In this chapter and several that follow I will explain many concepts that counselors are taught in order to be as wise as clients. This will be helpful to you because these clients who usually visit their counselor once or twice a week are the very same people you and I encounter all day every day. To be absolutely honest, they are also the same people you and I are all day every day. As such, this book is not only written to you and me, it is also written about you and me. As you read further, you may well say to yourself, “So that’s what they have been pulling on me,” or perhaps, “So that is what I have been pulling on them.” In either case, remember that God’s grace is sufficient for all of us, and your response to others based on what you learn in this book should embody the same grace as well.
Give and Receive
You have probably heard that healthy relationships are “give and take.” I prefer the phrase “give and receive” in that one person gives and the other receives what is offered. People who “take” from a relationship often end up taking more than what the giver was willing to give, even though the giver may not resist. This type of relationship is more characteristic of a parasite robbing life from its host.
Christians often struggle with how much to give of themselves. The balance is to give only what you intend to give. Anything beyond that will leave you feeling drained and abused, which can only occur with your permission, the result of your naïveté, or perhaps a willingness or psychological need to be abused. While I am not saying how much you should give in a relationship, I am saying that what you give needs to be intentional for it to be a gift.
Abuse in the area of giving and receiving can be a reenactment of childhood wounds for those whose needs and desires were not acknowledged, affirmed, and met by parents, caregivers, family members, or peers. For many of these children, acceptance required unconditional submission and servitude. The corrupted substitute for their give and receive relationships was give and give and give and give.
As with any gift, someone else must be willing to receive. People who are not willing to receive, deny others of the joy of giving, and people who are always giving, deny others of the opportunity to grow in that area.
Questions
1) When have you been in a relationship where you ended up giving more than you intended? Why do you think you did, and should you prevent that from happening again? If so, how?
2) Are you willing to receive from others? Why or why not?
3) How balanced are you in your giving and receiving?
4) Have you ever taken from a relationship more than someone intended to give? If so, why do you think you did and are you content with continuing to do the same to others?
Expectations in a Relationship
A relationship implies an agreement with rules and expectations. For example, countries have specific rules for how drivers of cars will relate to one another. These rules include which side of the road to drive on and what speeds are acceptable. Our personal relationships with others have similar rules, such as how often we meet, what we do, and whether or not we have conversation or one of us talks continuously while the other is a captive audience.
Another example of rules and expectations is among players in a pickup game such as basketball or soccer. The players enforce the rules and the rules can vary widely depending upon the mix of players. Sometimes the rule on calling fouls is that the player who thinks he or she was fouled is responsible for calling the foul. Other times it is the opposite in that the player who fouls is responsible for making the call. This is when expectations and tolerance can be wide-ranging because for some players the rules are the same as for an organized game, while for others the one rule is, “No blood, no foul.” Most of the time it only takes a game or two for everyone to get on the same page of that day’s rulebook. Problems arise however when a player wants to be untouchable when he has the ball, and a mixed martial arts fighter when his opponent has it. This inconsistent application of the rules, even if sincerely believed by the aggressor, rarely ends well in pickup games, and can cause serious problems in personal relationships.
Unequal Relationships
Many relationships are meant to be unequal in that the roles and expectations are not the same for both people. I have a different set of rules and boundaries for a relationship with a physician than I do with my friends. A physician can do things to me that I am not permitted to do in return, and the legal rules of our relationship are determined by an established code of ethics and standards of care. However, rules for relationships with our family and friends are not so well-defined, nor are they externally enforced by a “code of ethics ” or “standards of care,” and often are not even mutually agreed upon.
Family Relationships
Relationships with family members differ from pickup games, physicians, and friends in that these other relationships can be temporary, and you can choose to stay or leave. Family relationships, however, are usually not your choice, and family members can show up at anytime for a pickup game to be played by their rules if you let them.
Most people do not like to play by hypocritical relationship rules such as, “What is mine is mine and what is yours is negotiable,” or “Do as I say, not as I do.” Other rules that are particularly toxic to a relationship are, “We don’t have any problems,” “We don’t talk about our problems,” and “If you think there is a problem, it is you!” People who find their unequal rules in a relationship personally satisfying often forget that a relationship can die from either end.
A potential problem with family rules can be they are handed down from generation to generation without a second thought. They can be wonderful and spiritually grounded, or as with the partially-shaved dog mentioned earlier, they can be like an embedded rubber band around a family member’s neck. These rules are seldom reexamined, and anyone who thinks about doing so may be labeled as disloyal to the family – even by those family members who are gasping for air from the same ever-tightening family rules rubber band. Escaping the bondage of a family that lives by these types of rules can be like crabs in a bucket where any freedom-seeker is foiled by the others who keep pulling it back in.
If you do not like the set of rules that a family member, or anyone else for that matter, is using on you, it is your responsibility to call the foul. This is often your only chance for freedom because more often than not, the people who should be calling a relationship foul on themselves rarely do.
If you are not willing to make the call when a family member or friend is abusing your relationship, then take the mental and emotional beating without complaining to others. And if someone is continually complaining to you about another person whom they refuse to confront, you need to decide just how much more of your precious life you are willing to give them.
Questions
1) What relationship rules from others make you uncomfortable? What alternative set of rules would you prefer?
2) What rules do you bring to your relationships? Are you expecting others to conform to your relationship rules in order to win your approval? If so, what do you gain? What do they lose?
Listening to Endless Complaints
Giving your attention to a family member or friend who is stuck in an endless cycle of complaining may seem like a loving act, but to what end? How often does he or she need his or her anxieties about others soothed by your inert and paralyzed attention? Is he or she incorporating you into an ongoing way of coping with life and refusing to take responsibility for his or her own choices? Does this person want his or her real or imagined conflicts resolved, or does he or she only want the attention you are willing to give? Are you helping this person grow mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, or are the two of you only colluding in a mutual dependence?
Mindfill
Just as a landfill is a place where garbage is dumped, you can become a mindfill when you allow yourself to serve as a psychological dumping ground for the frustrations and anxieties of others. The irony is that you only receive a copy of their woes, and they still leave with their originals.
If you are someone’s mindfill, even though they depart from you feeling better temporarily, my question to you is, “How do you feel after you have received an infusion of their woes into your mind, and then become a permanent part of your mental experience?” Your sacrifice is the time it took for you to listen, which is gone forever, along with any of the one mores you might otherwise have been doing. With your own thoughts, time, and one mores at stake, it seems appropriate for you to speak the truth in love, and put an end to the wasteful abuse. In fact, if listening to an attention-seeking mind-filler is not one of your one mores, then it probably qualifies as a not now and tomorrow isn’t looking good either.
Questions
1) Does this section bring anyone to mind? If so, who and why?
2) Are you a mindfill? If so, why do you continue to listen?
3) What benefits do you receive from being a mindfill and listening to someone’s continual complaints?
4) What costs do you incur when being a mindfill?
5) What could a healthy relationship with someone who wants to be your mind-filler look and feel like?
6) In what ways can you help someone who continues to complain about the same issues?
7) Are you using others as your mindfill? If so, is that good for you or fair to them?
Get Up and Walk
Jesus was not shy about speaking the truth in love when questioning others about their true desires. Recall what he asked a disabled man who had stayed for thirty-eight years at a pool near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem.
5 1 Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. 2 Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. 3 Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.5 One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
7 “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
8 Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” 9 At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked. (John 5:1-9)
When Jesus asked the man, “Do you want to get well?” that was a valid question because the man had obviously developed a social network of people who enabled him to survive for all of those years. Getting well would change all of that and introduce him to a new life with a new set of rules and responsibilities.
When it comes to you helping others, it is obvious that everyone will not be “cured” immediately upon your command. However, a valid question for you to ask yourself is, “Does this person really want to get well, or am I only being used as an ongoing source of temporary relief?” If you are not sure of the answer, you may need to ask him or her just as directly as Jesus did.
Questions
1) Does this section on willingness to get well bring anyone to mind? If so, are there changes in your relationship that you would like to make? If there are, what are the changes and how can you make them?
2) Can you relate to the man by the pool? Is there an area in your life in which you are afraid to “get up and walk?” If so, roll over and crawl, and Jesus will crawl with you. When you want to stand, He will lift you up. When you walk, He will walk with you. When you run, He will run with you. When you fall, He will lift you up again. If you happen to be terrified to try any of this, it probably means it is worth doing.