Re-Relate: Through Relational Lenses

PREFACE

Have you gushed over someone but weren’t sure how to demonstrate that? When Jesus reclined in Simon’s home, Mary lavished on him an extravagant scent. She could have elegantly wrapped the gift and presented it. But Mary demonstrated her love in an unrestrained, communicative way. She anointed Jesus’ feet with the perfume using nothing but her hair! Her attitude was refreshing to Jesus, who praised it and said it would be talked about by everyone everywhere.

When you have an honorable attitude, you do not need fancy gifts. You become a gift to others. Imagine the excitement!

Jesus declared us to be the salt of the earth. We often use salt shakers to sprinkle salt deliberately. Your attitude resembles the salt shaker. It allows you to conduct yourself in a way that values others, invites responsibility, and accepts their differences. When treated this way, others will feel more heard, known, and loved.

In applying sound attitudes or lenses, you will be better able to distinguish the trustworthiness of others with whom you can enjoy intimacy, acceptance, and fulfillment. The lenses magnify responsibility lines, making it straightforward to delegate responsibility and avoid frustration and micromanagement!

The sound lenses enable us to honor others and confront them simultaneously. We resolve conflicts more often and feel more equal and reconciled in family, church, and community.

Distorted attitudes derail relationships, igniting offense and strife, culminating in a tidal emotional wave of sadness, fear, and anger. It eventually corrals us into a corner of despair and loneliness.

The importance of the attitude is far-reaching; it influences how we relate to God, education, and business partners.

Re-relate invites responsibility for attitudes and realigning them with principles of love, freedom, and equality. Abundant emotional life is not a dream but attainable to those who seek it.

INTRODUCTION

Stuck in traffic, I read a bumper sticker that said, Just be nice. I muttered, I wish it were that simple! My attitude has always been nice enough, in my view anyway.

Let’s consider our daily routines. We meet family and friends, go to our job, and afterwards head to a fitness class or a grocery store. In these activities, we conduct ourselves and perceive others’ conduct through our attitude.

In his letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul praises faith, hope, and love. When we think about them, we can see that they are relational experiences between us, God, and others.

What if something happens that causes us to realize that we may need to learn a different way of going about relationships—in other words, begin to relate to others in a different way? It happened to me in the aftermath of a failed relationship when I petitioned God to help me pick up the pieces and begin to relate differently with others—what I call Re-Relate.

As a result, I have poured the new insights I received into this book. Re-Relate focuses on attitudes we use to interpret our interactions with others and refers to these attitudes as relational lenses. It chronicles the formation of these lenses of bonding, distinctness, integration, and levelness, which we will explain further in the book. But when our relational lenses are distorted, they lead us to relate to others in offensive ways.

Re-Relate applies these relational lenses to shed light on the dynamic processes of trust, dialogue, and conflict in the midst of our forgiving and reconciling with others.

In Matthew 6:22, Jesus describes the eye as the lamp of the body. Soiled lenses block the light that helps us see clearly, inevitably causing us to stumble. On the other hand, clear relational lenses let the light in, enabling us to walk in love and perceive others as worthy—a noble life indeed.

Being God’s offspring, we perceive Him through sound relational lenses as forgiving, gracious, and truthful, and therefore we should reflect his true image to others. In contrast, when we use distorted lenses, we perceive a God who abandons, degrades, and condemns us. We also reflect this false image to others even as we tell them about his goodness and mercy!

Re-Relate will broaden your insight to love deeper, abide in God more, and hope better. You don’t have to settle for anything less than the abundant life God desires for you.

1

Taking Boundaries Personally

Becoming Conscious of Self

Sitting in my aging leather recliner, I sighed as my kittens watched me intently. Thoughts of my recent broken relationship kept invading my mind, and of how my ex’s stepfather had mistreated her when she was growing up. Since he was therefore out of the picture to help her through the trauma of our breakup, was there anyone else available? How was she managing it all? A heavy feeling of dread engulfed me even though I no longer had any responsibility for her or commitment to her.

My therapist has been keen on telling me I need to take care of myself, but I have had trouble doing so. I know it is good to be concerned about others, but now I was also getting the message that I needed to first concentrate on getting myself to a good place before I could begin to help others.

I picked up my phone and opened the Bible app. Clicking the play button, I heard the words from the psalmist playing gently in my ears: You desire the truth in my innermost being (Psalm 51:6).

Suddenly, it hit me. The truth is that my ex-girlfriend is not my most inner thing—she is not me. We are distinct. Her thoughts don’t belong to me. Her family’s hurts are not mine. So why did I rehearse them over and over in the last few days and react to them as if they were mine? Was I attempting to take care of her troubles so that she would love me? I grabbed my journal to write. I couldn’t wait until I met my therapist to share these new thoughts.

My therapist told me that I was a loving person, but that I have injured boundaries and let others overwhelm me. I didn’t recognize what was in me. I was not conscious of self, and as such, I didn’t take care of myself properly.

That afternoon I determined to begin to focus my thinking on myself to see where I was in life. I thought of it as taking my first personal inventory. But I have to be honest—it was terrible! My thoughts were scattered, twisted, and contradictory. The chaos in my head resembled taking inventory after a tornado—destruction was everywhere.

I began to journal about my feelings daily so I could handle them properly. I needed to decide which were legitimate and which I had no reason holding onto if I were in the business of personal growth. This was my first step towards erecting boundaries in my thought life. I continued for weeks and started feeling lighter.

I prayed earnestly for God to help me learn to care for myself. Not soon after this prayer, my tax accountant invited me to her Bible study where I learned much that helped me understand my true value. I took a course on learning to swim, ticking off one of those boxes I always had on hold. One day I noticed that my backyard was messy and riddled with weeds and crabgrass, so I hired someone that week to remove them and plant fresh herbs. My garden began blossoming, both literally and figuratively.

What Lies Inside

Our boundaries paint the outline of our intellectual and emotional portrait. With their help, we define the edges of our soul. Our soul exists inside the body and relies on it to receive and give information about situations and people around us. Nonetheless, we are spiritual creatures, and our soul is also linked with our spirit. The soul contains the mind, emotions, and will. Those contents should occupy proportional space with one another. When they don’t, for example, and our feelings flood past their designated area, they can overwhelm our will and cause us to act impulsively.

From Keith Carrol’s book, Created to Relate, with permission

1. Mind

The mind contains thoughts that can be facts or perceptions. A fact is a physical event witnessed or heard while a perception is an inference we develop when interacting with another person. We use our perceptions to decipher relational situations.

Both facts and perceptions produce emotions. We feel fear in response to a physical threat or a relational interaction we view as threatening. We form our perceptions through early life experiences with our parents and others. Those perceptions eventually shape the attitudes we use to connect with others. In the same way that we put on glasses to read the news or social media, so too we put on our relational lenses to examine our relational interactions. Through those lenses, we connect with and feel about God and others.

Through receiving ample love deposits from God and our parents, we form four sound relational lenses: bonding, distinctness, integration, and levelness. In contrast, in the absence of love deposits, we perceive ourselves to be unworthy. As a result, we see others through four deformed lenses: abandonment, devaluation, splitting, and disparity lenses. We will go through each of these in detail in the chapters to come.

Whether sound or deformed, we are constantly using our relational lenses to interact with others and God. They are also how we perceive ourselves.

Our defective perceptions can be unnoticeable to us. God and our loved ones many times come to the rescue by speaking their truthful feedback about us being worthy and equal. We need patience and forbearance to receive the truth they share with us so that we can displace our distorted perceptions. This is how we kick-start our journey of emotional healing.

God is not a magician. He is a Spirit, and we need his Holy Spirit to discern his thoughts.

The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:14).

He imparts His perceptions to our minds, leaving us to decide whether to receive them or not. God’s first declaration to us when we approach Him is how much He loves us. God loved us first so that we could love (1 John 4:19). As we respond to God’s love, our relational lenses begin to be transformed.

2. Emotions

We produce emotions in response to thoughts. The thought can be a perception, event, or memory. Emotions are energies, and once generated, they do not vanish easily. To deal with them, we should verbalize what we feel to both our trusted friends and God in order to receive understanding and empathy and not to condemn others. Non-verbalized emotions can influence our countenance by spilling out through our vocal inflection, facial expression, and body posture. Listeners feel us before decoding our words.

In the normal emotional response, we feel the emotion and confess its presence and intensity. We review the triggering thoughts and relate them together. In the midst of this, we may experience changes in our bodily functions such as faster heartbeats and breathing. Finally, we verbalize the emotion when it is feasible.

Emotions don’t ethically contaminate our character because, contrary to motives, they are morally neutral. They are not wicked nor righteous. They, more importantly, inform us about the true nature of our perceptions. Embracing our feelings helps us interpret our perceived threats, demands, and achievements.

Here is a quick example. I feel angry when a colleague interrupts me at a committee meeting. I recognize anger as a demand to be heard. I calmly tell my colleague that I want to be heard.

Embracing emotions is not an invitation to act impulsively on them. We learn self-control by containing our emotions until we can divulge them to trustworthy listeners or write them in a journal. Proverbs 16:32 praises such a person: Better a patient person than a warrior, one with self-control than one who takes a city.

It is wise to employ logic and emotions when making decisions. If our decisions happen to be incorrect, we can at least congratulate ourselves on making decisions with a complete set of tools at our disposal.

3. Will

We use our will to choose and to execute. Apart from emotional impulsivity, the use of our will is guided by motives, faith, and prior life experiences.

God’s character is loving (1 John 4.8), just (2 Thessalonians 1:6), holy (1 Peter 1:16), and righteous (Psalm 7:11). Once we are born of Him, His Spirit imparts His perceptions on our minds. If we agree with, rehearse, and act on them, they become our moral motives.

Motives are translated through the relational lenses into social behavior toward others. For example, when we obey the love motive, we translate it through the levelness lens into acts of cherishing others as worthy and equal.

Verbalizing our intentions to clarify misunderstandings is helpful, like Paul addressed believers in 1 Thessalonians 2:3: The appeal we make does not spring from error or impure motives, nor we are trying to trick you. We should never assume we absolutely know others’ motives. Instead, it is better to invite them to state their intentions.

Let’s look at Kevin’s relationship with Angelina, another example that is riddled with ineffective communication. One recent night, Kevin made coarse remarks about Angelina’s dress. Angelina waged an utter war of silence for days. Eventually, she broke her silence and told Kevin via an email that he was no longer allowed in her house.

Remembering how she had always said she would never leave him, Kevin made the decision to dismiss what she had communicated in her email. He went out and purchased some flowers and headed to her residence. He felt unsure yet hopeful. To his dismay, Angelina called the police to escort him away.

Kevin felt confused and embarrassed. He decided to attend counseling to better understand where he