Relational tension is something most of us know well, at work, in families, or in teams.
When difficulties arise, we usually focus on the issue at hand. We try to clarify the facts, solve the problem, or find the right decision. Yet despite our efforts, the tension often persists or returns.
What we may not realise is that something deeper is often happening. We are not just dealing with a problem. We are participating in an anxious people system.
In these systems, relationships become shaped by heightened emotion, quick reactions, blame, and subtle pressure for everyone to think alike. The focus narrows to what is wrong, who is responsible, and how to fix it, quickly. If you have experienced this before, you will know it is utterly draining and exhausting!
When Systems Become Overly Serious
Family systems theorists such as Murray Bowen and Edwin Friedman observed that anxiety has a powerful effect on groups. When anxiety rises in a system, perspective shrinks.
People become reactive. Differences feel threatening. Conversations revolve around what is wrong. Over time, something else quietly disappears: playfulness.
Friedman noted that the connection between anxiety and seriousness is remarkably predictable. When a system loses its capacity for lightness, curiosity, or humour, it is often a sign that it has entered emotional regression.
Everything begins to feel heavy and urgent. People repeat the same arguments. Meetings become what Friedman once called “brain-stem-storming sessions”, intense reactions with very little reflection.
In that atmosphere, something interesting happens. Apologies become rare.Forgiveness feels impossible. And genuine listening fades.
Why Anxiety Limits Our Responses
Bowen’s work helps explain why.
When anxiety rises, our ability to think and relate with flexibility decreases. We revert to automatic patterns, blaming, defending, aligning with some people and distancing from others.
Bowen described this as a loss of differentiation: the ability to remain thoughtful and grounded even when emotions run high.
In anxious systems, people are pulled into emotional reactivity. The system pressures everyone to conform to its current mood or interpretation of events.
Under those conditions, it becomes difficult to step back, apologise sincerely, forgive generously, or respond playfully.
Our repertoire of responses becomes very small.
The Role of Awareness and Self-Regulation
This is where insights from ontological coaching become especially useful.
Ontological coaching emphasises that human beings participate in systems through three interconnected domains: language, emotion, and the body.
When anxiety is a background mood, our conversations become rigid, our emotions reactive, and our physical presence tense.
But when we develop greater awareness of how we are participating in these dynamics, something begins to change.
Instead of trying to control others or fix the issue immediately, we can shift our attention to how we are showing up within the system.
How regulated am I right now?
Am I contributing to the urgency, or helping create space?
What emotional tone am I bringing into this interaction?
These questions move us from reacting to participating more consciously.
Why Apologies, Forgiveness, and Playfulness Matter
This brings us back to the original question.
What do apologies, forgiveness, and playfulness have in common?
They are all signs of a system that has regained enough perspective and emotional space to move beyond reactivity.
Apologising requires humility and the ability to reflect on one’s own role in a pattern.
Forgiveness requires a widening of perspective, the capacity to see beyond the immediate hurt.
Playfulness requires safety and flexibility. It signals that people are not completely trapped by anxiety.
In other words, these three qualities appear when a system begins to move out of emotional regression and back toward relational health.
They are not simply nice behaviours.
They are indicators of a more ontologically secure and emotionally healthy system.
So What Is the Way Out?
Friedman often emphasised that systems rarely change because someone explains things better or tries harder to manage everyone’s feelings.
Change begins when someone in the system becomes more differentiated.
This means staying connected to others while also maintaining clarity, calm, and perspective, even when anxiety rises.
Instead of joining the urgency, that person slows the process. Instead of blaming, they become curious. Instead of reinforcing seriousness, they introduce lightness where possible.
From an ontological perspective, this involves shifting how we are showing up in our language, emotion, and the body.
A calmer tone.A more spacious conversation. A posture that signals steadiness rather than tension.
These small shifts can have disproportionate effects on a system.
Because systems are relational, when one person begins to change how they participate, the patterns around them often begin to shift.
By becoming more aware of our own participation, regulating ourselves, widening perspective, and bringing curiosity instead of more anxiety, we can help create the conditions where apologies, forgiveness, and even playfulness become possible again.
Until next time, Carine
