Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
I finally have enough emotional space in my life to continue my conversation about the conflicting needs in my marriage. I will first restate my perspective on emotions so you can understand my explanations (whether or not you agree).
(ONE WAY TO MAKE TRUTH A LIE)
No one likes unpleasant feelings, and so we all try to escape them. I think that is actually their purpose–like bodily pain that alerts us to physical harm, emotional pain alerts us to psychological harm, though it is the source of the pain rather than the pain itself that needs to be addressed. In other words, our unpleasant emotions are valuable and beneficial in protecting us. But since they hurt, we want to avoid the feelings themselves, and when Christians teach that such feelings are wrong, we believe we ought to avoid them: fear is a lack of faith, sadness is a lack of joy, despair is a lack of hope, anger is a lack of love, and so on. Not only do you feel bad, but you are wrong for feeling bad. As a result many of us have tried to directly control our emotions as a moral obligation, “get over” our weak and “sinful” feelings, talk ourselves into feeling better by controlling our conscious thoughts with “truth.” My own perspective is that when truth is wrongly applied it is simply another form of untruth.
Talking down our feelings may work with superficial and circumstantial emotions (ones which do not connect to deeper underlying issues). But if they are revealing more profound issues, I believe this approach waylays our attempts at growing more mature and healthy, like using aspirin to fight migraines that come from a brain tumor. I think we undermine our growth whenever we disrespect our own feelings (through denial, dismissal, shaming, etc.). As long as our coping mechanisms successfully distance us from our true, unhappy feelings, we are unlikely to recognize and work through our big issues.Coping mechanisms can be more addictive and blinding than pain killers when they are habitually used as the answer to our pain.
Neither Kimberly nor I would have faced our painful feelings if we could have successfully avoided them. I have numerous coping mechanisms: redoubled effort, procrastination, comparing myself to others, busyness, self-castigation & repentance, fixing, passing blame, detailed planning, control… and I could go on. Unfortunately, all these combined could not protect me from those unwanted feelings. I needed help. I needed to find a spouse that would shore up my inadequate defensive arsenal, someone who would be so sweet and supportive and gracious that I could find peace and security at last. I was sure I had found this in Kimberly.Kimberly had spent her life hiding her true feelings from others because she quickly learned the world did not like her unhappy feelings. She badly needed someone to accept her fully as she was, and she found that in me, or so she thought. I had very little discomfort with her depression and felt honored that she would share with me these vulnerable parts of herself. She discovered that she could trust me to accept all of who she is.
But as we grew closer and more fully knew each other, as we grew in trust and shared more vulnerably, our conflicting coping strategies poked out. 
To protect myself against this assault, my coping mechanisms kicked in, and when she smacked against my defenses, she put up a wall. I would feel blamed and shame her in defense. She would withdraw into self-protective silence or try to explain her words in ways that simply hurt me further. The tension escalated, and all we knew to do was to keep talking it out… for hours… for days… for months and years.
We were committed to the relationship and to honestly working through our issues, we respected and loved one another adamantly, so our only way forward was to try to understand the painful dynamics. I explained myself over and over to Kimberly and she asked questions and tried to understand. She told me about herself, repeating the same confusing messages week after week while I struggled to make sense of it. Our way was slow, painful, scary, confusing, but we found ourselves on a journey of deep self discovery and healing wounds. We were constantly dumbstruck by this unexpected dynamic–that understanding and sharing our pain with someone who loved and accepted us was so amazingly transformational and life-giving.
I have been struggling more with depression in the last few weeks and it deflates my energy for social media. I kept trying to process the feelings because it always helps me work through to a better place if I can identify the source of my emotions, but I could get nowhere with it, so I used busyness as an alternative escape. I think I have finally identified the source… Kimberly’s discouragement at work. Not only do I suffer because she suffers, but both of us continue to be inspired by the L’Arche vision (even though I resigned a year and a half ago) and we have kept hope alive that this L’Arche community would find its way through the turmoil to a place of genuine L’Arche living. With Kimberly now having doubts after hanging in there so long, it is the slow death of our dreams for a community that embraces weakness as a core value. This is why we moved to Lynchburg in the first place, and it leaves a sense of emptiness, uncertainty, pain, loss.
This was my written prayer over not missing, but just delaying my morning visit with God. Welcome to a world where grace is in short supply. (Notice the date, this was well before I awakened to full grace.)
07/07/97
Lord, forgive me for failing to spend time with you this morning. I was caught up once again in doing other things, working on the day’s tasks instead of spending time with you. Lord my heart is so prone to wander and so quick to forget and turn aside. Oh, God make me sensitive to hear your voice. To crush the voice of my flesh crying out so loudly all day and all night. Let me learn to die to that voice. To live only to you. To take my pleasure only in giving you pleasure. To cast out all darkness, however pretty, from my heart like it is the entrance of Satan into my heart, for it is. Who can tell where the end of evil is once it enters the heart–for even after repentance and forgiveness it continues its evil work in me and in others, sending out wave after wave of evil from that one initial act. What fools we are to think we can measure our own sins. If we added all the evil up which comes from one sin alone, we would find it the mother of countless and terrible demons roaming the earth to devour all good.
We confess a sin quickly, spoken and forgotten. We said an unkind word to a brother. Out of discouragement from that word, he fails to be grateful to his wife’s special meal. She responds by withdrawing into silence and her daughter feels rejected. Because she is in her mood, she forgets to make lunch for her son. At the first growth of sin it has multiplied into two lives. The daughter goes to school, and her attitude affects 5 girls. The son doesn’t have a lunch, and gets angry as a result, and because of a quarrel, loses a friend who turns against Christianity as a result. All through his life he affects hundreds of people with his hatred of Christianity. That sin we confessed and forget that night grows into a terrible monster. Evil, like energy, never dies, but rather grows and breeds.
This is where my story gets hard and healing, frightening and amazing. First the mess. My needs displayed themselves in a hundred ways that were threatening to Kimberly and her needs. For instance, 
I have often used anger and blame to protect myself from looming danger, but Kimberly was raised by a mother who screamed and shouted, so when I honestly expressed my feelings, her alarm tripped.
Early in our dating we sat for lunch in a restaurant booth in Arlington, Virginia where I was living. The man in the booth behind us, apparently a construction foreman, was carrying on a loud conversation on his two-way radio. I muttered to Kimberly how rude this was, which she feared he could overhear, and then I swiveled around and gave him a “dirty look” hoping to shame him quiet. When I turned back around, she was visibly shaken and said she did not know whether she could stay in relationship with someone with anger issues. So began the saga of conflicting needs in the area of self-defense, specifically anger.
The machinations of the mind are complicated, so unless this is your experience, you may not understand the root of my anger. Anger is the result of feeling disrespected, having my boundaries crossed. As I grew up, my sense of worth grew dependent on the value others placed on me. If they seemed to devalue me, I was threatened at my core. There are many ways folks can protect themselves from this, and one of mine was anger and blame. When the crew chief raised his voice, I felt disrespected, and in my insecurity, I reacted to protect myself against this threat.
Is This Going to Work?
From childhood, Kimberly has taken the opposite approach of protecting herself by accommodating every one so that she is liked. When threatened, I bared my teeth and Kimberly wagged her tail. She was quite successful in acting in such a way that no one would ever get angry with her. Underneath was her terror of rage and denial of her own anger. Both of us were living out of fears that we did not recognize, incompatible anxieties, each person’s defense mechanism triggering the other’s fear. I thought I needed a mate who would be okay with my anger and Kimberly thought she needed a mate that never got angry. This did not look like a match made in heaven!
But what we wanted was not what we needed. Let me put it plainly–we each wanted to marry someone who would help us escape our deepest fears. Our coping mechanisms were not “working” (protecting us from pain), so we wanted a spouse that would reinforce our defenses, not so we could face our underlying issues, but so we could avoid them successfully. We were both blessed to have a very supportive and accepting relationship… except when it wasn’t. She was not trying to expose my denial (the anger that hid my fear), but in simply being herself with me, and I with her, the truth was forced to come out, and it was very painful. After all, there were quite good reasons why we developed these protective patterns early in life. Let me relate a very common interchange
Me: “That jerk just cut me off and then slowed down to turn into Sheetz. That’s really considerate!” My insecurity is shouting at me that I have been disrespected. I don’t realize that I feel threatened and fearful because my anger jumps in so quickly to protect me and blame the other driver. I think my aggravation is his fault.
Kimberly: “Maybe he was running low on gas and saw the gas station at the last minute.” Kimberly feels her fear rising at my heat, and she jumps in to protect the person I am attacking. I feel unsupported and shamed.
Me: “He could have easily slowed down and pulled in behind me.” My coping mechanism is being threatened. If you take away my anger, I have no protection from being devalued. I still don’t realize that my true, underlying feeling that needs addressing is fear.
Kimberly: “Maybe he didn’t have time to think of that.” I feel the legitimacy of her argument. I really should not be mad. I begin to feel shame for my temper instead of sympathy, which would give me the safety to look deeper into the roots of my fear. I shame my anger away, closing the one door to my true heart’s need, and I no longer feel safe sharing my feelings with Kimberly.
Me: “Whatever!” an irritated dismissal. Kimberly senses my disapproval of her responses. She is deeply hurt by my unspoken criticism that she is not supportive and caring, that she is not enough. I am challenging her one shelter against shame, her remarkable ability to be supportive and empathic. Her solution for the world’s problems is “Life is so hard, let’s all just get along.” To feel safe, she needs me to be nice to everyone, especially her.
This dynamic played out scores of times. We were committed to honesty in sharing our feelings and in accepting one another “as is,” and this characterized our relationship, so we grew more trusting and secure with each other. The problems came when our needs conflicted, when supporting her meant denying my own needs. But our commitment to love and understanding in the other parts of our lives slowly began to soften these areas of conflict. Kimberly moved from “your anger is bad” to “your anger is hard for me” to “your anger is understandable” to “I see how your anger is a vital protection.” I moved from “you are not enough” to “I feel hurt by you” to “I see why anger is a problem for you” to “wow, you have every reason to fight anger.” This was only possible by understanding ourselves and one another better. We had to face into our fears and trust one another to listen, understand, and accept us. We often failed. It was messy.
OKAY, LET'S TAKE THIS SLOW
PAIN
Before I share how Kimberly and I grew in our wonderful, painful, scary and supportive relationship, I need to give some context regarding our perspective on coping mechanisms.
All of us are wounded because we are born into a broken world with broken people and broken relationships. In order to survive emotionally we develop methods for protecting ourselves. These include the happy face, the sad face, the angry face, the cute face to hold off the dis-grace of others. We use control, manipulation, confrontation, and every other form of avoidance (procrastination, withdrawal, acquiescence, drugs). The list goes on. We use these methods unwittingly, settling into a pattern that works best for each. Many children would be emotionally destroyed if they found no means to cope.
I was at one time convinced that coping strategies were evil because they shielded us from the truth and taught us to live a lie. They do shield us from the truth, but this is not necessarily an evil. As Jack would say, “You can’t handle the truth!” or in Jesus’ words, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear.” Our coping mechanisms act as crutches, and if we see them as such, we can slowly mend and get back on our feet. The problem comes when we either deny the injury and pretend we have no crutch or stop going to physical therapy because it is too painful and decide we’ll just sign up for a disability pension. I used to try talking people out of their coping mechanisms, kick their crutches out from under them so to speak, until I realized how powerfully beneficial these protective shields are.
My major coping mechanism for feeling better about myself is trying harder. I thought I was practicing discipline, obedience, godliness, but increased effort was really my means to block a sense of shame and unworthiness. I only discovered this truth because my method of coping didn’t “work” sufficiently–I still felt too much like a failure. The more energy I used to escape my negative feelings, the more I realized it wasn’t working, that I could never make it work.
Once I realized that this was a coping mechanism, I tried to “overcome” it. It was a lie that I had to cast out… only it had stopped deceiving me once I recognized it for what it was. When I realized it was a crutch, I could use it as a crutch. For instance, I feel inordinately bad about failing to meet expectations (the inordinate part is a major clue). When I did not recognize this as a coping strategy, it controlled me subconsciously. Now that I realize it is a crutch, I am tempted to throw it down, but the problem is not so much my behavior (trying harder) but the reason behind it–working to earn my worth.
The Dark Hand of Shame
So my second temptation is to maintain my hard effort while changing the underlying thought patterns, but the effort itself supports the wrong mindset. I am running late for a meeting, and as I drive I tell myself, “It’s okay. Everyone is sometimes late. Calm down,” but all the while I am driving like Jehu. I find that I can’t maintain the same level of diligence without operating out of a sense of urgency, a drivenness that comes from my insecurities. The more I try to give myself a break, the less I meet expectations, and the worse I feel about me. These voices of condemnation have indoctrinated me and shaped my feelings, and barring a miracle, it will take a long process of reorienting my perspective. In the meantime I do not have the emotional resources to simply stop all effort to meet others’ expectations and hold back the resulting flood of shame. I would be overwhelmed by the voices against me feeding my shame. My coping mechanism allows for my frayed emotions to be soothed as I slowly push into my fear and break free.
So I take baby steps, put a little weight on the foot. I put in a little less effort while working to offload the shame that I would normally feel, turning a little more towards grace. I share with others my fears so that their power is reduced. I find gracious people to support my faltering faith. And slowly I find myself growing whole from this deep wound. Healing of long established problems, both physical and emotional, takes a lot of time, gentleness to the injury, support and protection.
ME: YOU GOT A PROBLEM? I GOT A SOLUTION!
I could share many troubles that jumped Kimberly and me because of conflicting needs. One of the most painful and intractable is based on her focus on acceptance and my focus on improvement. Because of our families, personalities, and experiences, we have each fine tuned our coping strategies to survive threats to our emotional well-being: she is a people pleaser and I am a people fixer.
BERLY: I AM HERE FOR YOU
In relationships, she provides emotional support and I provide practical solutions. I am pretty good at empathizing, but that is not my goal. My goal is to help folks find a way forward. Kimberly is encouraged to see folks move forward, but that is incidental since her goal is to “be there” for others. I seek change, she seeks stability; I want action, she wants presence; I need hope, she needs patience.
Naturally, when our coping mechanisms do not “work,” do not protect us, we each feel deeply threatened at our core. You can see where this is going. I feel loved when someone understands my struggle and adjusts to my needs; I feel rejected if my friend does not change. Kimberly feels loved when she is accepted as she is; she feels rejected when her friend asks her to change (i.e. is not okay with her as she is). 
The message she regularly heard from me was “You are not enough” and the message I regularly heard from her was “I don’t care about your needs.” Each of us, by trying to defend our needs in relationship to each other, simply hurt the other one more.
If I were to write my real thoughts about these particular differences while dating, I would say, “I want to change for the better, she does not; I seek improvement, she seeks stagnation; I am an optimist, she is a pessimist.” In my younger years I would have pointed out the many Bible verses that support my perspective and shamed the other person into compliance. I am quick to blame, Kimberly is quick to accept, so she probably did not have these thoughts, but she would be justified in thinking, “I accept others, he rejects others; I am patient, he is impatient; I see people as individuals, he sees people as projects.” Thankfully, Kimberly and I respect one another and highly value honesty, understanding and acceptance. I see real benefits in her perspective and see how I fall short in those areas. She sees real good in my strengths and is grateful for it.
However, this does not change decades of reinforced feelings. When these dynamics popped up, it was very painful for both of us. For a long time, her perspective made no sense to me and my perspective made no sense to her. When our needs were not in conflict, we freely expressed our love and acceptance, and so over time we became more trusting of each other. That gave us the emotional space to slowly learn each others’ languages. Most of this happened before marriage, and though our feelings still smarted a great deal, we understood our issues and were committed to working through them. In fact we realized that in an amazing way, even our conflicting emotions were a great benefit to us and our relationship… but more on that later.
Pain Opens the Door to Love
HAPPY HAPPY, JOY JOY!!
I suppose an illustration at this point might help clarify our marital dance. I have many to choose from! Like most American women, Kimberly has a higher standard of cleanliness (or lower comfort level with dirt) than her husband. So how do we determine what is “fair”? Do we decide that her standard is “right,” and that I should do 50% of this? Do we decide that my standard is right, and that if she wants it to be cleaner, the rest is up to her? Or do we settle on something in between so that both of us are doing more than we feel is fair? There are many other considerations–who has more time or energy, which tasks do each of us prefer or hate, how much emotional cost is involved, is resentment building up because either of us feels the other does not care enough about our feelings to do more?
We try to talk… or rather I try to negotiate and Kimberly tries to share (I’m a fixer, she’s a relater). It seems to me completely useless to clean underneath or behind the sofa. No one sees it, not even us! But she feels it! It bothers her. Now here comes the rub. When she tells me about her emotional needs, she is simply sharing. She just wants me to understand, listen, empathize. She’s not indirectly asking me to change, but that is what I hear: her expectations, what she thinks I should do. That’s what “sharing needs” always meant in my family of origin if the person we were telling could actually do what we wanted. So I argue against her unreasonable demands (as I see it), but she is not coming from a place of expectations, so my resistance to her sounds like I am rejecting her feelings, telling her that she should not be bothered by the dog hair under the loveseat.
She completely separates sharing about her needs from my obligations regarding her needs, but I instinctively unite them, so the only way I have of protecting myself from demands that seem unreasonable is to talk down her feelings (which are loaded with expectations as I suppose). If I could separate empathy from obligation as she does, I could listen compassionately without feeling threatened that my needs are being shoved aside. But my feelings are so deeply ingrained around this relational dynamic, that even after I intellectually grasp where she is coming from, even after believing she really is not imposing expectations (both of which took years for me), I still struggle with my deeply ingrained emotional reactions.
However, the more we talk, the more our mutual understanding and acceptance grows. Since I am released from a sense of obligation, I have much more emotional space to empathize, and my love for her responds easily and gladly in this context of freedom, vulnerability, and trust. Now I can choose to clean under the sofa and actually feel good about it, because I am motivated by love rather than obligation. Still, we give each other the right to take care of our own needs, so if I feel burdened by the thought of vacuuming, I let it go, and Kimberly, because she genuinely has no expectations, is glad for me to do so. This does not mean I love her less, I simply have a need just now that it would hurt me to neglect. We have learned that if we do not honor our own needs, we not only suffer personally, but ultimately hurt our relationship as well.
Cleaning under the sofa might be a trite issue for many, and if the feelings it raises are slight, then resolution is easy. It doesn’t really matter who cleans, and the issue of “fairness” is rather meaningless since nobody is asking the question. The real conflict for us was not over a five minute cleaning job. That was simply a porthole into the deep waters, the very fundamental question of every human heart, “Do you care? Am I loved? Do my needs matter to you?” Emotions are surprisingly consistent and accurate in telling us what really does matter to us, though the “why” is often hard to interpret and is often best teased out in a supportive, accepting relationship. I am so incredibly blessed to have such a relationship.
SORRY! IT'S ALL MY FAULT!
Oh, the bumpy ride out of the marriage gate! Kimberly and I both came from families that saw the world divided into right and wrong, but I bought into it and she didn’t. She valued understanding and accepting each other as is. I valued changing to meet one another’s expectations: decide what is right and do it. But how would we decide what is “right”? The only guideline that made sense to me was to let fairness determine basic expectations, and then each of us could feel free to be “more” than fair as an exercise of grace. How could I even understand grace if I did not start with fair expectations? If we agree that we both should do 50% of the dishes, then my doing 75% is an extra 25% of grace, but if fairness (all things considered) expects me to do 75%, then I have only done my duty and nothing more. Have any of you married folks tried to decide what is fair? What I thought was straightforward proved to be indecipherable.
A PRECISE CHART OF FAIRNESS
Consider our budget. Take something as simple as grocery shopping. How much should I buy of what I like and how much of what Kimberly likes? 50-50? But being a good bit bigger than Berly and having a faster metabolism, I eat more than she does. Should we factor in how much we each love, tolerate, or hate a certain item? How do food allergies or dietary necessities weigh into the mix? If one of us does the shopping and/or cooking, do they get an extra slice? If one of us brings in more income, do they get more of a say in the spending (or is it based more on hours worked… only occupational time or household chores….)? If 9 brownies are in the frig, how much can either of us eat before the other one feels cheated? (Yes, this has been an issue.) Even I could see that my views of fairness smacked of legalism.
You may find all of this a bit silly, even childish. Shouldn’t each of us simply choose for the sake of the other person? This is the way I was raised, but you can imagine how poorly it works when I believe we are each responsible for the other’s needs and Kimberly believes we are each responsible for our own needs. From my perspective, the only way to resolve unmet expectations is to “encourage” Kimberly to meet them (or live at a deficit). But from Kimberly’s perspective that is imposing my wishes on her and making her take up what she feels is my responsibility. From my viewpoint, we should focus on expectations, what ought to be done for the other. From Berly’s viewpoint, we should focus on what each of us needs to do for ourselves. For her, self-care must precede other-care just as a mother must put on her airplane oxygen mask before she puts one on her child. I said, “I have expectations. They are reasonable. If you don’t meet them, my needs will go unmet. I will feel you don’t love me. I will become hurt and resentful.” She said, “I have no expectations for you to meet my needs. I take full responsibility for my own needs, and I do not want you to neglect your own needs so that you can satisfy mine. I want you to take care of yourself, to take care of your emotional needs as you do your physical ones. I wish you would do the same towards me. Your need does not establish my responsibility, nor mine yours.”
IT JUST LOOKS VERY DIFFERENT FROM MY ANGLE
I think my trouble has always been connecting expectations, reasonable expectations, with responsibility. If my expectations are legitimate in a given relationship (clean up your own messes, repair what you break, do your fair share of the work) and you don’t meet those expectations, then you are simply wrong, and need correcting. What else could it mean to be my brother’s keeper if not identifying the problem and urging the right path to take? Only… the real reason I am pushing this is not for your sake, but for mine. I feel inconvenienced, disrespected, hurt, unheard, overburdened, and it is because of your negligence. I need you to change so I can feel better and our relationship can smooth out.
Clearly for relationships to work at all there must be some standardized expectations. If my friend may respond to a dinner invitation by punching me or turning in circles three times or offering a breath mint, then I am at a loss to know how to relate. His behavior does not make sense to me. If he reacts in an unexpected way, I think him odd or worse (based on whether he seems to know or not know what is expected of him), and this starts us right off in the wrong direction since I believe he is the one who needs changing. What we really need is mutual understanding, talking through our differences, but if either one of us assumes our own “rightness,” things are likely to go awry, and we may part ways with less clarity and an extra helping of acrimony. I have understood him, and what I understand is that he is mistaken. So I will do the “loving” thing and “forgive” him, which means I still think he is to blame for the tensions in our relationship.
CAN I PLEASE JUST HAVE THE BONE?
It seems to me that if we do not find in God the ultimate answer to our needs, we become dangerously dependent on others. If I think my wife is the sole channel of God’s grace for any substantial need and she fails me, then my only recourse is to force her compliance. I might cajole, argue, bargain, threaten… there are a hundred ways to get her to “fall in line,” but this manipulation undermines her sincere love.
Genuine love must grow in an atmosphere of freedom, not control. That is frightening because freedom allows my friend to choose to be unloving and uncaring, refusing to help with my needs. If I make no demands, but offer unconditional love, he may take advantage of me, take all I have to offer and give little in return. And if my needs go unmet, I cannot survive. So when I sense a disparity between how much I give and how much I get, I react to protect myself. If I protect myself by giving less, I feel bad for my selfishness, for my lack of generosity, and I feel a distance growing in my heart towards him. So instead I subtly (or plainly) push him to give more.
This approach did not go over well with Kimberly. She felt the pressure of my expectations and recognized the conditionality of my love. When she chose not to do as I wished, I felt unloved and became resentful, critical, and demanding. This in turn made her feel unloved. I tried to pressure her to comply, to prove her care by meeting my expectations. She insisted on a more honest path to resolving our conflict, one that made room for both of our needs and for genuine rather than forced expressions of love.
I thought love was proved by what it gave—if folks didn’t give, they didn’t care—and this was intolerable to me because it inflated my fears of unworthiness. I gave to others with the expectation that they would reciprocate and so prove my lovability. My mind tightly bound together loving motivation and helping behavior, and I desperately needed Kimberly to prove my worth by setting aside her feelings to meet my needs. Through long conversations and consistent responses, Berly expressed her care for my needs without yielding to my pressure to change her behavior (and so abandon her own needs in favor of mine). It took years for me to believe she loved me in spite of not coming to my rescue. I slowly realized that someone can love without helping and help without loving, that sometimes the truest and hardest love is one that does not give when giving would beguile the loved one into a false security.
I wanted to stop feeling my insecurity and Kimberly wanted me to embrace it, understand it, work through it. If she helped me to avoid those feelings, it would undermine our relationship. For her part, she was afraid of my resentment, and wanted to act in a way that would hold it at bay, but she knew living out of that fear would keep her from sharing herself honestly and vulnerably with me. Things might go smoothly between us, but we would be sacrificing substance for façade. Slowly we both stepped into our fears and broke through to a deeper understanding of ourselves and one another, a deeper trust, and a deeper freedom to accept who we are. We encourage and help each other to find a way to meet our needs, but do not take the responsibility for this on ourselves. Of course, sometimes our needs conflict, but that is another story altogether.
I lived the first 40 years of my life with the assumption that if someone had a need I could meet, I was obligated to meet that need. No matter how much I gave, I was still being selfish if I had any resources left for myself. Such a view leads to spiritual and physical self-destruction. In grad school I knew that 12,000 people a day starve to death (no doubt that figure is higher today), so how could I spend any more than the absolute minimum on my own needs? If I used resources for myself that would cause one more person to starve, was I not killing them? Was I less responsible because they were half-way around the world instead of on my doorstep?
With this thought I calculated the cheapest possible way to survive so as to give more money to relief agencies. Since tea or coffee had no nutritional value, I thought drinking it was simply a sin… so was jelly on toast (although it was so dry I used margarine sparingly, or rather a cheaper margarine substitute, and felt guilty for it). I must eat nutritionally, for which my mother gave me the simplest advice as I left for grad school , “Eat one green and one red or orange vegetable a day.” I knew I also needed protein, starch and fruit. The cheapest fruit was to drink orange juice each morning with a piece of toast (starch).
I prepared my dinner one month at a time. The cheapest protein was a chicken whole fryer (39 cents a pound), and the cheapest green and orange vegetables were beans and carrots. At the beginning of the month I would cook one whole fryer, one bag of string beans and one bag of carrots. I then mixed a bit of each into golf ball size clumps, twisted six into a row inside my used bread bags, and froze them, making a month’s supply. I would warm one of these up to put on rice each evening when I came home from school.
I saw time as another resource to share, limiting my sleep to a bare minimum. I lived in Chicago for six years and never visited the famous sites, which seemed an unconscionable waste of time. But I could not strip myself of every resource, so I lived with a pervasive undertone of guilt for not living on less and giving more. That person’s need constituted my responsibility, and the needs of the whole world lay before me to meet at whatever cost to myself. 
Something was deeply wrong with this picture. Whose needs am I responsible to meet? If I shave it down to the bare minimum, I would say I am responsible to meet my spouse’s needs… but is even this true? Doesn’t my wife have many needs that I cannot fulfill? After all, no individual has all the spiritual gifts for meeting another’s needs. The problem lies here–whether I took on the needs of the world or of only one other person, I was still trying to play the role of God, and it was crushing me.
Over time I came to the conclusion that if someone has a need, it is God’s responsibility to meet that need, and he may or may not use me to do it. He is not dependent on my help. It is not the other person’s need which constitutes my responsibility, but the invitation of God to become involved (and he does invite, he doesn’t force). If I choose to live by grace rather than law, then someone else’s need is a potential opportunity rather than an obligation. But whether or not I get involved (and to what extent), it remains completely God’s responsibility to meet that person’s need.
My own wife must ultimately look to God and depend on him to meet her needs. If she makes me the final point of responsibility for her needs, then her needs are going to regularly go unmet and she has no recourse. She is trapped in a life that is unworkable and has no means of escape because she is dependent on me, and I am a flawed creature. She and I must receive the grace of God for ourselves, either directly or through whatever channel he uses. We cannot restrict his grace for us to one channel, not even our spouse. No human relationship was designed to bear such a burden.
Over a long time, I was able to shift the weight of the world (and every individual in it) onto God’s shoulders and off my own. I still struggle to let the burden go, and tend to blame myself if another person’s needs go unmet, but I now know that to carry such a weight will break me. I discovered that I can care without taking responsibility, that mourning the loss of another does not require me to jump in and “save” them. In fact, when I am always in “fix-it” mode, I tend to be distracted from loving and caring, especially if I am pushing myself with obligation rather than letting my involvement flow from a deep settled nest of God’s grace.
But as we grew closer and more fully knew each other, as we grew in trust and shared more vulnerably, our conflicting coping strategies poked out. 
To protect myself against this assault, my coping mechanisms kicked in, and when she smacked against my defenses, she put up a wall. I would feel blamed and shame her in defense. She would withdraw into self-protective silence or try to explain her words in ways that simply hurt me further. The tension escalated, and all we knew to do was to keep talking it out… for hours… for days… for months and years.
Janathan Grace Reflections 