Conflict In Relationships?

There is a direct correlation between relationship conflict and negative emotions. We were designed for love and intimacy. Sadly, many of us were not given healthy forms of love. So we enter relationships with baggage full of skewed love systems and unmet needs expecting the other person to meet our emotional needs. However, since unhealthy people tend to attract unhealthy individuals into their lives who enter the relationship with their own emotional baggage – unmet needs and skewed forms of love expecting us to love them as they think they should be loved – it’s a great recipe for emotional pain and conflict. People enter relationships with all kinds of learned negative patterns of behavior to deal with relationship conflict.


The truth is we will never be able to enjoy healthy mutually satisfying relationships until we deal with the issues of our own heart. When we can identify the cause of our emotional pain, we can then process the effects they have on our life, and we can stop blaming others, take ownership of our negative feelings and behaviors and stop allowing others to control our emotions.

People are not responsible for the way they make us feel. Understanding and accepting this enables us to let others off the hook and give them permission to take ownership of their feelings and stop blaming us for how they feel. Jesus heals and restores one heart at a time.

It’s Not About You

People we love and care about sometimes mistreat us, say unkind things to us or about us, verbally or physically abuse us, neglect, ignore, betray, reject, or abandon us. Our first reaction is almost always to personalize it. Please understand that people’s negative behaviors are not about us and everything to do with what is going on inside of them.

We cannot react by taking ownership of their negative junk when they act out of their own unhealthy patterns that we are not responsible for.

What we can do is take ownership and responsibility for our own junk, ask for forgiveness when applicable, and impose healthy boundaries to protect ourselves from allowing their actions to hurt us physically, spiritually, or emotionally.  To do otherwise just gives unhealthy people way too much power in our lives. And last time I checked, only God is allowed to have that kind of power over my life.

We can’t make people’s problems our problems. When we do that, they own us! They will live rent free in our heads. They will consume us. And that only leads to bitterness, anger and resentments robbing us of our joy, peace and sanity.

 

“Above all else, guard your heart for out it flows the issues of life.”

Proverbs 4:23