimes we do the same thing with people in our lives. If somebody starts to feel, let's say, difficult. What if they start to trigger that flicker of annoyance or dread in your gut when you see their name pop up on the phone?
Modern, cultural and therapeutic advice is almost universal. Protect yourself. Block 'em, mute them, cut 'em off. And look, I'm not talking about abusive situations here. What I'm talking about are the everyday sort of difficult relationships that mother-in-law with the unsolicited opinions, the colleague who seems to thrive on passive aggression, or the sibling who always seems to have a crisis, right?
When you're having a good, a really good [00:07:00] week. So when those people show up our anxiousness spikes, we feel that. Physiological togetherness, pressure. Our heart rates go up, our jaw tightens, and we get this overwhelming primitive urge to just leave. Let me move away from this. Hit the exit. That exit. The distancing. The ghosting, the silence.
Aspirin For Toothache
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Aspirin for a Toothache
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Phillip Weiss: It becomes exactly like taking an aspirin for a toothache.
It works. In the short term, the pain stops, goes away. In the moment you feel that immediate cooling relief and you think, thank God I don't have to deal with that person right now. I get it. I mean, we have all, we have all been there, but here's the central question of this episode. Did fix the tooth or did you just numb the nerve?
Because here's what I've observed most people who master the art of distancing and some of us are really good at it, [00:08:00] eventually find that the world sort of feels a little bit like a smaller and smaller place. They start to realize that the difficult person they've left behind at the dinner table, they're now seeing that same person in their boss and the person down the hall or in a spouse or partner.
So it turns out you can run away from a person, but you can't run away from how you react to them. When we use distance as a tool for conflict avoidance, we're we aren't really setting a boundary, we are just putting our maturity on pause. We're not growing. So lemme say that again. When we, when we use distancing as a tool, we might very well be putting our maturity on pause.
Separate but Connected
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Phillip Weiss: So today we're gonna step away from the protect your peace trend and look at the real kind of gritty, uncomfortable work. And here it comes, the [00:09:00] uncomfortable work of differentiation of self, that great Bowen term. We're gonna talk about what it actually looks like to maybe sometimes stay in the room to remain what we like to say separate.
But connected. So you're gonna be hearing me use that phrase from here on out, off and on. It's a great one. Separate but connected when every fiber of your being is telling you to just get out. Before we get into the how to, let's really sit just for a second with that urge to bolt because it is so profound, it's so human.
Think about the last time you saw a text or an email from that one person. Right now, what happened in your body? Did you feel the pressure, the flight response? Again, it's just, it's so really human and sometimes it can serve us well, but not. Not always.
Differentiation Explained
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Rubber Band Forces Explained
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Phillip Weiss: So We've somewhat [00:10:00] established the symptom, the knot in the stomach, the urge to silence the notification, like just this relief of getting away.
But let's look under the hood here a little bit what might be going on here. Because if we can better understand what some of these dynamics are than we have a better shot of more successfully navigating it, that's to me the benefit of, of even just thinking about these patterns. And this is where Bowen theory is really very helpful as we talk about the constant invisible tug of war between two forces, individuality and togetherness.
We've talked about this before. Think of it like a rubber band. The togetherness force pulls you toward the group. It says, fit in, keep the peace, don't cause trouble. Stay in the group. The individuality force, on the other hand, pulls us away. Think for self, stand your ground, be your own person. Now, when you're around somebody who's difficult, let's say a boss who has no boundaries so to speak, [00:11:00] or a family member who has an opinion on everything, that togetherness.
Force feels like it's crushing or smothering you. I don't meaning, I don't want to create an issue here. I don't want to stand against them. When you feel that tension, the force screams you at, you basically either surrender or get out. Ask yourself this. If you were truly, deeply secure in who you are, so to speak, if your self was a solid rock.
Would that person's comments or behaviors actually bother you? If you were a bit more differentiated? Their noise would be just that noise. It wouldn't be a threat to your existence. But because we were just sometimes not quite there yet, we're not as differentiated as we might like, their anxiety feels like.
Our anxiety, we start to mirror it. They get anxious, we get anxious, they get aggressive, we get defensive, we've [00:12:00] become fus. That's that togetherness intensity, and this is where the distancing as conflict avoidance really starts to hurt our growth. When we choose to distance ourselves, we're telling our brain, this is a threat I cannot handle.
I've got to avoid it to stay safe. But what if it isn't a threat? What if it maybe was sort of this a, a test, if you will, every time you choose to stay in the room? Not by fighting, not necessarily by submitting, but by staying as calm, as reasonable and present. You're potentially building that self.
You're building the muscle that makes you more immune potentially to that chaos. I. Think about it. How many times have you walked away from a conversation only to spend the next three hours in your head replaying the argument? And I am classically good at this refining, you know, refining your comeback.
Gosh, I wish I'd said this, or, or fuming over what you said or didn't say. In some cases. In [00:13:00] reality, we don't. We haven't really left the relationship. We've taken the relationship with us in our own brain. We're still free fused. We're still marching to the beat of their drum even when we've left the room.
So if we're going to be honest, if we're going to really grow up, the question isn't how do I get away from this person? The question is, how can I be more of a self in the presence of this person without needing to change them? Let me, let me say that again. How can I be more of a self in the presence of this person without needing to change them?
Two Rooms Two Examples
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Two Rooms Two Examples
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Phillip Weiss: So wanna invite you into two rooms. The first is a living room. It's it's Thanksgiving and people are at dinner. Everything is. Everything, everybody's kind of quiet except for the clinking of silverware on China. You know, think of it like when you're sitting just behind first class and you hear people up in the front cabin with their forks on the China.
So you're, that's all [00:14:00] you're hearing in this room. You are sitting across from a family member who has a habit of monitoring you. They aren't shouting. They're just observing and they ask, are you, are you still working that job? You, you look tired. Are you sure you're eating enough? And in that moment, you feel it.
You feel that cold creeping sensation in your gut and your brain is sort of screaming. Don't let them have the power to judge you. So what do you do in this case? You retreat. You offer maybe a clipped, you know, I'm fine mom, and you can pull out your phone and you, you do pull out your phone and you start checking emails.
In that case, I would argue you've successfully distanced. You've created a wall of silence between you and in this case, your mom. You physically in the room, you're present, but you've effectively cut yourself off. Yeah, you maybe feel a little bit of relief because you didn't have to defend your choices anymore.
You didn't keep going into the conversation, but [00:15:00] watch what, what maybe happens next? You leave that dinner feeling drained and agitated and restless you, and you spend the time driving home, picking apart every word that was said. You were still in the room with that person, with your mom in this case, even though you were in the car.
You're still in some sense fused. Let's look at a second room. This one is a glass walled conference room in a high-rise office building. You are an executive and you're sitting across from a team member who is very agitated and is really agitated you. Let's call him Jim. Jim is convinced the new project is a disaster that you are promoting. He's raising his voice, he's pointing at the screen, and the tension in the room is so thick. You could cut it with a knife.
What's your instinct as the leader here? In this case, it's to shut down. You don't want the drama. You do [00:16:00] not like the discomfort of the conflict of the moment. As follow up, you stop inviting Jim to strategy meetings. You start seeing hi. He gets CC'd on fewer emails. You're being professional. You're retreating, you've distanced, but there's a cost.
Within weeks, the team has shifted. They start to see Jim as being managed out. They see the gap between you and him, and now the rest of the team is walking on eggshells, wondering, am I gonna be next? The next one to be kind of frozen out like Jim, the anxiety disin didn't disappear. It just metastasized. And I, I like that word. I think it's really appropriate here. It spread through the entire team like an infection because you didn't have the differentiation to stay present in, in the face of Jim Zg anxiousness. You didn't stay separate. You let Jim's noise dick.
Tate the [00:17:00] moment and you didn't stay connected. You began to build a wall instead of working toward a more constructive relationship. In this case with Jim.
Staying Present as Leader
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Separate But Connected
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Phillip Weiss: These two scenarios, the family dinner and the boardroom, they're really almost the exact same dynamic. Think about the silence in that living room or the distance in the conference room.
That silence isn't is, it's not peace. The silence really is a sort of vacuum. It's the sound of somebody in a sense who's lost their ability to be a self in the presence of a difficult other person.
If you could have stayed in that family dinner, a little bit more calm, present, maybe even somewhat curious with questions and said something maybe like, Hey mom, I hear that you're worried about my career and I appreciate that, but I actually am really happy where I am right now. You would've been in potentially an island of calm in the storm.
It would've probably [00:18:00] shifted things a little bit more for the positive, or if you could have looked as the CEO at Jim in that meeting and said, Jim, I see your frustration and I want to hear your concerns, but we need to stay focused on the data right now. Again, you probably would've held that room more together instead of letting it fracture as it did, and that is the work.
This isn't about being nice necessarily. It is about being more grounded, more solid, more of a noble medal.
Cutoff Quote And Trap
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Phillip Weiss: If I can say in bow, in theory, distancing really is a form of conflict avoidance when the anxiety in a relationship just gets too high when it feels like fusion. That is the idea that I can't really tell the difference between where I end and you begin.
The pressure just becomes really unbearable and so to lower. Lower that pressure. We move away. We distance.
Kerr Quote on Cutoff
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Phillip Weiss: I wanna share a quote from [00:19:00] Dr. Michael Kerr, a longtime collaborator at Murray Bowen and share this quote from his a fairly recent book, Bowen Theories Fa Bowen Theories Secrets. So Kerr writes and I quote, Bowen Theory does not assert that people should not cut off from their families.
It says that this is what people do and that it has its advantages and disadvantages. The principle advantage is that it can provide some peace from difficult and painful interactions. The principle disadvantage is that it intensifies future relationships, end quote. So in other words, things don't really get fixed.
We get a temporary relief. There's that aspirin hit, but we're still dealing with those reactive tend tendencies in ourselves. So we walked through the trap. We've sat in the uncomfortable silence of the living room and the tension in the boardroom.
Audit and Small Experiments
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Audit And Experiment
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Phillip Weiss: Now we need [00:20:00] to maybe look a little bit at an exit and how do we actually begin to lean into this concept of separate but connected without losing, losing our minds in a sense.
So I want to suggest a simple start with an audit. Now, let me just say it, this, this topic is huge and we could spend a lot of time on this, but just with a, a simple exercise here, and like I said, an audit, I want you to find. This, that person who right now is maybe your ghostie, who is that one person in your life?
Maybe a parent, a spouse, a partner, a colleague, a friend where you feel that itch to distance. So I'm gonna encourage you to perform a separate but connected audit. This isn't about you trying to change the relationship. This is about you taking responsibility for what is in your power to control. You're not trying to win the [00:21:00] argument.
Your only goal here is to see if you can be in the room mentally and emotionally without. Reacting negatively. So here's your experiment. And I do like that word experiment because we, we've gotta experiment with things in life. Some things are gonna work, some things not so much, and we keep trying. So here's the experiment.
Next time you feel that urge to send a curt, maybe short email or text, or even just walk out of the room because the pressure's just spiking. I want you to do the opposite of your reflex. If you usually are turning toward the door. Don't try to stay, even if it's just for one extra minute, if you usually shut down, which, which means staying in the room, but completely, you know, closing off communication.
Is it possible to speak one, maybe neutral, calm sentence, something along the lines? I hear you, and I'm gonna [00:22:00] take some time to think about that. That's it. You're not conceding, you aren't fighting. You're simply stating that you are an independent person who can hear them without being as hijacked necessarily by their anxiety.
When you do this, even just small steps, you might notice something happens. The other person might push back. They might even get louder.
They might get confused because they're used to you reacting more negatively in a more predictable way. And that is kind of the system testing you. I would say Bowen theory might even suggest this is the togetherness force trying to pull you back into your old familiar patterns. But what if you hold your ground a little more calmly, a little more neutrally, solidly?
You're doing the work of a leader. You're becoming someone who cannot be blown off course by [00:23:00] the anxieties of others around you. Remember, you cannot build a self in a vacuum. You have to build it in the fire. I would say the fire of relationships of challenging ones, at times you, you have to build it right in the middle of the people who sometimes challenge you the most.
Closing Stay in the Room
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Stay In The Room
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Phillip Weiss: And my hope is as we move toward a close here, I'm hoping that you're beginning to see that if we can start to identify these patterns of togetherness, conflict, distance, cutoff, if we can start to identify and name these patterns, we have a better shot of navigating them more successfully. Thank you today for listening to this episode of Noble Metal, and if you have thoughts or comments or you wanna recommend us, please pass it on using your preferred platform.
In the meantime, stay in the room when the heat goes up, stay connected, [00:24:00] but most importantly, stay you.