by Jay Stringer
Before Engaging Conflict and Repair
Before you begin to engage conflict in your relationships, there are three important things to keep in mind:
You can do only your part for others.
Getting close to others takes iterative work.
Every person you meet offers you a mirror that reflects some part of you.
Let’s look at each of these more closely and why they are important as you get close to others to offer them empathy.
The first thing to remember in conflict is that it is not your responsibility to change the other person. During conflict, many people feel an enormous burden or entitlement to change the other person. You must remember that God is far more committed to this person in your family or community than you could ever be, even if it were your full-time job. Change is a slow, often mysterious process, and you will need to adjust your sense of timing. When it comes to addressing an affair or pornography use, you must give those you have hurt time to feel the shock, pain, betrayal, confusion, anger, and ambivalence that your choices have ushered in.
Second, each person you encounter has a style of relating. You might think of it as one’s personality. Everyone you meet is asking two things of you simultaneously. With one hand, he waves you in to come closer: “Get to know me a bit more. Share a meal with me. I want to let you in.” But with the other hand, he stretches out his arm with a stop sign. He is deeply afraid of being seen and known. He will warn you, at times with a jab and other times with an uppercut, if you get too close or see him contrary to his neatly constructed identity. Responses of “Come closer” and “Come no further” are both normal, and all you are doing at this stage is gathering data about someone’s style of relating.
Knowing your family members’ or friends’ styles of relating is important because it helps explain the feelings you experience in their presence. For instance, you may see them waving you in and feel afraid of what they need from you. Or you may feel very rejected when they put up their stop signs. You are responsible for how you metabolize this fear or rejection. At the same time, these reactions offer valuable clues into the distance the other people likely want you to orbit around them. Stay curious about your responses and the person in front of you. Over the course of your relationships, you will be able to share these reflections. Remember, these are not one-and-done conversations; you will have countless opportunities to bring up these dynamics with those close to you.
Third, allow what is difficult about the other person you are having conflict with to lead you into a deeper understanding of yourself. Conflicts with others are often telling, inviting us to face unpleasant realities about ourselves. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”[95] For example, we might blame our spouses’ low sex drives or the inherent stress of our jobs for our pornography use. This is appealing to us because we can locate the irritation outside ourselves rather than understanding that we do not know how to tolerate difficult dynamics within us. The more we allow our conflicts with others to shed light on our blindness, the more we will see the dimensions of our lives that need to mature.
Practicing these three concepts prior to engaging in conflict will benefit you immensely. Rather than enacting conflict, you will learn to reflect on what the relationship is stirring within you. In the next few months, you will likely receive difficult news at work, have a spouse or significant other go to bed without checking in or calling you, or feel excluded by your group of friends. For example, rather than yelling at your significant other for forgetting you, your responsibility is to reflect. Is it your responsibility to control your significant other’s behavior? How might these experiences be inviting you to care for an open wound? What might be going on with your significant other that would make him or her choose to head to bed without checking in with you? Pondering these questions prior to engaging conflict will create good soil for the work of repair to begin.
How to Practice Conflict and Repair in Relationships
If you have a spouse or significant other, this relationship will be the primary focus of your journey through conflict and repair. At a minimum, this means addressing the infidelity or involvement with pornography that you brought into your relationship. It could also mean repairing some of the lies you told friends and family members as a result of your secret unwanted sexual behavior. Although many people caught in unwanted sexual behavior go back and forth about whether to disclose their behavior to others, research has found that even though it is difficult, the betrayed spouse tends to prefer to have the knowledge of what the offending party has done.[96] It is vital that you recognize that all relationships, particularly with loved ones, are repaired through a long process, not a singular event.
I strongly recommend you refrain from telling your spouse or others the details related to your unwanted sexual behavior until they have adequate levels of support around them. This means you tell your spouse or significant other that you have been addressing some of the major themes of your life with a therapist, faith leader, mentor, or trusted friend and have been advised to invite your spouse to find his or her own circle of care when the time of disclosure comes. If you are considering a therapist for yourself, you should ask any potential candidate about his or her familiarity and competency with the process of disclosure.
Addressing infidelity is a multilayered process that depends on the details of your unwanted sexual behavior. Here are some foundational (though not comprehensive) actions to pursue.
End the secrecy of the affair or participation in unwanted sexual behavior by talking to a therapist or trusted guide. Although you may see some of the external forces that drove you into your behavior, the responsibility resides with you and you alone. The time to address the dysfunctional patterns in the relationship that may have contributed to the affair will occur later (in many cases, six to twelve months from the time of disclosure). Staying focused on your actions will prove invaluable in later stages of relational healing.
Address your deceit and/or blame. Next to the agony of betrayal, the second dynamic that creates the most anger for betrayed spouses is that they were led to believe they were the problematic ones in the relationships. During the course of addressing your problematic sexual behavior in the context of your marriage, your therapist may encourage you to write a letter of amends to your spouse. This will include a confession of the times you lied to your spouse, made her feel as though she were the crazy one, deceived her into thinking that your behavior happened only one time, or blamed her for either not being sexual enough or “letting herself go.” Before any level of forgiveness can take place, you and your spouse must have the full scope of what must be forgiven. This season of repair could take months or years for your spouse or family and friends to navigate. Therefore, you must prepare for how you will interact with your desire for sex or intimacy when your spouse needs a season of emotional and sexual separation to address the harm you brought to the relationship. For many men, this can often instigate another season of pornography dependence. The way to prevent this relapse is to ask others (therapist, friend, pastor) for help with the complexity and stress you are facing. Community strengthens us in ways we would never be able to conceive in our secrecy. Additionally, around the time of disclosure to spouses, many will choose to commence sixty to ninety days of sexual abstinence (discussed in chapter 12). Suffering the pain you introduced to your partner’s life while simultaneously learning how to understand and regulate your emotional life without sex is one of the most powerful combinations of change you will undergo in this process of repair.
Begin repairing the relationships with your children and family members. If you are a parent, particularly to adolescents or adult children, it is important to recognize that your kids perhaps grew up under considerable rigidity or disengagement. If your home was rigid, they likely felt that their lives were under constant surveillance. If you were disengaged, your chil
dren likely wandered through life wondering if they were truly loved and delighted in. You are accountable for the coercion or abdication of your parental power. The task ahead is to reflect on what type of home you set up for your children and explore how this affected them. Contemplation is the start of repair. When it comes time to share your thoughts with your children, be sure to give them ample time to metabolize your words and offer their experiences in their own words. One of my clients, months before his son’s wedding, told him, “When you were growing up, I was incredibly controlling and invasive about your dating life and how much time you could spend with your girlfriends. I used shame and guilt tactics to parent you. The truth is that I was in an intense battle with my own sexual brokenness, and it was easier to aim my anger at you than address my own hypocrisy. Since I’ve started therapy, I’ve been setting aside money for your counseling too, if you ever want to go. I know I’ve been an intimidating father, and I want you to know how much I desire to be a kinder dad.”
Write a letter to your mom and/or dad addressing the pain you experienced as their child. View it as a personal journal entry, not a letter you will share with them. Nevertheless, write it to them. You might choose to write about the triangulation, rigidity, or disengagement you experienced or the way those dynamics set you up for bullying or sexual abuse. The purpose of this letter is not to blame them but to take an inventory of the pain you experienced. Remember, honor does not negate the necessity for honesty. Many of us avoid conflict because we do not want to deal with pain. Next, write a response letter from the perspective of your mom and dad in which you imagine them acknowledging your pain. Although the majority of us will never have the privilege of hearing our parents repent for the harm they brought into our lives, this does not prevent you from imagining what it would be like to have them say the words you have longed to hear. Take a half hour and write these letters. Notice what you feel when given the opportunity to engage in conflict and repair.
BENEFITS OF CONFLICT AND REPAIR
Trust is established through the interplay of generative conflict and mature repair (not perfection). You discover that repair helps reduce the anger that fuels your flight to unwanted sexual behavior. Chronic stress stemming from relational division and secrecy is reduced. Mysteriously, you find yourself craving connection with your significant other or friends rather than pursuing sexual disconnection to address your anger and hurt.
[94] I am indebted to Dr. David Schnarch for this observation. See his book Intimacy and Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (New York: Beaufort, 2009).
[95] Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989), 247.
[96] A good book on this is Stefanie Carnes’s Mending a Shattered Heart: A Guide for Partners of Sex Addicts (Carefree, AZ: Gentle Path, 2011).
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PURSUE STRENGTH AND VULNERABILITY IN YOUR RELATIONSHIPS
IN THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES, the God of the universe is depicted as strength and vulnerability in perfect union. He is the powerful creator, unmatched in his strength. Some Middle Eastern traditions might have gods of the sun, moon, or stars, but the Jewish God is the creator of the sun, moon, and stars. At the same time, though, this God is not unaffected by human struggle. To the contrary, he is constantly taking up residence in the situations of vulnerability that his people face. Other gods are believed to create human beings because they are lazy and want their created beings to do the hard work. In the Hebrew worldview, however, God’s hands are in the dirt, forming life and inviting his creation into joyful co-participation in the world.
When God’s strength is present, creation flourishes. His strength does not dominate others; it serves them. God pursues the weary, increases the power of the weak (see Isaiah 40:29), and equips others to co-create the Kingdom of Heaven alongside him. God’s vulnerability is equally remarkable. His vulnerability takes on the very illnesses and sin that have contaminated the human condition. At the climax of the Gospels, we see the power and vulnerability of God intertwined. His ultimate strength rises out of his ultimate defeat: resurrection from the grave.
True Strength
My friend Jill is a managing partner of a consulting firm. Through the years, I have been both a witness and a recipient of her godlike strength. When Jill is leading a meeting or a company, you do not get the sense that she is attempting to use her powerful insights against you. Instead, the insights are presented to serve you, equip you, and call you to more than you would be willing to imagine on your own.
When practicing strength, keep the tension between pursuing your personal dignity and pursuing the welfare of others. Those who pursue only themselves become vacuous men and women, blind to the needs of others. Those who pursue only the welfare of others develop identities in reference to the needs placed on them by others and do not know who they truly are. When you gain a sense of your relational strength, you walk the razor edge of power. Too much of it, and you intimidate or irritate others. Too little of it, and people will know you are choosing a path of cowardice.
Melissa sought out therapy because she felt used throughout her life. Her employer owed her thousands of dollars in unpaid overtime. Her spouse recently got a dog for their daughter despite knowing she was allergic. In this same season, Melissa’s brother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She didn’t know what to do, so she chose not to talk to or see him for six months. In addition, Melissa’s marriage had been slowly eroding for three years and went into a downward spiral after her husband found her pursuing a same-sex romantic interest with an old sorority friend from college and saw her TV-viewing history, which included pornography.
As you can see, Melissa’s circumstances were making known the difficulty she had in practicing strength. As a result, her dignity at work suffered, she felt too stuck to pursue the welfare of her brother, and she consistently struggled in bringing her needs to an emotionally calloused husband. The fantasies within unwanted sexual behavior often reveal our inability to find what we want and need in reality. Melissa could pursue what she wanted, but only in a world without any forms of relational resistance.
Austin entered therapy in the hopes of addressing porn addiction and learning anger management. His initial phone call to me followed a family vacation where his wife was driving in a tremendous thunderstorm and swerved to miss a braking car ahead, only to collide with a car in another lane. Seconds after the accident, Austin went into a rage, berating his wife for her incompetence while his young children screamed helplessly in their car seats behind him. Later that evening, his wife caught him masturbating in their vacation rental home. In the first month of therapy, he recognized he was using a counterfeit version of strength to dominate his wife and children.
Both Melissa and Austin have distorted the purpose and efficacy of strength. The counterfeit version of strength for Austin is anger. He recognized that he had learned this misuse of strength through watching his father. Using anger to intimidate others is not strength; intimidation is bullying. Melissa struggles with the other counterfeit version of strength: abdication of power. When strength is distorted through anger or abdication, relationships suffer.
After exploring these themes, both Melissa and Austin began to engage their strength differently. Melissa asked her husband for a date on Saturday and told him about her hurt over his getting a dog against her wishes. She told him, “That dog, as much as we love him, needs to go.” That same weekend, they found a new home for the animal. Melissa also raised the issue of compensation with her employer with the subtle indication that she knew a good lawyer. A payment plan was quickly worked out. With the extra money, Melissa purchased a plane ticket to visit her brother. In choosing strength, she found that strength compounded in interest, allowing her to shed tears over her brother’s disease. She deeply apologized for how she hid in their relationship. After a year of intentionally practicing strength, she said it had been the most res
tful year she had ever had as an adult.
Austin’s change was equally impressive. His wife loved to run, and he began to join her. He used the runs to invite his wife to tell him stories about her life. He laughed at how his poor fitness finally allowed him to simply listen to his wife. He learned that her father was a workaholic, which had left her constantly in harm’s way with a cruel mother. On one run through their local park, she told him about the year she got her driver’s permit and how her mother would yell at her for anything she was not doing right. On one occasion, this caused her to slam into a parked car. Recognizing the connection immediately, Austin stopped the run and held his wife as they both wept for how her story and his abuse of strength had collided. Austin was learning how to use his voice to engage others, which allowed for beautiful attunement to his wife, and the result was rest for everyone around him.
True Vulnerability
I met a man named Brent my first year in seminary. He was ten years older than I was, and I immediately thought of him as a big brother. We eventually became housemates and dear friends. Brent is a rare man who paradoxically experiences grief and joy, the embodiment of godlike vulnerability. To know Brent is to encounter his heartache: He has been single for much longer than he or others would have ever thought, a host of allergies adversely affect his day-to-day life, and vocational longings and questions are ever present. At the same time, to know Brent is to encounter joy. Those of us who know Brent all have stories about him that fill us with guttural laughter and a deep appreciation for his character. At times, he is the life of the party, and at others a sage of wisdom.