Bringing It All Together 14: Broken Attachment & Blatant Conflict

How about this scenario?

Alex and Judy (from yesterday) are non-confrontational. They are brewers, not spewers. But Susan and Joe are fighters. There is a lot of anger and yelling in their house. Joe’s blasting attempt to confront Susan with his disappointment is met with angry accusation and slammed doors. “Well if you hadn’t ____, I could have done something! What do you expect when you come at me like that?!”

When someone says “I LOVE CONFLICT,” what it often means is that they rush into disagreement powerfully in order to win… in order to NOT deal with their OWN fears and failures. Anger is a mask for something else.

Are Alex and Judy any better off than Susan and Joe? As far as attachment is concerned, is confrontational anger fundamentally different than passive hiding and pretending peace? Both have deeply developed ways of hiding their deeper emotions.

And yet, we often think that conflict is bad and needs to be avoided, while “not fighting” is better. Sometimes the opposite is true. If two people are fighting, they are showing that they CARE about the relationship. They are protesting the fact that they feel disconnected, even if they have no idea that’s what’s really true. When you see that intensity, you have two people who WANT to be connected, and haven’t figured out how. They are running in circles around a pattern they don’t see, but they are intense because they want it to work. If you DON’T want a relationship to work, you don’t get intense. You get indifferent.

Bringing It All Together 13: Broken Attachment & Veiled Conflict

Yesterday I wrote about adult attachment, which is a term for a God-given human desire to connect deeply with others. Today I’m suggesting that a broken attachment is a key element of what fuels relational conflict.

When there is conflict in relationships, we often think that there is a breakdown in understanding. That if both sides could really understand the intentions of the other, then there would be no problem. But if you think in terms of attachment, the problem is often not a lack of intellectual understanding between people. It’s that you are talking on two different planes.

Consider this scenario:

Judy come to her husband Alex and says, “That really hurt my feelings.” And Alex proceeds to explain to Judy why she misunderstood him…. “Well, honey, I said that because…” or “What I really meant is…” Can you see how these two are talking at two different levels? She is sharing about her heart, and he is addressing her head. Alex thinks that if Judy just understood why he said what he did, then she won’t feel hurt. Their conversation lasts two sentences and they quickly retreat into their own thoughts.

Alex walks away thinking “I’m so glad we cleared that up.”

Judy walks away thinking “He didn’t hear me at all. That’s the same thing that happened last time. And the time before…” Bitterness, hopelessness, and indifference grow slowly over time. Judy stops talking to Alex. They settle into their mundane, everyday, disconnected lives.

You see, in order for Alex and Judy to be connected, they need to deal with the HURT. The point is not what Alex did or didn’t do. Judy still feels hurt and longs for Alex to connect with her pain. But because Alex doesn’t see what’s in his black box, he doesn’t know how to emotionally connect with her. Because of Alex’s story, it scares the bejeezus out of him to think about emotional pain. It is buried WAY deep in his black box. So what does Alex do? He means well. He really does. But he only knows how to look for something to DO.

By the way, this is not a knock on Alex, or men in general. Women can be just as clueless, even if more “emotional,” and just as committed to staying as FAR the (!!bleep!!) away from their black box as men are. (So tomorrow, I’ll turn the tables.)

Bringing It All Together 12: Relational Attachment

At this point in my summary series, I’m turning to what goes wrong in relationships. As a pre-cursor to this post, go back and read the following two posts, that explain childhood and adult attachment.

Childhood attachment

Adult attachment

When relationships are done right, both people experience “attachment.” Of course there are different levels of relationship, so we see this most significantly in parent-child relationships, and in the marriage relationship. Attachment is just a fancy term for what we all experience as true: We long to be deeply connected in human relationships. I wrote about this earlier as well: Because God is relational (has connected relationships within the Trinity), and we are made in His image, craving human connection is part of our God-given design. We see this with babies and their moms from the first moments after birth, and we experience this hunger until the day we die.

Another key aspect of attachment is that it is experienced EMOTIONALLY. You don’t just want to share information with your spouse or close friend—you want to feel that they heard you and value you. You don’t want your spouse to just intellectually agree that you have shared factual truths. You want to feel understood, respected, and loved. Before you remark this sounds too touchie-feelie, remember that God is an emotional being who experiences anger, pain, joy, hunger, loss, loneliness, etc… Thus, the experience of these emotions is a significant part of what it means to be HUMAN.

Attachment in marriage is about you asking your spouse, at a deep heart level, Are you there for me? Laying this emotional foundation of human interaction, tomorrow I’ll unpack what often goes wrong when there is conflict. Oh yes, come back tomorrow. I positively THRIVE on conflict!! (Where the "I'm being sarcastic now" button?)

Meet My New Niece Taylor :)

Here is my new niece, Taylor, who I met for the first time this last weekend in Houston :)


















Taylor and her friend Bubba

































I got 2 days all by myself with her, her sister Aubrey, my brother Aaron and sister-in-law Kristen! Unfortunately there are no pics of the adults... but that's how it goes when there are cute babies:)














And here is big sister Aubrey... it's been awhile since I had a 2 year old :)
We played and played and played!






































On Friday Kathryn & Ellie arrived to meet Taylor too...
Ellie with Taylor...



















Taylor & Aubrey. What a sweet disposition little Taylor has... except for about 3-5am, right Kristen?



















K with Taylor... K calls Taylor her "consonant cousin." Before Taylor, K was concerned that she was the only cousin whose name did not begin with a vowel... (Ellie, Aubrey, Ethan, Elise, Emma, Allison)... Who would have thought of this besides K?



















All the girlie cousins...















Ellie with Aubrey



















On Friday night, we had dinner at my Aunt Karen's house (my mom's sister) who hosted us all, and it became the event for the unveiling of the summer dresses. You see, K and my mom began a sewing project together (and we know who did most of the work!) to make matching dresses for the 4 of them. Aren't they cute?

























































































Wish all the cousins could have been there! The girls had so much fun :)

Bringing It All Together 11: The Stuff Below the Line (but wait, there's more!)

Black Box Special #4: ANGER

(For an explanation of the black box, see the "Human Person Box" post below.

Anger is often the presenting emotion when there is ungrieved pain. Why? Because the experience of anger often shuts off the feeling of pain.

Think for a moment about how you respond when someone is angry with you. Usually one of two ways—you fight back (counter-attack) or you run away (remove yourself, or just emotionally check out.)

Though usually unaware, another’s anger can shield from the pain or fear of a deeper conversation. If am I angry with you and you run away from me, well that’s your fault. And if I am angry with you and you lash out at me… again, your fault.

I’m not saying there isn’t a legitimate, good anger. We often hear the analogy of Jesus overturning the moneychanger’s tables. We can be righteously angry when there is injustice against the oppressed or lack of regard for the needs of others. But often, our anger points to something else. The person who you are angry with touched something inside you. There is another emotion, and often another story, attached to your anger. There’s a lot more there to investigate.

Once DZ said that anger is the beginning of the forgiveness process. Before you own why you are angry and how angry you are, you cannot begin forgiving an offense. You might confess and quote verses all the day long, but if you haven’t come to grips with your anger, your forgiveness will be shallow and likely short-lived. But again, anger is the BEGINNING of the process of forgiveness. There is a LOT MORE down there (in the black box) than just anger. Keep digging to see what’s under it and you will usually find pain or shame.

It can be a big mistake to emphasize forgiveness first when listening to someone process an offense. (And usually an emphasis on forgiveness results from a fear of anger.) Forgiveness and reconciliation IS the ultimate goal. But before a person allows themselves to name their anger, they don’t know what their losses are. Before an offense is named, there is nothing to forgive.

Not every person needs the same encouragement, however. There are people who get so good at being angry that they are stuck there. This person probably hasn’t really dug under the anger enough to see what is underneath. And there are people who feel ashamed of their anger, and need to be shown the good and righteous elements of naming wrong.

In both examples, a good counselor is sometimes an ambassador of anger. Not as an end, but unto an honest, fully owned look at pain and the impact it has had.

To Think On Over the Weekend

A quote to chew on over the weekend and back on Monday with black box special #3: ANGER

"The work of restoration cannot begin until a problem is fully faced."
— Dan B. Allender

And think of the girls and I today as we head from Houston to Colorado... I'm so ready to see my hubby after 18 days!!

Bringing It All Together 10: Stuff Below the Line (still more)

Here's one of my favorites...

Black Box Special #2: ANXIETY

This is a fun one, isn't it? Anxiety is a special kind of fear that doesn't know what it's afraid of. Fear is specific. You are afraid of something particular--spiders, or closed spaces, or heights. But anxiety? You are blind while it eats you up!

Acute anxiety can be adaptive. You are being chased, so you run. God made your body with lungs and running muscles that can kick into overdrive when you are threatened. But chronic anxiety... it can be a killer. Continual high levels of stress hormones can eat away at your stomach (ulcers), cause tense muscles that can never relax, cause headaches, heart palpatations, and a garden variety of other health problems! These symptoms are often God-given signals from you body-- PAY ATTENTION, PAY ATTENTION, PAY ATTENTION.

Like pain, the first step of growth for an anxious person starts with awareness. When you feel anxiety, can you say so? Or do you rush to fill all the available space with internet, computer games, numbing entertainment?

Anxiety works like a thermostat. Consider this scenario. The whole family knows the unwritten rule: Bob (dad) can't handle a messy house. When Bob walks through the door and sees the kids toys all over the floor, he breathes a heavy sigh and slams down the newspaper. No words were spoken. But everyone got the message. The thermostat has just kicked in. Bob's anxiety rises, and the family kicks into action. Mom apologizes for their mess and talks about how busy the day has been. The kids wisk the toys away. Notice the reason for the activity. Not in order to clean the mess. But so that Bob will calm down. Bob's anxiety, unnamed, is unequivocally driving all the members of this family.

All of us experience anxiety. But one way to see how you may or may not be growing in this area is to ask what you do with it. When you feel anxious does it incapacitate you? Do you run (literally or figuratively?) eat? check your email? attack? Or can you stop and say, "I feel anxious. Let me stop and think. What's going on in me? My reaction is not really equal to what happened. Why is that? Yes, I'm anxious, but I can still make a wise choice here... The anxiety may still be present, but it doesn't win.

Bring the Lord into your anxiety struggle, and he WILL answer those prayers to show you what's really going on down there in your black box.