When Relationships Fall Apart: 3 Tips For Reengaging Relationally
Life is an amazing and sometimes disturbing series of twists and turns. One moment you can be cruising down the highway with few problems and feeling like things are really starting to click. Suddenly, you hit a bump in the road that destroys the front end of your car and you’re sitting in the ditch waiting for a tow truck.
Nowhere is this more true than in our relationships. You start a new friendship. It looks promising. All the signs are good—you like the same food, you enjoy the same artists, you get each other’s humor, and conversations are easy and sometimes deep. Over time you really start to build something. Then one day they ghost you. Texts go unanswered and phone calls are not returned. The next time you see that person, it’s like you barely know each other. You feel disoriented, silly, and if you’ll admit it, wounded. You start to wonder if this whole relationship thing is worth the effort.
As a result of all of this, it becomes the norm to jump from one relationship to another while always keeping a level of distance to protect yourself from more pain. Unfortunately, that distance and constant relational change has consequences to your emotional development as a human being. Bestselling author and teacher John Bevere has a fantastic illustration about this:
When people are always jumping around relationally it’s like a young tree that gets planted and then uprooted to move it somewhere else. The first time you uproot the tree it’s difficult but trees are resilient enough to recover. If you keep uprooting and moving that tree from place to place, pretty soon the tree will lose its ability to thrive and it will be stunted in its growth. The tree that is continually uprooted doesn’t develop a deep root system and as a result never reaches its full potential. It will never mature to become the tree it was intended to be and will never bear the fruit it could have.5
Similarly, humans are not designed to be continually uprooted, and yet our society has become increasingly transient—not just geographically but relationally too. We’ve developed a cancel culture that causes us to end relationships with people we don’t agree with or who don’t view the world the way we do. When we bounce from one relationship to another, we don’t develop the deep roots of maturity that are needed to reach our fullest potential as people. If things get difficult or painful, we can simply move on, but moving on removes the process needed for us to develop the muscle necessary to persevere in a relationship and find the gold yet untapped. We become stunted and unable to have the kinds of conversations and long-term commitment necessary to go to the deep places of intimacy that we long for as humans.
In essence, we live in pseudo-community—technologically connected but emotionally distant, with shallow relationships, unknown, disconnected, impeded in our growth as healthy humans, and lost in a sea of artificial connections.
(Excerpt from the book, Unknown-finding connection in a disconnected world)
Questions for Reflection
-Have you ever been cancelled or ghosted? How did you respond—with anger, shame, sadness, fear, confusion, negative self-talk, or something else?
-What is your go-to response when someone hurts you—isolation, blame shifting, walking away, defensiveness, or something else?
-Reflect on a time you got surprised by relational pain. What do you think might have helped you in that season?
-Describe a time you saw someone not maturing because they didn’t build deep relational roots but instead moved on too quickly. What could you learn from that?
3 tips for reengaging relationally
- Remember that relational breakdowns between adults always have fault on both sides. People tend to fall into two categories when it comes to relational pain–one group blames themselves and the other group blame-shifts to the other person. Neither of these are helpful. When you only blame yourself you end up in a tarpit of shame and depression. When you only blame the other person you end up learning nothing and will only repeat your same mistakes over and over.
- Reflect–if you lean toward blaming yourself, reflect on what the other person might have done wrong and give yourself a break. If you lean toward blaming others, reflect on what you could own and make some adjustments.
- Remember, this is not the only relationship in your life. Talk with someone you trust and respect and ask them to give you perspective on what you could potentially do differently going forward. Also, remember, this relational hiccup is not your last relationship but it could be the one that teaches what you need to know to make your next one your best one.
Bio:
Keith Spurgin is a retired pastor of New Hope Christian in Wylie, TX, an author, an international speaker, and the founder of Growth Resourcing Group – an organization dedicated to helping leaders, pastors, and small business owners lead better than ever. www.keithspurgin.net
