Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut

Relationships in a Nutshell

(Sharing an Article by Natalie Lue)

You know how it is. . . Sometimes you feel like a nut – and other
times you simply ARE. At least that’s the way I’ve felt about myself
on occasion. And sometimes, relationships work out the way we would like them to. Unfortunately though, often they do not. But, there’s always something to be learned, even if it’s just about ourselves and “why we do what we do.” Still, I believe that all things are possible, even Healthy, Healing and Lasting Relationships – especially when God is involved.

I’ve come to learn that the more I know about myself, realistically speaking in a “Healthy (and Healing) Way,” the more likely it is that I’ll be able to contribute to having a “Healthy and Healing Relationship” with another person. As author Ken Unger says, “Nothing changes until I change.” Personally, over the last 5-years, I’m experiencing that to be true.

I found a majority of the insights in the following article to be “on the mark” in terms of how quite a few relationships often appear to be operating.
I know that the article caused me some personal reflection on my own
part – without pointing my finger at someone else. And as it’s said, “The only person we can truly work on. . . is ourselves.”

But in regard to anything written by man, there can always be “meat and bones” – things that are valuable and things that are not. I believe, that ideally, no one Partner is to “Lord it over” another. And, I also feel that the best arrangement for a Healthy Relationship involves having a “Quarterback AND a Receiver” – whereas, both positions (roles) are of equal value. If that’s not the case, it will truly be hard to “win the game
of life” with another by your side. The reality is that you can’t have just two quarterbacks or just two receivers if you’re intending on getting anywhere. Perhaps, learning how to submit to one another in Love is really what this is all about. Individually, for BOTH people involved, a Healthy and Healing Heart can help with that, as well. I hope you benefit from the article. . . and wish you Blessings on your Journey.

R Butch David 


Relationships in a Nutshell:

Co-Pilots, Drivers and Passengers. . .
(and the Importance of a Joint Agenda)

(By Natalie Lue)

After much observation and plenty of experience, I believe that healthy relationships have joint agendas and co-pilots and unhealthy ones have drivers and passengers with solo and hidden agendas.

When you recognize the importance of being a co-pilot sans (without)
a hidden agenda, not only will it be far harder to be swept along by an unavailable or ass-clown tide, but you’ll no longer be ‘helpless’ in your relationships and will have the ability to work out where you’re at.

We can become very focused on the ‘hallmarks’ – these are what we consider to be the ‘markings’ of a relationship such as sleeping together over an extended period of time, having things in common, great sex,
a ‘connection’, ‘chemistry’, future talk, being introduced to people, etc.,
as well as big ticket commitment items like moving in, babies, marriage. These are nice, great even, to have, but without the 'landmarks', your relationship is all shirt, no trousers.

Many people chase stuff like passion, chemistry and common interests and then wonder why it’s not working. They assume that if these elements are present that the landmarks will automatically follow.

The landmarks of healthy relationships are intimacy, consistency, balance, progression, and commitment, as well as shared values and what should come as standard in any relationship – love, care, trust, and respect.

If you have the hallmarks without the landmarks, your relationship is either casual and/or unhealthy. Before you go doing any big ticket commitment items, I suggest you make sure that the landmarks
are present first.

As individuals, we each have our own agenda which caters to taking care of our self-esteem with boundaries and healthy beliefs, as well as our values that tell us what we believe are the most important things for us to live authentically and happily.

We use dating as a discovery phase to discover the facts about one another and ultimately whether we can have a shared agenda that respects each party healthily as individuals, while creating a
common journey for the relationship.

Healthy relationships have co-pilots steering them along with open discussion about the joint agenda as well as all of the landmarks –
no hidden agendas. You will steer and plot your journey together
and even if at times, one has to man the steering, they continue with
the joint agenda. These are mutually fulfilling relationships.

Unhealthy relationships and casual relationships
have a driver and a passenger.

The driver steers the relationship on their terms, agenda, and ‘route’.
They may have a solo agenda that they’re open about and/or may have
a hidden agenda. They’re sometimes egotistical enough to assume
that their agenda is the joint agenda because it’s what they want.

You will know you’re involved with a driver if you attempt to co-pilot
and meet restrictions and conflict – they take a parachute and jump,
or pull up on the route to say that they need to go to the ‘toilet’ and then disappear. Or maybe they’ll steer the relationship so crazily that you
panic and agree to let them be in control. You get the gist?

Drivers are about getting their needs met. They often need a passenger for their ego etc, but they don’t want to step up and put
the needed effort into a co-piloted relationship – they’re controlled
and often controlling.

Passengers basically take a backseat in the relationship. They tend to
get swept up in other people’s agendas because they’re not as street smart (read: relationship smart) as they should be. They may actually be on this journey because through a lack of boundaries and latching onto the hallmarks of a relationship, they were not paying attention to code red and amber behavior.

They will tack on to the drivers agenda assuming that this is what
‘love’ is about, so they end up not living congruently with their own
boundaries and values.

Many passengers however, actually know the driver’s agenda
and hope to change it. They think if they love enough, get the driver to change, cry, beg, plead, wait, or give them their money, that the driver will become a co-pilot and they’ll have a joint agenda. Passengers with very low self-esteem look to others to create their agenda for them and give them validation. When the relationship ends, they feel lost.

Passengers tend to have hidden agendas even though they
won’t always admit it. Sometimes the agenda is about changing the relationship (could be a mix of playing Florence Nightingale and trying to be the exception to the rule, or I Can Change Them), but it’s also often about catering to the self-fulfilling prophecy of negative and unrealistic beliefs.

Sometimes passengers try to be drivers or backseat drivers and get shot down. When they end the relationship or they get back together after the driver has promised that things will be different ‘this time’, they may actually feel like the driver.

In some instances, it can seem like it’s passenger/passenger – in effect, you’re both really messed up together, but you will find that under those layers, someone is actually the driver.

Most drivers and passengers are trying to be drivers – they have ‘ideas’ about how they want the relationship to be and try to steer it that way. There are some passengers who actually want to take a backseat role
and may be inclined to be victims or helpless.

Passengers and drivers have unhealthy relationship habits and are invariably emotionally unavailable, so until they address their issues, being a co-pilot in a mutually fulfilling healthy relationship is unlikely because they are not prepared to be honest and vulnerable enough to
risk a joint agenda. They forget that in a healthy relationship, each party is sharing the risk of being vulnerable to healthily emotionally engage and be authentic in the best interests of their own sense of self AND the relationship.

I’ve written before about why relationships don't always work out. Often, it’s because you are two potentially compatible people who may
be doing stuff that’s counterproductive. And that eventually ends up making you both incompatible, or because you’re actually incompatible, whether it’s because you’re two great people with different agendas due to your values, etc. or because it’s an unhealthy relationship.

It’s important to recognize that addressing issues in relationships needs to be co-piloted, too – you can’t work at something where another person has their foot out the door, has already moved on, or is in denial. When you leave a relationship that isn’t working for you, it’s because you recognize that your agendas cannot be a joint one.

If you want to establish a relationship on a good footing or quickly determine if you have a ‘driver’ on your hands, do not accept the default role of passenger. Rather, take an active role in shaping your relationship with partners. If you discover you’re involved with a driver, don’t burn up your life fuel trying to sort out what you think are their problems – address the issues that make you a passenger first.

In some instances, when you change, the driver may adapt as well.
But, you’re also likely to find that the relationship is no longer attractive because your mentality [perspective – rbd] has changed.

Basically always seek to be
a co-pilot with a co-pilot.

That is Relationships in a Nutshell.

http://www.baggagereclaim.co.uk/

  

Love and. . . Its Opposite

The Opposite of Love

(An Article by Jo Hilder)

I remember a few years ago there was a discussion in Christian circles about exactly what the opposite of love could be. If people are not being kind and loving, what exactly were they doing instead? What do they need to stop doing so they can start being loving, as we all know God is loving? What stops Christians, and those who aren’t Christians, from loving their neighbors, and anyone else in their world for that matter? What is this
key that might help Christians carry out 1John 4:7 – Let us love one another, for love comes from God – so we could potentially stop wars, cure poverty and just generally help people get along? The rest of this scripture actually tells us that everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Love makes us like Him, because He IS Love. Surely if we just did the opposite of whatever was preventing us from loving, we’d be heading in the right direction?

We’d all been assuming for ages that the opposite of love was hate. But then someone pointed out that you can hate someone and love someone at the same time, and that you can demonstrate hating behaviors directly towards someone you profess love for and vice versa. And we knew it was in fact possible to hold onto ones hate for someone or something and give all the outward appearances of love, or even to love just one sort of person and hate another sort for quite arbitrary reasons, if there were sufficient incentive to do so. So we stopped saying love and hate were opposites anymore, and resolved to just accept that in certain circumstances sometimes hating was unavoidable, and love impossible.

So after that, they said the opposite of love must be fear, because we only hate what we are afraid of, and once we know all about something and don’t fear it any more we are able to love it. For example, Christians were encouraged to learn about and understand varying religious practices and sexual expressions in the hope that this would lead to greater capacity to love the people engaged in them. But unfortunately, ‘others’ remained ‘others’ despite everything we knew about them, the only difference being that Christians now knew more about the people they hated and could object to them in more personal and informed ways than ever was previously possible. Fear, it seemed, could not be eradicated by love, but fear could be useful in helping us work out who God’s enemies were.

But then someone else said, no, it’s not fear that’s the opposite of love, it’s is actually indifference. And we all went “yeah…”, because we could
all relate to being on the receiving end of someone else’s total lack of positive regard, or any regard whatsoever, be it positive or negative. We appreciated that what people aren’t aware of, they can’t have any feelings toward – they can’t love what they don’t acknowledge. Christians understood indifference – we experienced it when we tried to tell the
world they were all dying in their sin and going to hell, and then refused
to come to church or know and appreciate our Lord and Savior.  

We were also well versed ourselves in demonstrating indifference toward people or issues we had no vested interest in changing or improving, or where we could effect no change favorable to our cause. We all agreed indifference had to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from love. The absence of any feeling or sentiment, empathy or interest in the other, whether feigned or inadvertent, surely had to be the opposite of what Jesus had in mind, except in the cases where one deliberately maintained one’s innocence, ignorance or naivety for reasons of maintaining good mental health or physical safety. We couldn’t be held responsible for loving those we went out of our way to avoid ever coming across in the first place.

Time has passed. The world is changing. Love in all its forms is needed now more than ever before. The older I get, the more I understand that the world, and by the world I mean the earth and all the people on it, has some fairly significant problems, and that I am one of them. I can tell you what I hate and what I’m afraid of, even though I know Christ teaches me to love, and tells me that love comes from God. I think about the pressing social issues in my part of the world and wonder at my own capacity for indifference when it comes to solving these issues, or even being part of the solution. I search for smiles. I stare into the blank expressions of the people around me in the street, and I think, surely, we are all as capable
of love, even small expressions of it, small acts of kindness, as we are of indifference, of fear, of hate?

There is no opposite of love. There is love, and you do, or you do not. It’s within us to do it, all the time, to everyone.  It’s how we were made. When it comes to how we were made to love, the gears work only in one direction, but at various speeds, including not at all if we so choose.
They don’t go backward. There’s no opposite to love. Hate, fear and indifference are different sets of gears, and let’s face it, running all your gears at once is exhausting; no wonder we pick only the ones that require least resistance. Hate and fear each pull from their own momentum, but move quickly once they get going; they feed off each other. Indifference gets busy and greases those gears. But love needs someone out
front to throw the propeller before it can even get off the ground. With love, you’re the mechanic, the pilot the navigator and the passenger. Love is harder work, but takes you much further, and
the view is better.

Why do we overcomplicate things? Does it help us in actually practicing love to think love has opposites? Or does it merely justify our own reasons for not doing it, or provide the ammunition to aim at someone else we think should be? I have been the recipient of an act of love perpetrated
by someone who lacks the capacity to tie their own shoes, directed at me for no other reason than I was present in the room. It’s not quantum physics. But maybe that’s where we go wrong.  Maybe it is. I mean, how many people in this world really get quantum physics? When you think about it, it apparently explains everything, but hardly anybody actually understands it.

If fear, hate and indifference figure anywhere in the love equation, it’s perhaps only to demonstrate what poor excuses they make for not doing it. The propensity for fear, hate and indifference to the plight of others might not indicate so much a lack of acting upon a motivation to love, but perhaps more a sign of a lack of being loved. If a fearful person were properly loved, would they be so afraid? If a hateful person were properly loved, might they be less threatened by the society of others? If an indifferent person were properly loved, might they be more willing to see the world through others eyes, on purpose?

Love is not so much the opposite of fear, hate and indifference as it is
the cure for it. People who are properly loved will not be afraid, hateful
or naive, and it’s our mission as Christians to love one another, because love comes from God. When we have learned how to be
loved properly by God ourselves, through Christ, we will release love’s alternatives, and seek to practice it at every opportunity. Our mission surely then as professors and disciples of Christ is to do what He did. Love people. And do it properly.

http://burnsidewriters.com/2011/11/04/the-opposite-of-love/