Take Your Life Back Read online

  We isolate

  Don’t stick around if you don’t have to. That’s the motto of the isolationist. People who fear abandonment will sometimes preemptively abandon the other person instead, either by moving out or by simply pulling away. Moving out might be the right thing to do if we’re not safe, but if it moves us toward greater isolation, it is not a step in the right direction. Some of us have become so ashamed of our lives that we stop letting anyone else in. It is a survival technique we learned in order to stay in control or stay alive.

  Sometimes our isolation from healthy relationships is the result of our being controlled by another person. We fall for this person’s explanation that he or she is only trying to protect us. We soon find ourselves separated from the very people who care about us and could help us. But rather than go back and reconnect, we continue to run away from them and cut them off when they try to reach out to us. We are on our own, alone in our pain and isolated from anyone who could offer us a path to freedom. We become fearful and self-doubting because there is no longer anyone healthy who is putting anything good into our lives. Our lives become secretive and obsessive, covered up and alienated from others. We become afraid of being known.

  “Well, if you really knew me, you may not like what you see.”

  In every sense, our lives have become completely unmanageable.

  Learned Helplessness

  Each of these behaviors and patterns is part of reactive living. They are not healthy responses that will move us toward healing. If anything, these unhealthy reactions move us further from hope and transformation. We developed these reactions as a means of staying alive. But now they simply keep us from living. Because they come so naturally to us, we may be unable to see (or may refuse to see) that these reactions are all we have left. Unless and until we start the process of restoration and healing, these reactive strategies are the only choices we have available.

  Reactive living eventually puts us in a state of learned helplessness. We feel trapped and unable to consider any healthy options. We reach a point where we are totally dependent on others to do for us whatever needs to be done. We are like children who need a caretaker to make decisions for us because we act as if we don’t know what to do. And even if we know what to do, we’re convinced that we’re not able to do it.

  Our final reaction is to live in hopelessness. When we believe that life is hopeless, our learned helplessness spurs us on to prove it every day. We set ourselves up for failure and aren’t surprised when that’s what we get. We continue to react out of shame and fear. We don’t choose; we react. Our flawed reactions to our pain create more pain to react to.

  The hope for breaking out of this cycle of learned helplessness is for life to become so bad that we sense a need to give it up and surrender to a different way of living. We start to realize that there has to be a better way. And after all we’ve done to defend our reactions, we start to move closer to allowing a power greater than ourselves to take control. That is our only hope—but it’s a good hope.

  5

  THE ORIGINS OF REACTIVE LIVING

  WE HAVE WORKED together as authors and coauthors of many books, and we have also edited three major Bible projects together. We have been friends through thick and thin, and we know each other and each other’s families very well. We have helped each other through situations involving divorce, a child with addiction, and all sorts of other issues that arise when two people live in close relationship for almost forty years. We started a counseling center together and have spent hours and hours together on New Life Live!, answering thousands of calls. Through all of that, we thought we knew just about everything there was to know about each other. But as we met to discuss the intricacies of this book project and what we’re trying to communicate here, we made a new discovery.

  We both detached from our families at an early age. I (David) can point to the age of six. Most people don’t even remember what they were doing when they were six, except for maybe having a birthday party or raising a pet. But I remember it well.

  My parents had given me a red Sheaffer mechanical pencil for my sixth birthday, and they told me not to take it out of the house for fear I would lose it—which is exactly what happened when I took it to a friend’s house to show him. When I told my mother that I had lost the pencil, I asked her not to tell my dad. I wanted to tell him myself when I was ready.

  One day, when he erupted about something, in his rage he made a point of telling me that my mother had violated my confidence and told him about the lost pencil. From that point on, I remember withdrawing from any emotional investment with my family. It was as if I became an “emotional orphan.”

  When I was sixteen, I gave my dad a red Sheaffer mechanical pencil for Christmas, thinking that the time when I had lost my birthday present ten years earlier had been important to him. But he never recognized the significance of that gift, which only deepened my feelings of alienation from him.

  This father-wound was finally healed in my life when I was in my forties. Steve knew about it, but he had never heard me talk about such an early age of detachment from my family.

  I (Steve) did the same thing around the age of thirteen, when I “moved out” emotionally from my family. This was more than a typical act of individuation or the establishment of a separate identity from my family. I had a growing sense about my family that we were five very different strangers living under the same roof. I was related to them by blood only.

  The connection at home was so thin that I looked for connection, attachment, and belonging anywhere else I could find it. I never brought my friends to the house, but I spent hours at the home of my best friend, Cliff, who was being raised by a very loving and caring mother after the death of Cliff’s father. In many ways, I felt more related to Cliff than my own brothers and more comfortable at Cliff’s house than my own.

  When I was in high school, I started dating a wonderful, steady girlfriend, who had an exciting and adventure-filled family life. She and I did a little television show together, and we became very close. I felt much more like a part of her family than my own, and I longed to be at her house and with her parents. It was all a reaction against the rigid rules in my own family and the absence of a meaningful connection at home. My father, who had been raised by a John Wayne–type Texan, did not understand how to connect with his family or that connecting was even a goal. My mother had a very difficult time dealing with the loss of her father, which had happened when I was very young. My reaction to their parenting was to detach myself and go it alone.

  When David told me that he had felt like a stranger in his own home, that was exactly how I had felt for years, and yet we had never shared that with each other.

  Though we both reacted to our home life growing up with the same detachment, these reactions developed along very different paths. My (Steve’s) journey out of high school and into college left me searching for attachment and connection wherever I could find it—most often with a girlfriend. I felt incomplete if I wasn’t dating someone. I ended up in a lot of superficial relationships, often getting involved sexually as a way of feeling that I was wanted and that I belonged to someone. I never saw it as reactive living. I saw it as a normal way of life that any young man would choose. But I didn’t realize that it wasn’t entirely a choice. I had become trapped, and essentially owned, by my reactive attachments to the family I didn’t feel attached to.

  I (David) dated a lot in high school, but I was seen as being very detached. I might date a girl once or twice, but that was all. Then I met Jan, and we got married a month after I turned twenty. It has been in the context of my marriage that I’ve had to work out my issues of living reactively. In a sense, Jan and I had to finish growing up together. We call the first ten years of our marriage “the great tribulation.” It wasn’t until after I began to receive mentoring from an older man that things took a turn for the better.

  Reactive Living

  Before we look more closely at the
origins of reactive living, we want to clarify exactly what we are talking about. Reactive living takes many forms, but it is often rooted in the lack of healthy attachments from an early age, which typically occurs when we don’t bond and attach properly with our parents or early caregivers.

  It isn’t very comfortable being a reactive person. We are always on alert for the next slight, insult, or threat that will trigger a reaction from us. When we can go from experiencing a little nirvana one moment to unleashing a full rage the next, it’s no wonder we just want to keep the peace. Reactive people are easily overcome or overtaken by deep emotions—not because we choose to be but because we have so many triggers that are pulled by the people closest to us.

  When we’re triggered, we don’t take time to sort through our thoughts. We have a set of reactions all lined up and ready to gush forth. We have perfected our reactions, refining the aspects of our behavior that don’t push back hard enough or are ineffective in getting the person who pulled our trigger to walk away. Rather than think through the consequences of anything we might say, we fire a barrage of words that will most likely hurt the other person and deflect the focus away from ourselves and the real problem. Without any consideration, a stream of internal thoughts comes pouring out onto the other person:

  “You are the problem.”

  “You know nothing.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You are so stupid.”

  “No wonder you’re such a loser.”

  On and on we go, spewing thoughts that should never have been revealed, but there they are for everyone to hear and judge.

  When triggered, we also fail to process our feelings. We don’t know precisely what we’re feeling, but it’s not good. We lash out and fling our feelings as they arise:

  “I hate you.”

  “You disgust me.”

  “I’m tired of listening to you.”

  “You make me miserable.”

  “I can’t stand being near you.”

  It’s what we feel, and we think we have the right to get it out there. But it’s a sad form of adult bullying to use our feelings as a means to knock others down and push them away.

  Reactive people play the game of life more like checkers than chess. We think one move at a time. If I react to your move, you’ll react to mine. We don’t think three or four moves ahead, as a chess player would, because we’re reacting, not thinking or planning. We simply go with our first instinct, which is most likely defensiveness, projection, blame, and shame. And if that barrage is not enough force to punish the other person, we will continue to find new ways to bring him or her under control. Rarely do we see anything other than our right to defend and deflect. We are in survival mode, and like any wild animal, we attack when we feel endangered. But we don’t realize that we’ve surrendered our humanity and our freedom.

  Reacting Like a Baby

  In 1987, psychologists Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver published the results of their study of how adults act, react, and respond in romantic relationships, based in part on John Bowlby’s research with infants on attachment, separation, and loss.[21] Hazan and Shaver found interesting correlations to Bowlby’s findings about the ways that babies acted, reacted, and responded with caregivers who cared for them, inconsistently cared for them, or neglected them. They concluded that, while not all romantic relationships are based on or produce these childlike characteristics, most do. We can examine these traits of romantic love to evaluate the health of our adult romantic relationships.

  Do you feel safe in the arms of the person you love?

  Babies calm down and relax, showing that they feel safe and secure, when their caregiver is in close proximity and responds to their needs and signs of delight. In a healthy romantic relationship, adults feel safe, have lower anxiety, and enjoy the experience of the one they love being close and responsive.

  It seems obvious that there would be some parallels between healthy baby-to-caregiver relationships and healthy adult romantic relationships. But many people have not experienced either one; rather than feeling safe in the arms of their spouse, they may feel controlled, anxious, or even terrified. Some people feel these unsettling emotions while dating and yet move forward with the relationship anyway. This could be because of feelings of unworthiness or because they have become so accustomed to being uncomfortable in their close relationships that they associate the feelings with belonging or attachment.

  When we can step back and see that we have entered into a relationship that is not calming or soothing, or when a relationship develops into something destructive, we come to understand that we are not free and that we have not made a free, objective choice of a partner who would be good for us. In reaction to earlier neglect or inconsistent attention, we may have been driven to seek the familiarity of an uncomfortable relationship or to attach ourselves to anyone who would have us.

  Do you engage in enjoyable close, intimate bodily contact with the one you love?

  Babies thrive on close, intimate bodily contact with their caregivers. In a healthy adult romantic relationship, people are drawn to each other and engage in close, intimate bodily contact such as holding hands, hugging, kissing, and cheek-to-cheek proximity.

  In romantic relationships, we are drawn to bodily contact, and much of it arises from sexual attraction. But in a truly healthy romance, we are able to show restraint. If we are desperate, we may act on our urges and become sexually involved before marriage. But this makes it difficult to navigate the other aspects of the relationship in a healthy way. Often, premarital sex is a desperate attempt to force attachment on the other person. Sexual involvement can be a reaction to a fear of being alone and isolated, which may have its roots in our infancy. In our experience, couples who are highly sexually active before marriage often wind up not wanting close, intimate bodily contact at some point after marriage. Separate beds, separate bedrooms, separate houses, and eventually separation and divorce replace the desire to be close. If we were making free and healthy life decisions, we never would have made some of the choices we’ve made. But we were not operating in freedom. We were driven by early life events that skewed our attractions and attachments.

  If sexual activity is the primary attachment or bond between two people, marriage will tend to nullify its impact over time, and the attraction will die. A healthy relationship may start with a love for close physical contact, but it must move beyond the purely physical to provide satisfaction and sustainability.

  Do you feel a little insecure when the one you love is not near you or responsive to you?

  Babies show signs of distress, suggesting insecurity, when their caregiver is either out of sight and inaccessible or else unresponsive to actions that indicate needs or enjoyment. Adults in romantic relationships love being together, and they find it unpleasant and feel insecure when the other person is not accessible.

  Though it’s normal to feel a little insecure when people we love are away, because they are so much a part of us, in unhealthy relationships we may feel terrified. We become afraid they may not return, or we fear what they might do while they are away. We may even be afraid of what we might do while separated. Another possible reaction is relief. The relationship may be so sick that we love our time apart more than our time together. We might react by leaving, taking off because we are so uneasy with being in close proximity to the person who is supposed to bring comfort, joy, and fulfillment.

  Do you love sharing discoveries about yourself, the other person, and your world?

  Babies seem to enjoy sharing discoveries such as new sounds or new objects with their caregivers. In healthy adult romantic relationships, both partners love to share discoveries about themselves and their world with the other person.

  When our romantic relationships are not healthy, our fear of rejection, retaliation, or ridicule can cause us to go from openly sharing insights about ourselves and our relationship with each other to protecting ourselves,
hiding, covering up, and becoming secretive. Alternatively, our loved one may know just what to say or do to draw us out and win us over, but once we have revealed ourselves, we see the flip side to his or her personality, and we find that we are not free to explore or express ourselves honestly.

  In a healthy relationship, the whole world opens up to us because we have someone to share it with. We love to travel, go antiquing, or go exploring because we enjoy discovering new things together. But relational dysfunction restricts our world and binds us to the old, the sad, and the other person’s control.

  Do you show a fascination and mutual preoccupation with the one you love?

  Babies and caregivers play with each other’s facial features and exhibit a mutual fascination and preoccupation with each other. Adults in healthy romantic relationships also do something similar.

  Fascination is replaced by frustration when we are trapped in a sick relationship. What preoccupies us now is how quickly someone who once seemed to hang on every word we spoke gets hung up on almost anything we say or do. Once, it seemed we could do no wrong, but now we question, evaluate, and second-guess everything we do or intend to do. And we seldom seem to get it right. Partners who are weak and insecure feel the need to prove us wrong at every turn in order to show themselves that they still have power. But they don’t. They’ve simply found a way to tap into our weakness and trap us in their prison. The irony is that we gave them the keys and helped them click the lock shut. Our sickness has entrapped us and convinced us that we don’t deserve to have our own lives. But we need to take our lives back.