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Relational Tri-Umph

AuthorHouse

Contents

Foreword..............................................................................ixChapter 1: Struck by Stress...........................................................1Chapter 2: Our Most Important Needs...................................................9Chapter 3: Three Stress Roles.........................................................21Chapter 4: Codependency...............................................................43Chapter 5: Shame and Abuse............................................................51Chapter 6: The Observer...............................................................67Chapter 7: The Strategist.............................................................73Chapter 8: The Implementer............................................................81Chapter 9: Boundaries and Interdependency.............................................89Chapter 10: Emotional Energy..........................................................103Chapter 11: Looking It Over...........................................................117Chapter 12: Continuum of Stress Roles.................................................121Chapter 13: Above and Beyond..........................................................133Chapter 14: God verses God............................................................139Conclusion............................................................................145Appendix A: The Role of Forgiveness in Your Life......................................147Appendix B: Discovering Your Ideal Self...............................................157Appendix C: Ten Basics for Effective Communication....................................163Appendix D: Preparing for Confrontation and Reconciliation............................167Appendix E: Reconciliation Tools for Lingering Issues of the Past.....................169

Chapter One

We want relationships, and yet we experience disappointment and pain in them. We long to be fulfilled through our interactions with those we love, but sometimes we end up feeling drained and distant. There seems to be no getting around it. Relationships are wonderful and stressful. For example, most marriages begin with joy, contentment, and a view of a bright future together. But for many couples, those wonderful feelings subside and the relationship becomes a crumbling mess. Parenting is another form of relationship that starts off with broad smiles and glowing hearts, yet can turn into a long list of chores, battles, and sometimes a crisis. Or perhaps you recall what it's like to begin a new job, feeling like the bright star on the team and bringing joy to your boss. Soon enough something goes wrong, the "honeymoon" is over, and you are scrambling to figure out how to manage the damaged relationship with your boss or colleagues.

My goal in this book is to help you learn about yourself while under stress and guide you through steps that can transform your way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Essentially, I want to help you find fulfillment in your most important relationships even when things aren't going well or you are under some form of stress. The stress may be as plain as feeling distant and fatigued in your relationship, or perhaps a list of complicated and unresolved conflicts stand between you and the other person. Or the stress could be related to addictions, betrayal, or abuse. Whatever the difficulty is, it's getting in the way of your desired outcome for that relationship.

Not every stress on a relationship is directly relational. Unemployment, health problems, and financial difficulties are examples of outside stressors that can easily affect our interactions with those around us. At some point in life, we all will encounter stress of unusual proportions. And when that happens, we will likely find ourselves wondering what to do about the significant impact this has on our relationships. How can we fix the problem? How can we get others to understand our pain? We want to know what techniques to use in order to navigate these troubled waters successfully and emerge intact. And sometimes, just when we think things should be getting better, they take a turn for the worse. These events can have an altering effect on our most important relationships.

Not all stress is bad, but there are certainly times when the strain of life places a burden on our dearest relationships. No one wants that to happen, but it does, and this book will help you find your way through those tough times. In reading it you will learn how to gauge the impact of hardship and stress on you and your family, friends, and colleagues.

When we go through deeply troubled times, those around us end up wearing pieces of our hardship. And vice versa. In fact, it is a good and humanly decent thing to carry one another's burdens. When this occurs effectively, people can traverse their hardship with greater ease and rebound more quickly. For example, a young man was in deep trouble with the law, and he feared telling anyone about it, even his mom. When he finally took the risk of disclosing his crime to her, he discovered that she was not contemptuous at all, but in fact supported and cared for him throughout the ordeal. The response of this mother takes skill and finesse that some people don't have. They end up reacting harmfully instead of helping carry the burden together.

Occasionally our burdens are collective in nature, belonging not to one individual but to a "system" of people—the marriage, the family, the staff at work, and so on. Ideally, when the burden is distributed among many, we can expect it will be reduced in size and intensity, but that's not always the case. In fact, when a dark season of life occurs, involvement of the wrong person can actually multiply the weight of the burden. A relationship with someone you were once close with can be jeopardized if that person is ill-equipped for the task of burden-sharing. Just when you need each other the most, you discover that the closeness is adding to the complexity of the relationship or even tearing it apart.

This book is meant to give you reasons to hope again, to help you find inner calm, and to provide you with practical insights and tools for developing relationships that can be truly fulfilling—especially during times of storm. In these pages you will encounter

• A deeper understanding of the influence of stress on your key relationships. • A realization of your most typical way of responding to extraordinary stress, and an ability to spot the natural bent in other people as they are faced with stress as well. • A sincere hopefulness to survive the difficulties of stress in relationships, plus practical tools that will help you implement new behaviors and create the kind of relationships you want. • Spiritual insights that can help in the transformation of your most important relationships.

I want to share a few important observations before we delve into the details of this book. These are best illustrated by what I encountered while on my way to the secluded location where I worked on this manuscript. Here is the story.

I was heading to the Whiteshell, a gorgeous manifestation of nature where the Canadian prairie highways turn into twisting roads among the forests and lakes of this spectacular country....