How do Healthy Relationships Really Work?
Have you ever wondered why some people seem to have great relationships and others don't? What is their secret? Well, in this post, I will briefly describe the five things healthy people do to enjoy healthy relationships.
They balance grace and truth over time
Grace is receiving unmerited favor and forgiveness simply because the other person loves you. We all know intellectually that God loves us, but we often don't know if our spouse even likes us, let alone loves us.
Couples who have healthy marriages and friendships who are healthy practice giving and receiving grace - unmerited favor when it is least deserved or expected.
Truth focused on reality describes what is real. Truth is not fantasy. It is not seeing the world as we wish it was. Truth is seeing the world, our business, our marriage, even ourselves, as they really are.
Truth without grace is judgment. Grace without truth is license. Healthy relationships have a balance of grace and truth over time because that's what is needed to build a firm foundation for any relationship. In order to be authentic in one's relationships, one must have the confidence that the other will accept you, faults and all, with love and grace.
Truths says: "I've sinned against you," or "you have sinned against me." Truth is reality-oriented and cares little whether someone is offended by it. Grace admits the truth of reality, but injects mercy and love into the relationship so that the other person knows they are fully loved and accepted even when they screw up.
In most Christian circles, we have way too much truth and not enough grace. It's not that truth is wrong. It's that truth by itself produces a performance-based Christianity that is antithetical to what Christ called us out of: a works-oriented religion (the law) where we try to stack up performance chips to be acceptable to God. God gives us grace because he knows we can never do enough to earn our way into heaven.
Truth-oriented sermons will teach you to do more, try harder, be less of this or do more of that. It's all performance. But sermons that balance grace and truth will teach you to submit to God to be transformed so that you can more closely approximate the image of Christ on this earth.
They know how to build healthy, emotional attachments
I've come to the conclusion that most Christians have attachment issues. Some psychologists have written books about our attachment problems. But in a nutshell, we have difficulty forming attachments to key people in our lives and that is mostly likely due to a lack of grace in our relationship with them.
When we don't receive grace from our parents at early stages of our development, we learn that the world is cold and brutish. We learn that unconditional acceptance doesn't exist and that the only way to be loved is to perform. So we perform. And then we "pass it on," expecting others to perform before we give them love and grace. Most of our culture is built on this dysfunctional dynamic.
Healthy, emotional attachments are highly difficult to build when our key relationships lack a balance of grace and truth. Yet, this balance is what is needed to build healthy, emotional attachments to others.
They know how to build their identity and assert boundaries
Knowing what you think, believe, feel, want, and need is at the core of building your identity. People with strong identities can set boundaries around what they do and don't own in their relationships. Boundaries are not about setting a line that another should not cross. Boundaries are about expressing your beliefs, thoughts, attitudes, desires, and needs to others and then saying, "these things are mine to manage and fix, these other things (your beliefs, thoughts, attitudes, desires, and needs) belong to you and are yours to manage or fix." In so doing, you set a line, a boundary, but the boundary is not focused on what the other person shouldn't do, it is focus on what you will and won't do. Healthy boundaries are based on one's identity, not on one's preferences for another's actions.
The stronger your identity, the calmer you will be when asserting boundaries, and the lesby its often you will cross boundaries into another person's domain.
Crossing boundaries is at the heart of so many relationship issues that it is difficult to overstate how often relationships are destroyed due to crossing boundaries. People who cross boundaries:
Micromanage others
Have significant control and anger issues
Cannot delegate key or important tasks to others
Routinely diminish, devalue, or discount the ideas and personhood of others
Are frequently perfectionistic and expect others to achieve to their standards
Do not allow separateness of others in beliefs, thoughts, attitudes, emotions, or needs
Cannot listen to the opposing viewpoint
Do not listen during conflicts and often storm off in anger, saying something like, "I'm not going to listen to this b***s***," or "I'm going to divorce you!"
More partnerships, employer-employee relationships, marriages, and friendships are permanently destroyed because one party cannot resist their dysfunctional and destructive urge to cross boundaries and run others' lives.
They know how to work with good and bad in themselves, others, and the world
The world is full of good and bad. People are full of good and bad. You and I have both good and bad in us.
The ability to accept good and bad in others and learn to work with both sides in another person is an indication of a healthy person building a healthy relationship.
In our culture, we often expect perfection from our leaders - especially our pastors or our partners in business. We find it very difficult to put up with character flaws that we find offensive or that we ourselves do not struggle with. It is so easy to criticize others and so difficult to take the log out of our own eye.
It is so easy to perceive the other's faults as much larger and more egregious than ours. We often don't appreciate how out of balance our perspective is until we have driven away our partner or spouse after much criticism, gossip, or outright meanness. At that point, we're left alone with our own thoughts, and perhaps only then are we able to hear the convicting voice of the Spirit lovingly tell us just how greatly we have wronged the other person. It's difficult to admit, after years of criticizing others, that your lack of grace and your inability to accept the good and bad in others have been the real problem all along.
We want others to be perfect, yet we want them to accept and overlook our flaws. I have found that my relationships are much healthier if I try not to impose my perfectionistic standards on them and instead extend grace to them, even when they have not extended grace to me.
They take on adult roles as they move into adulthood
They don't get stuck in childhood or adolescent ways of relating to others or the world. They don't stay in one-down roles nor do they complain about what is their's to manage as if they were ten or fifteen years old. They step up to the plate and hit a few fast balls. They take responsibility for what is theirs and they don't take responsibility for what belongs to others.
They are adults and they act like it. They are not arrogant or ego-centric. They are not power-hungry. But they submit themselves to God and they put away childish ways of behaving and thinking. They get out of bed and assume their place in their family, business, and the world.
Would You Like to Learn More?
If you would like to learn how to build healthy relationships in your life, OnPath is opening a waitlist for an education group that will focus on this topic.
The group will be eight weeks in length, offered over Zoom, and in this group, you will learn how healthy relationships really work. There will be homework and one required 1:1 session with Bill English, MA, LP. This group will be taught from a Christian/Biblical world-view.
Once we have a sufficient number of people who want to attend this education group, we will formulate a schedule. Right now, the dates/times are TBD.
Bill English, PhD, MDiv, MA, LP
Dr. English is an Executive Coach with over 35 years of experience starting, growing, and managing businesses. He has been the CEO of five companies, with revenue ranging from $75K to $25M and employee counts ranging from 2 to 550. English has conducted over 10,000 hours of psychotherapy as a clinical psychologist and has been a guest on Faith Radio (myfaithradio.com) for over 10 years. He has written twenty books, including Biblical Wisdom for Business Leaders, Working for a Difficult Boss, and A Christian Theology of Business Ownership. English holds a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology, another in Divinity, and a PhD in Business Management. He has also completed post-graduate work in family systems therapy, trauma therapy, strategic organizational leadership, and business process management. Book a free 45-minute consultation to speak with him.