Toward Better Relationships

Sometimes, just when you think you’ve gotten to the bottom of something, you find out there is yet another layer underneath. So it was with this.

In my late teens and twenties, I had a most lamentable habit of hanging out with people who disapproved of me. I know that one, at least, disapproved of my very existence—making gaining approval an absolute impossibility—but others disapproved of my ambitions, my beliefs, or the fact that I disagreed with them. I know I’ve written of this before, but it has reentered my life at a deeper level, so I’ll say it again: it may be true that we can experience disapproval without it affecting us, but when our friends disapprove of us, and especially when that disapproval is at the very foundation of the relationship, we are in big trouble.

That may sound silly to you, but not if you’re a people pleaser. People pleasers attract people who are disapproving and hard to please, and then feel that they must stay in the relationship. They deceive themselves into thinking they are really such poor creatures as their critics (with which they have surrounded themselves) say they are. It isn’t just damaging; it’s disastrous.

Interestingly enough, all my (few) friends now are either approving of me or downright admiring. That doesn’t mean we never have disagreements—in fact, since they all embrace a growing level of honesty, we definitely do—but all of my present friendships are with people who think very well of me—and visa versa. So what happened between what was (almost entirely disapproving relationships) and what is (approving ones)?

Isolation happened between then and now. The wilderness between Egypt and Canaan happened.

This is interesting to look back on. People-pleasing, you need to understand, is an addiction. It is every bit as addicting as any kind of drug. I’m not going to suggest that the Lord has only one way of breaking addictions, but for me, His method was isolation. Before I could be free to form fresh, healthy relationships, I had to be willing to leave the old, sick ones. My desire and in fact my entire focus had to be on pleasing the Lord. If that meant that no person on the planet was pleased with me, so be it. I was willing to live with that.

I also had to learn to value what the Lord had put inside of me, and be willing to protect it. This meant that not only did I need to be willing to stick to my course in spite of disapproval, but I had to be willing to distance myself from those who were disapproving. I had to leave the one in order to cleave to the other.

Oddly enough, only now can I see how damaging those old relationships really were. At the time I had no idea they were chipping away at my very destiny. There is no relationship on the planet worth losing my future.

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