The DNA of Relationships (5 page)

Maybe so. But I’m guessing that there’s more to it than that. Because usually there is.

Usually the pain that another person causes you is coming out of a fear or insecurity you have about yourself. Think about it: If someone says something about you that you know isn’t true, then it’s not really a problem. You are hurt by what people say or do only when something rings true.

Let me use a simple and obvious example. Let’s say you’re six-feet-two-inches tall. By most standards, you’re considered a tall person. Let’s say that at a party a friend calls you “Shorty.” Now, there’s no reason for you to take offense, and you probably wouldn’t. In fact, other people would look at your friend oddly because she was saying something that was obviously not true about you. You aren’t particularly offended because you are confident inside yourself that what was said wasn’t true.

But let’s say that at the same party, your friend calls you “Skyscraper.” Now this bothers you. Why? Perhaps because you’re insecure about being too tall. What she said pushes a button inside you. You’re thinking,
It might be true. I’m too tall. I’m faulty as a person.

At that point, you assume your friend was doing you wrong, was making fun of you. Yet, for all you know, maybe she was saying it as friendly teasing, or even perhaps she (being on the short side) admired you for being taller. And yes, it’s possible she was being mean. But even then, the real problem isn’t really what she said. The problem is
how you see yourself.
You reacted to what she said based on some inner fear of not being normal or feeling somehow defective. How many times in relationships are you blinded by what others say? You’re offended by someone else, and that, then, becomes a relationship problem. Instead, you need to take a look at yourself, clearly and objectively. You need to point the camera at yourself through the right lens.

Note that I’m not saying that the problem here is that you
are
too tall. You may not be. Many times the statement that offends us isn’t true at all. The problem is how we
react
to what others do or say. Any accurate snapshot of a relationship problem never focuses just on the other person—the picture must also include you.

You can probably see the third DNA strand—you are made to take responsibility for yourself—weaving itself through this discussion. When you violate that DNA and blame other people, you are placing the responsibility for the relationship problems on them. Only when you recognize your own responsibility will you begin to find a way out of the problem. I call this the Power of One, and because it is so important, I’ll discuss it fully in chapter 4.

You Have a Relationship with Yourself
Does it surprise you to think about having a relationship with yourself? Somehow this simple relationship truth escapes so many of us so much of the time. But this understanding is
critical
to successful relationships.

Part of your resistance to paying attention to your relationship to yourself may be that it sounds, well, self-centered. And it is to some extent. But as with all relationships, it’s all about balance. It is unhealthy to be too focused on your relationship to yourself; it can lead to what psychologists call narcissism. However, it is just as unhealthy to belittle, dismiss, or ignore yourself.

Do you have a healthy, dynamic relationship with yourself? Are you on good terms? Do you think of yourself as important? Do you like yourself? Do you accept yourself? Do you forgive yourself? Do you take care of yourself?

One of the things I see so clearly in the people who come for counseling is the difference between people who don’t have a healthy relationship with themselves and those who do.

One of the women is Mary, who is dealing with alcoholism. It’s quite a struggle. Besides the problem of her dependency on alcohol, her addiction affects all the relationships in her life. She has become distant from her husband and neglectful of her children. She has good days when she is more communicative, but other days she drops out of sight for hours on end. She barely speaks to her husband, Tom, and she forgets to pick up her kids from school.

Mary is unaware of what she does to the people in her life, unaware of how her behaviors affect relationships. When asked why she does what she does, she mutters, “I dunno” and has a blank look on her face. She looks and sounds helpless about herself. She consistently seems unable to see her own behaviors, to understand anything about how they affect others, or ultimately to have any perspective about herself in the world.

Now, addictions are very hard to overcome, no question. I don’t minimize the difficulties that Mary faces on a daily basis. But she’ll never climb out of her situation until she sees herself honestly and objectively, which is the starting place for her developing a healthy relationship with herself. She needs a model, someone like Susan.

Susan also struggles with alcoholism. She was much like Mary, helpless in the face of her addiction and unaware of herself. But then she gave birth to a baby girl. The baby changed Susan’s perspective of herself. She suddenly
saw herself through her baby’s eyes,
and she saw how her addiction could hurt her child in a major way.

She was able to step apart from herself and see herself objectively as if she were another person. It was as if she saw herself through a camera lens. She didn’t like everything she saw—an addicted woman who thought she had no choices—but facing that reality helped her begin the process of change. Once she saw her own actions and how they affected others, she could take personal responsibility for those actions. Susan was finally motivated to change.

Soon Susan started making changes in her lifestyle and fighting the addiction that had controlled her. (Do you see the third strand here again? You are made to take responsibility for yourself.) She started taking care of herself. She got into AA, which has been immensely helpful.

All of this started when Susan saw herself through the camera lens and developed a healthy relationship with herself.

People who
do
have a healthy relationship with themselves—who take responsibility and take care of themselves—are better positioned to deal with relationship problems because they can see themselves objectively.

The relationship truth is this:
Put yourself in the picture.
When you master this skill—seeing a picture image of both the other person and yourself in the same frame—you suddenly have a perspective on yourself with others. You can see the consequence of your own actions and the effect they have on the feelings of your friends and family. And you can adjust your thoughts, words, and behaviors accordingly.

One of the things you immediately notice about people who have a healthy relationship with themselves is that they take care of themselves—their bodies, their minds, their emotions, and their spirits. This relates to the importance of self-care, which I’ll discuss fully in chapter 6. When we teach this concept of a relationship with self, people just come alive. When they accept this truth and start thinking about the future of taking better care of themselves, they get very excited and hopeful.

But be prepared for something else.

I have to admit, sometimes when I see snapshots of myself, I don’t always like what I see. I look across a row of beautiful smiling faces—my children and grandchildren, my wife, and then I see my smiling self—and I think,
Is that really me?

If you look at yourself through the camera lens, you may not like what you see. Some of what you see—in your behaviors, in the responses of other people, in the attitudes that you cast out among others—just won’t be pretty.

* PUT YOURSELF IN THE PICTURE. *

The danger is that you’ll run from the ugly stuff and put away the camera. In fact, that’s why people avoid developing an honest, objective relationship with themselves in the first place—because they’re afraid of what they’ll see. But some people dare to look at themselves, and when they do, it yields great results in their relationships.

Although it’s good for us to look at ourselves through a camera lens, many of us use the wrong lens. Sometimes we use the lens that Hollywood uses when filming aging actors and actresses—the soft-focus lens that blurs out the wrinkles. Other times we use a distorted lens, like carnival fun-house mirrors, which makes us look uglier than we are.

I believe that the most objective and true camera lens is God’s. And that brings us to the third key relationship in our DNA.

You Have a Relationship with God
Your most important relationship is with God, the source of all life. Some people may not want to admit that they have a relationship with God. They may say, “I abandoned God a long time ago. I have no relationship with him.”

I maintain that we
all
have a relationship with God, whether or not we like it. Even people who don’t believe he exists nevertheless have a relationship with him—a distant or dysfunctional one, but a relationship nonetheless. Think of the physical world. You have a father, whether or not you like it. He may be living or dead, a man of integrity or a criminal. But you have a father. Your relationship with him may be wonderfully nurturing or deeply hurtful. It may be intimate or cold as ice. But you have a relationship with him.

The reality is that you have a relationship with God, and he created you to need a relationship with him. The French philosopher Pascal once said that each person is created with a lifelong, deep desire for something more, and that longing is filled only by knowing God. In fact, recent scientific findings have led researchers to believe that the human brain itself is “hardwired” for God. A
Newsweek
cover story carried the intriguing headline, “God and the Brain: How We’re Wired for Spirituality.”
³

God is serious about his relationship to you. In fact, the Bible says that “He is a God who is passionate about his relationship with you.”
⁴
If you ignore this relationship, if it becomes out of balance, then all of your other relationships will also be out of kilter.

Adam and Eve learned this the hard way. God offered them everything they needed: first, a relationship with him; second, a relationship with each other. God was utterly dependable. He asked Adam and Eve to trust him to meet their needs. But they trusted the serpent instead. When they walked away from God, they walked away from the lasting source of love, joy, peace, and an overflowing life.

The key to the DNA of relationships is to understand that we are wired to have a direct connection with God. Let me go back to the image of the camera.

As I have said, what we tend to do in relationships is to see only the other person, and we point the lens only at him or her. It looks like this:

This is where many people are. You can see how flat and simplistic this view of a relationship is. This is why so many of us experience the kind of relationship problems we have.

The DNA of relationships says that you are made for relationships with others, yourself, and God. It looks like this:

We’ve said that relationship problems aren’t just about the other person and that we need to put ourselves in the picture too. That looks like this: