Edwin H. Friedman Quotes

Chronic anxiety is systemic; it is deeper and more embracing than community nervousness. Rather than something that resides within the psyche of each one, it is something that can envelope, if not act...

It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of terrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality....

It was then, after my presentations to thirty-two generals, that I first began to see how similar the approach to leadership problems was throughout our civilization. After two days of presentations,...

Indeed, a funeral can give a subsequent event new importance for the entire family because the newly celebrated individual becomes the replacement for the family member who has just died.

Daniel Kahneman astutely observed, No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.

The old world view separates data from emotional process and focuses leaders on the talking heads of others, while the new world view focuses leaders on the nature of their own presence.

But no one has ever gone from slavery to freedom with the slaveholders cheering them on, nor contributed significantly to the evolution of our species by working a forty-hour week, nor achieved any si...

The key to survival is the ability of the host to recognize and limit the invasiveness of its viral or malignant components.

Maternal anxiety may be the original addiction.) To some extent, the child's reaction will depend on the extent to which mother used the child as her own addiction, fusing with the child to ward off r...

Although the social science construction of reality tends to emphasize how families differ from one another, I began to see that knowledge of what they have in common could be more important, as a bas...

A willingness to be exposed and vulnerable. One of the major limitations of imagination’s fruits is the fear of standing out. It is more than a fear of criticism. It is anxiety at being alone, of bein...

I want to stress that by well-differentiated leader I do not mean an autocrat who tells others what to do or orders them around, although any leader who defines himself or herself clearly may be perce...

A new world view of the brain suggests instead that communication is itself an emotional phenomenon that depends on three interrelational rather than mental variables: direction, distance, and anxiety...

The three criteria of reptilian functioning that leaders of any family or institution can always rely on to judge madness (of others or their own) are ​​interfering in the relationships of others; ​​u...

In our society today, much is made of treating children as persons, human beings who have a right to be heard. But many family leaders today bend so far in the direction of consensus, in order to avoi...

By the term regression I mean to convey something far more profound than a mere loss of progress. Societal regression is about the perversion of progress into a counter-evolutionary mode. In a societa...

While the modern, human animal is capable of deep thought and, like its mammalian forebears, can nurture and play, it also is capable of behaving in an absolutely reptilian manner.

The second attribute of imaginatively gridlocked relationship systems is a continual search for new answers to old questions rather than an effort to reframe the questions themselves. In the search fo...

Information does not consist of energy, and leadership is all about energy, about making an impact. Basing leadership on information theory disempowers leaders and is part of the bias toward data that...

Explaining families and institutions in terms of the nature of their parts, I began to think, was like trying to reduce chemistry to physics. Other forces come into play when one studies molecules rat...