Let’s face it; we all experience this from time to time. That elephant in the room that everyone’s aware of, but no one wants to talk about. It could be the conversation you need to have with your parents, or with your child or spouse. It could be the talk that needs to happen between you and an employee or coworker. Whether it’s the big elephant or a bunch of small stuff that’s been swept under the rug for years… either way it’s encroaching on, and diminishing the intimacy and authenticity of your relationship.
So why are these very necessary conversations so hard to have? It’s our FEAR OF PAIN. Come on, nobody likes pain. Given the choice, we all choose comfort over confrontation. The very thought of having the conversation produces anxiety in us because our fear is, “this is not going to go well or end well”. That thought process is true for all of us, but that entire process happens in our head, and gets all twisted up with the worst possible outcome, which produces more anxiety. Mark twain said, “I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened”.
My experience is this, while they are difficult to have, the positive outcomes to these conversations far outweigh the rare negative ones. I can still remember getting the phone call from Kirsten saying, “We need to talk, I’m coming to pick you up”. GULP! I didn’t know what it was about, but I knew it couldn’t be good. I remember this sick feeling in my stomach waiting for her to arrive. I’ll save the details for another post, but suffice it to say, it was one of the toughest conversations of my life, but in the months following that conversation our relationship soared to new heights because of it.
Avoidance is the best short-term strategy to ensure long-term misery. Muster the courage, lay down the negative thoughts, and go have the conversation. Freedom is on the other end.
If it takes a while to remember the last time you were truly happy, something needs to change. You need to invest yourself and your life differently if you are unhappy. Rarely if ever does “life” bring happiness to an unhappy place. Unfortunately, when most of us start to look at what would make us happy, we immediately look for the quick/easy solution. Something needs to change and because our eyes happen to point outward, that’s usually where we focus first… Change my location, job, friends, hobby, spouse, etc.
Did you know that when a bone breaks and it heals, it becomes strongest at the point that it was broken? That’s amazing to me. You would think that that place would be the most vulnerable in the future, but it really becomes the sturdiest. (I can see God’s fingerprints all over that science!)
We have all heard how our relationship with our Dad has a lot to do with our relationship with God as our Heavenly Father. And in the vast majority of story’s I’ve heard the father son relationship has had a negative impact on their relationship with God. As you know, there are so many stories of betrayal, abuse, abandonment and just non-engaged silence.
To start over… To quit and begin again… to take a step backward to be able to take two forward. Whatever you call it, it’s hard to contemplate and even harder to do! Starting over seems so painful. For some reason there’s a sense of failure in that. You’ve got all this time, effort and energy that will literally go to waste if you start over, and for that reason most of us don’t or wont and our “pain” continues.
Your greatest gift to me is a beautiful package with three things in it; unconditional love, prayer and example.
This is still a little raw but it’s a great lesson I’ve recently learned and worth sharing. Easter Sunday should be a fairly peaceful day with family and friends, right… well not so much this year. Kirsten (my wife) and Brielle (my soon to be 13 year old daughter) had just got home from church and everything’s great. Brielle invites me into her room to show me a new poster she bought (Justin Bieber), and as she opens the door to her room she almost steps on her keyboard which is on the floor. I interrupt what we’re there for (seeing the poster) to tell her to find a better place to put the keyboard. She proceeds with the original purpose of why we’re there and doesn’t acknowledge my comment. This makes me feel there is a lack of respect, which results in my stern speech about respect, which brings her to tears.
There were many years when Kirsten and I lived paycheck to paycheck (many times worse than that) and while there was no immediate impact on the relationship, over time, very subtly, a tension occurs. There’s a stress and a heaviness that weighs on the relationship. Many years when I was not a good or consistent provider, I was creating a deficit in my wife’s trust in me. It was literally creating an emotional debt in our relationship. And when something good did happen (a monetary increase) we spent it on “something” that in some way medicated that tension or stress. While that increase could have been used to pay down debt or put in savings, it instead was used to make us feel better (temporarily). The fact was, the more financial stress, the more tension there was in the relationship, the more tension there was, the more isolation there was in our relationship, and the more isolation… the less ‘good’ communication there was. 
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