Defending is the opposite of building a life-killing, hope-destroying wall. Walls keep people locked into the past with no hope for a different future. Walls cut off options and connections. Walls create obstacles that we bump up against every day. Relational walls are built with bricks of shame, regret, and despair. The mortar that holds the bricks together is deep, unrelenting resentment—Satan’s superglue, which he uses to wall us off from everything sacred. Sadly, we might willingly help with the construction of these evil walls. We then sit behind them and seethe and resent, demand and control, all the while wondering why we went to so much trouble to take our lives back.
Occasionally, we look outside our walls to see if anything has changed. When it hasn’t, we hunker back down, dig in our heels, and vow to ourselves to hold the fort. Meanwhile, we are missing God’s best for our lives and essentially bouncing from one extreme of defective living to the other. Both David and I have done this, and fortunately we’ve both seen the error of our ways. Every healthy relationship needs two healthy deciders and defenders working together in full ownership of their lives, with no need for deadly walls.
Knowing When to Say No
Tough and appropriate love requires a decision to say no to things that deserve a no, but we should not say no just because we can. I (Steve) worked with a man who had been very unhappy in his previous job because his wisdom and experience were often ignored. It seemed that every project to which he would have said no was funded anyway. If his advice had been followed, many bad and costly decisions could have been avoided, but his discernment and expertise were overlooked and undervalued in the decision-making process.
On his first day of work in our organization, I met with him and told him he would have the ability to say no in his new job. We would honor his judgment and allow him to veto things that he believed should not be funded. But I told him that he also had to evaluate every no to make sure he wasn’t saying it just because he could or as a reaction to his previous situation. He—and we—needed to be certain that he was not going to become a negative influence in our organization just because he had not been honored in his previous job. It was insurance against reactive living and encouragement for him to be responsibly responsive.
Some people inappropriately disapprove of everything because it feels safer to say no. It feels more protective, but it can be as big an obstacle, or wall, as any other defective coping device. Two obvious examples are the anorexic who says no to the food that would be nourishing and life-giving, or the agoraphobic who says no to leaving the house. In such cases, the no is clearly pathological. When an avoider says no to engagement and interaction, it kills the relationship. An inappropriate no can be just as dangerous as a risky yes that gets us into unhealthy, life-stealing situations and relationships. So we need some good guidelines for when to say no. Here are a few:
Before we say no, we must be certain we are denying or rejecting what is wrong and defective and not saying no for some other reason, such as fear, withholding, acting in, or revenge.
We must say no when saying yes would enable or encourage evil.
No is always the right answer when our health or welfare is needlessly jeopardized by a controlling or manipulative person.
We must not say no when we are called upon to be courageous. We must do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, no matter the consequences.
We should say no when the reason for saying yes would only be to avoid conflict or avoid exerting energy.
We should say no to something good when we can say yes to something better.
We should say no when we are tempted to repeat the same old failed strategies that never have helped us take our lives back, and never will.
No is never the right answer when it is punitive, vengeful, mean, or manipulative of another person.
No is never the right answer when yes would open the door of opportunity for healing and wholeness.
No is never the right answer just because it feels safe. God would have us risk a little more to experience his fullness in our lives.
If yes is just too scary, find out why you feel that way and work through it, discovering the source of the fear or the need to use fear to control or dominate someone else. If no is your default answer even when God offers wonderful opportunities, find out why and commit to resolving it. The response of a simple no restricts and restrains, but it isn’t always the best answer. When we take our lives back, we become free to say no when no is best; but we’re also free to say yes without fear.
Deciders and Defenders Use Tough Love
Some would say that all love is tough. I (Steve) told a group just the other day that a marriage license is really just a work permit. Marriage is work, and it can be tough; but when someone else owns your life, deciding to use tough love to defend your real self is what will allow you to take your life back. Tough love says that I will choose to not give you what you want if it prevents you from attaining what you need or if it would prevent me from becoming the person I want and need to be. Tough love requires a courage that most people-pleasers don’t have, so they must bring others into their camp for support, guidance, and accountability in order to defend their right to own their own lives. The courage of a defense team battling for your soul can compensate for your individual lack of courage. God says he will never allow us to be tempted beyond what we can bear, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be able to bear every temptation alone.[34] Sometimes we need the help of others to find God’s promised way of escape or to bear up under our burdens and endure.[35]
Learning How to Become a Developer
If all we ever do is decide not to allow someone to hurt or control us, we will be safe, but we will find ourselves stuck forever right where we are. Likewise, if all we do is defend what is good and wonderfully made within us, we will be affirmed, but we won’t get very far beyond where we are right now. Obviously, we need to do more than decide to say no and defend our independence. That is why we need to become developers.
Developers continually ask a simple question: “Now what do we need to do?” Perhaps we need to practice a little bit of tough love on ourselves rather than on someone else. Wallowing in the past and obsessing over what was and what might have been can become a comfortable place of inaction. Self-shaming over missed opportunities and blown chances is not a recipe for healthy, responsive living. Tough self-love puts a stop to that by establishing a limit and putting up a healthy border between our current lives and the past. From our side of the street or our side of the fence, we can glance through the pickets at the past but not allow the past to control us or own us. We can evaluate and learn from what led us to make some devastating choices, but we don’t have to relive or rehash the consequences of those choices.
We can look at the sources of our shame without cloaking ourselves in the darkness of that shame. Tough self-love helps us to be honest about things that are uncomfortable instead of becoming people-pleasers and hiding from the truth. If we receive nourishing and restorative care from others, we can be tough enough to stop ourselves from languishing in memories and regrets from the past that rob us of our present joy and cloud the future. Sometimes, tough self-love is the best kind of love of all.
Everybody Needs a Developer Who Knows When and How to Say Yes
When we fully understand the concept of establishing healthy, protective, and firm but flexible borders, we realize that sometimes we don’t need them—not even good and healthy ones. We never need a wall that will close us off from our loved ones. What we need is the freedom to say yes to things that are life-giving and life-affirming without clouding the issue by defining limitations. There are times when the way forward is a yes, but to get to yes, we must give up some ground that may have become sacred to us. Or we may have to give up some justifiable resentments or enshrined entitlements. When we do, we may take our lives back and take our loved ones along with us. As with anything in life, we need the right tool for the right job. There is no one-si
ze-fits-all solution for every challenge we encounter.
Recently, I (Steve) had a conversation with a woman at an Ultimate Intimacy Intensive Workshop put on by New Life. Brooke told me she had been married to an uncaring man who would not give her what she wanted and needed. In response to his detachment, she might have put up a wall that would have removed any possibility of connection until he finally delivered on what she wanted. But she hadn’t done that. The lines of communication were still open. She also might have made no her default answer until her husband, Gary, at least came up to a minimum standard of attentiveness or looked as if he was putting forth some effort. But she had avoided that pitfall as well.
By the way, she and I were having this conversation with Gary sitting right next to me and across the table from her. He and I had been discussing widescreen televisions, and I was quite envious of his seventy-five-inch HD plasma. Here I was getting by with a mere sixty-five-inch screen. Go figure. But when Gary told me that they would be turning off that television more often after this weekend workshop, his wife looked at him adoringly and said, “He’s my seventy-five-inch widescreen television.”
Brooke went on to say that before coming to the workshop, she had been full of bitterness and resentment and had been ready to give up completely on their marriage. She had told Gary what she needed and had explained what she wanted from him, and he had never delivered—not once. In her mind, he was the most uncaring and unresponsive spouse she could have ever gotten stuck with. She could not understand how a man who said he loved her—over and over again—could fall so short of the mark. Not only that, but he would also get upset with her when she became upset with him.
You might think this kind of dynamic would have caused Brooke to build a protective wall so she wouldn’t be hurt or disappointed again. But that hadn’t happened. In fact, she and Gary were at the workshop precisely because there were no unscalable walls between them. They were willing to listen to whatever God might say to them through the speakers, therapists, and other attendees. And what they heard changed everything.
Brooke finally realized that, in all the time they’d been married, Gary had had no idea what she was talking about when she told him what she wanted or needed. It was as if they spoke two separate languages and were trying to communicate in a third language. There was simply no way for him to understand the concepts of attunement, attachment, emotional bonding, and intimacy because those things had never been taught or modeled in the home he grew up in. He had been taught that men were designed to be strong and independent and that he should courageously hide his feelings if he ever felt the need to share them. Tough, not tender. In control and in charge, not vulnerable. Providing faithfully for his family, with no need to do anything except lead.
As a result of the weekend workshop, Brooke became aware that her expectations of Gary were the emotional equivalent of marrying a man with two broken legs and his arm in a sling and expecting him to carry her across the threshold, run a marathon, and walk an extra mile whenever possible. The truth was, Gary was emotionally challenged and lacked the training and experience to do what she expected.
Both Brooke and Gary understood their situation for the first time. He understood that he didn’t know the language of emotion—but he wanted to learn it. Brooke said that when Gary began to learn some emotional vocabulary during one of the workshop exercises and they caught a glimpse of how things could be, she fell madly in love with him all over again.
Taking your life back is not just about deciding to defend yourself. It is about finding and removing roadblocks, sinkholes, and dead ends that have disconnected you from other people and stopped your journey from going forward together. Sometimes we don’t need another decision to defend; we need an invitation to press in and allow the developer within us to do the job of developing every positive characteristic that God intends us to have. Sometimes we need a new understanding, or we need to transform our relationships and our lives by changing how we think about ourselves and how we think about the people who are falling short of our expectations. But we never need a wall.
We all are familiar with glass-half-full and glass-half-empty people. But there’s another dichotomy—between why? people and why not? people—that can help us understand when to decide between our defending and our developing. If every question or opportunity in life is met with a “Why?” or a “Why should I?” we are constantly being shut down and silenced by a default no decision from a defective inner defender.
Why not? people are willing to look at the possibilities that lie ahead and decide to allow the developer to go to work. There may be very good reasons not to do something, but healthy deciders are open to changes and opportunities that their inner developers are ready to implement. They are aware that no is sometimes—maybe even often—the correct response in choosing to do the right thing; but they remain open to God’s guidance, and they allow their inner decider, defender, and developer to be controlled by the divine Director. They say yes after considering the benefits of a decision, even if it is scary to go in the direction of yes. But they also weigh the costs and the risks so that they don’t inappropriately say yes to everything. In saying, “Why not?” their aim is to take back dimensions of their lives that may have been dominated by fear, insecurity, overly protective vows, or irrational generalizations about people or the past. As with any way of life, saying yes is best done in consultation with wise counselors, sponsors, friends, and family members who love us and who know that our ultimate motivation is to live out God’s plan and purposes for our lives.
Taking Back a Dating Life for Marrieds
One way to say yes in a marriage is to take back your dating life, especially if it has been shut down completely by busyness, conflict, or fatigue. We know that couples who reserve time for themselves—essentially saying yes to the relationship over everything else—find more satisfaction than those who don’t make time. When we stop trying to find the next excuse to distance ourselves, to disconnect, or to build a wall, we can start to say yes to dating and having fun, just as when we were single way back when. If you take back your dating life, you might be taking back your marriage. Saying yes to one key aspect of your relationship may turn out to be the yes that the entire relationship needs. Yes creates a wide-open gate that draws people out from behind their protective walls and back into constructive engagement.
Taking Back a Dating Life for Singles
If ever there were someone who needed a strong system of deciding and defending, it would be a single person who is dating. There are so many unhealthy, ungodly forms of dating that most people would benefit from having some guidelines. On the other hand, we don’t want to become so overly cautious and fear based that we close down potentially valuable relationships before they have a chance to form. If your beliefs about dating have become overly negative, you may need to cautiously but purposefully take back your dating life and see what God might have in store for you.
If you are not in possession of your dating life, maybe it is because you say no to every possibility. If you are fearful, find ways to create safety—such as meeting in a safe, low-key environment or starting with a group date accompanied by trusted friends. Counseling, creativity, double- or triple-dating, group activities, learning new hobbies, or volunteering at places where compatible people may be found are all ways to take back your dating life along with the rest of your life.
A Paradoxical Ending
The end of one thing is often the beginning of something else. When it comes to establishing the healthy practices of deciding, defending, and developing, you can stop the detrimental wall-building in order to pursue healthier options. But you will never establish healthy internal resources if you don’t stop long enough to evaluate both what you have done in the past and the position you’re currently in. Here are some guidelines for establishing the three key components of deciding, defending, and developing that will help you take your life back.
Ask yourself who,
if anyone, is controlling you or attempting to control you.
Identify destructive or unhelpful habits, behaviors, patterns, or addictions that control too much of your life.
Consider the possibility that your problem has a physical cause or contributor. For example, you may have a chemical or hormonal imbalance, or the emotional centers in your brain may have a functional defect. Talk to your doctor to get a diagnosis.
Become aware of your reactions to the controlling forces that are robbing you of the life that God intended for you. We cannot always change our circumstances, but we can change how we respond to our circumstances.
Evaluate where you need to establish boundaries or where you have allowed a boundary to lapse.
Evaluate boundaries you have established in places where they don’t need to be. How have they prevented you from moving forward rather than protecting you from getting stuck?
Assess your relationships to identify where you have built unscalable walls. Why have these walls been built and maintained? How may they be replaced by healthy boundaries?
Identify people, places, and situations that have prompted you to say no as an overreaction based on fear, rage, or shame.
Work with a sponsor or a trusted therapist to uncover the sources of your overreactions and work to resolve those sources of pain, fear, or intense anger.
Consult a trusted therapist who can help you identify areas where you can say yes to a new life, and who can show you how to safely implement a yes-filled life.
Too often, we live someone else’s life because we allow ourselves to be controlled by other people, fear, or shame. We must decide to do whatever is necessary to take our lives back and live for God with purpose and meaning. It may not be easy, but we have an obligation to be good defenders and developers of the gifts that God has given us—including the gift of life. Decide right now that when you wake up in the morning, you will do whatever it takes to develop the gift of your life in honor of the one who gave it to you. When you become the decider, defender, and developer of your life, you will tear down any walls that are unhealthy, and you will take important steps toward taking your life back and giving it to God.
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