The DNA of Relationships (15 page)

What if your irritation is with your spouse? What if he or she is just plain lazy and never helps around the house? What if your spouse mismanages the household money? Then what? You can choose to value the person. Try to understand what causes the behavior, what past damage may be responsible for the irresponsibility or laziness. Your partner may be so wounded that he or she can hardly function. Be careful to suspend judgment. Value the good. As you honor the other person’s uniqueness, as you value his or her differences—even the traits that irritate you—you create a safe place for your relationship to grow.

5. Be Trustworthy
When Bob Paul was eighteen years old, he worked as a handyman for a rich, eccentric psychiatrist. One day Bob’s boss sent him up to clean a skylight. Despite the tight fit, Bob dutifully started cleaning, armed with some noxious chemicals and a rag.

A short time later, the psychiatrist called Bob downstairs to help him move some things out of the living room. Bob woozily picked up a clay figurine to take it to another room, but he accidentally hit the toe of the statuette on a doorjamb. The leg fell off,
clunk
, and hit the ground.

The psychiatrist started waving his arms and screaming at the top of his lungs. “Do you have any idea how much that thing is worth? It is
thousands
of years old, and it’s worth
thousands
of dollars! Do you realize that one of the things that made this so valuable was its perfect, flawless condition? I can have this leg glued back on. But now, just by virtue of the fact that it has a crack, the piece has lost thousands of dollars in value!”

Because Bob did not see the figurine as valuable, he treated it carelessly and broke it. How much better it would have been to realize both its value and fragility than to act carelessly and thus cause irreparable damage!

The fifth step to safety in our relationships is to make sure that we are trustworthy in handling the delicate and valuable men and women with whom we want to deeply connect. In each of us lies something of staggering worth and value—yet that something is very vulnerable, easily damaged or devalued.

Trustworthiness is recognizing the value of someone and then treating that person accordingly. When we treat someone in a way that shows that we recognize both their
incredible value
and their
vulnerability
, we demonstrate our trustworthiness.

The kind of trustworthiness I have in mind has two parts:

• Be trustworthy with others.
  
• Be trustworthy with yourself.
  

BE TRUSTWORTHY WITH OTHERS

When you are trustworthy with others, you dedicate yourself to treating them as the valuable and vulnerable people that they are. When you are trustworthy with yourself, you act in ways consistent with your own value and vulnerability. So when others, at some point, show themselves as untrustworthy in dealing with you, you have to act in a way that is trustworthy to yourself, that safeguards your own value in view of your own vulnerability.

My sons learned this lesson in the mountains of Colorado. One winter Michael visited Greg in Denver. To satisfy his new interest in photography, Michael begged to find a scenic location suitable for a great picture. About an hour out of Denver, they found the perfect spot. They parked on the side of the road and hiked down to a river, where they found a gorgeous frozen waterfall.

Michael carefully tested the river to see if it had frozen over. He walked out a few feet and judged that it would support the weight of both brothers. He planned to briskly walk out to the falls, snap a few pictures, and then return to the bank. The plan sounded insane to Greg, but Michael talked him into it.

“Trust me!” he said.

Although Greg felt nervous about it, he followed Michael toward the falls, “like a sheep being led to slaughter.” Suddenly they heard loud cracking sounds, and Michael fell through the ice.

“Mom is going to kill me!” Greg blurted out, starting to panic.

But then he noticed that the river was only about three feet deep where Michael had fallen in. The icy water reached only up to his waist.

“Get me out!” Michael begged as the shock of the frigid water hit him.

“But I thought you said, ‘Trust me,’ ” Greg replied, trying not to fall over from laughter. Moments later Greg realized he shouldn’t have laughed. As soon as he reached for his brother, he also fell through the ice. Now they both stood waist-deep in freezing mountain water. After a few agonizing minutes, they managed to pull each other to shore. But then they faced the real challenge.

Darkness was about to fall, and they hadn’t dressed for a dip in freezing water. Greg’s truck sat about a quarter mile up the trail from where they had fallen in. As Michael surveyed the situation, he noticed a small opening in the surrounding cliff; it looked as if they could hike straight up to the truck.

“Trust me,” he said again, “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”

“I’m not sure who was more of a nitwit,” Greg says today, “Michael, for concocting this plan, or me, for trusting him again.”

As the shivering pair started scaling the cliff, Greg realized that Michael’s math teacher must not have explained that the “straight line” principle neglects to take into account hazardous terrain. Without gloves, it took them about an hour to ascend the snow-covered cliff. When they finally reached the truck, their hands felt completely numb and they couldn’t get the key into the door. They started imagining the newspaper headlines: “Two boys freeze to death with truck key in hand.”

Finally, after rubbing and blowing on his hands, Greg managed to get the door open. He had to repeat the process to turn on the engine. It would be awhile before he would trust his brother again.

Unfortunately, this lighthearted story reflects what happens every day with couples and friends. Trust is a key ingredient when it comes to safety, openness, and intimacy in all relationships.

What about more serious situations? What about the pregnant young woman who believed her date when he said, “Trust me. You won’t get pregnant if we do it just this once”? What about the son who believed his father when he said, “Trust me. My company won’t know that I haven’t reported this money”?

These people were not trustworthy because they did not take into account the value and vulnerability of the people who they asked to trust them or their own faults and inconsistencies. And like the chipped figurine, the young woman felt her value sullied and the son felt his worth diminished.

What would trustworthiness look like in these situations? The young man would realize the value and vulnerability of his date, and no matter how much he felt tempted, he would value her trust even more and so would choose not to convince her to have sex with him. The father would value his son so much that he would choose not to embezzle funds from his company. He would recognize that his trustworthiness was far more important than any amount of money he would have gained through his deception.

Being and staying trustworthy is an ongoing responsibility and choice. But when other people see us as trustworthy, they feel safe with us. They have no need to build walls of protection.

BE TRUSTWORTHY WITH YOURSELF
The second part of being trustworthy is remaining trustworthy with yourself. When you stay trustworthy with yourself, you act in ways that express your value and vulnerability.

Whenever you let someone have access to the most sensitive part of you and they start getting careless, you must take back that part of yourself and think,
Excuse me. Apparently, you’ve lost track of how valuable and how vulnerable I am. But I haven’t, and I can’t let that happen.

If the young woman in the previous illustration would have remained trustworthy to herself, she would have stood up to the young man: “I am not going to let you push me into an action I think is wrong. I am too valuable for that.” The son would have said to his father, “Dad, I feel uncomfortable getting involved in this kind of scheme. I do not want to go down that path.” Do you see how these two people had a healthy view of themselves? They saw themselves as God sees them—valuable, precious—and they had no intention of letting anything damage that. So they safeguarded their value by remaining trustworthy to themselves. Sometimes taking a stand about our own value could create conflict with others. We need to reassure others that our love is still the same for them but state that we don’t feel comfortable about joining them in any activity that may diminish our own value.

All relationships involve choice. When people treat you badly, you can choose to be trustworthy in a couple of ways. You may need to build a wall and shut the person out, at least for a time. That can be very appropriate. Some people have no clue and are not likely to get a clue anytime soon. Therefore you can treat them cordially, but you don’t need to give them access to the most vulnerable part of you. They can shout over the wall, but that’s it. The problem with this tactic, of course, is that it hinders a deep relationship. It makes connection impossible. You simply can’t hug someone standing on the other side of a wall.

The other alternative is more like drawing a line in the sand. You say, “Hey, I’m safeguarding that part of me because I can’t trust you with it right now. But I want you to know that I want this relationship with you. Therefore, I will give you repeated opportunities to try again. But I need you to know that the next time I let you in, and every single time thereafter, I’ll be requiring the same thing: that you show me, through word and deed, that you understand how valuable and vulnerable I am and that you act accordingly. To the degree that you do this, let’s be friends. But when you forget, I need you to know that I will protect myself.”

Your ability to feel safe in a relationship depends more on the second part of trustworthiness than on the first. If I can’t trust myself to remember how valuable and how vulnerable I am, then my whole well-being depends on other people’s remembering. To the degree that they remember, I’m safe; but to the degree that they forget, I’m not. In that case, I’m helpless and have no say.

But when I remain trustworthy to myself, I can afford to give others a whole lot of freedom in relationships. I know that others
are
going to forget, that they
are
going to have moments where they stop being trustworthy. I can live with that, however, because there’s always someone taking responsibility—me. When other people act in unsafe ways, when they get caught up in themselves, I take the most vulnerable part of me back, and I protect it. And when they regain their trustworthiness, I can say, “Let’s try this again.”

Create a Safe Haven
A family in deep crisis once sought out Michael for counseling. The family’s sixteen-year-old daughter had gotten pregnant, throwing the entire household into an uproar.

Michael first asked to see the father and mother, without their daughter. He wanted to figure out what was happening under their roof. He quickly discovered that hate had taken over.

“My daughter knows that we’re a good Christian family,” the father fumed, “and she knew that if she ever got pregnant, she’d be kicked out of this house!”

When this man discovered his daughter’s pregnancy, he lost his temper. He yelled, he screamed, he turned over furniture in her bedroom, he tore out her phone and grounded her from everything but breathing. He lost all control and threw the house into total chaos.

And then, amazingly, he couldn’t figure out why his daughter had tried to run away and elope with the boy who made her pregnant.

Michael tried to help this father understand that he had created an unsafe environment in his home. His ranting and raving and unrestrained fury did not create an environment where his daughter felt inclined to come to him with her problems.

“Look,” Michael said, “every kid is going to make mistakes. Every child is sinful. It’s not our job as parents to shame them, yell at them, belittle them, or threaten them. It’s our job to love them and lay out clear boundaries and give them healthy rules. But even when those rules get broken, we
have
to maintain a safe environment. And if we don’t maintain a safe environment, then we’re the last place our kids are going to go to in a crisis—and that’s the worst thing that can happen. When our children don’t feel that they can come to their parents with their mistakes and still be loved no matter what, we get chaos.”

When my children were growing up, I did my best to create a safe home environment. To reinforce my pledge, I hung a plaque in the hallway that said, “To Norma, Kari, Greg, and Michael: In assurance of my lifetime commitment to you.”

My kids’ friends sometimes made snide comments about my little message, but my children have told me how much that plaque meant to them. They knew they could count on me, not to be perfect, but to stay committed to them, no matter what. And they tell Norma and me today that our home felt like a safe haven.

And the tradition continues. These days, every night when Michael puts his own kids to bed, he tells them, “Now remember, Daddy loves you!”

“I know,” his children say.

“But I love you no matter what,” he replies. Those kids hear the same reaffirming words every night. “There’s nothing they can do that will ever make me stop loving them,” Michael says. “I want to create a safe environment for them.” He’ll sometimes ask Cole, “Is there anything you can do that will make me stop loving you?” He’ll give his son some examples, and Cole will mention a few. After each example Michael will say, “Nope, I’ll still love you even after you do that.”

You can do the same thing. Whether you’re a parent, a friend, a spouse, a member of a team, or a part of an organization, you can create such safety around you that people will naturally feel drawn to you. You can choose to create an environment in which healthy relationships have a chance to grow. Or you can choose to shut them down before they get a chance to start. The choice is yours.

We know a young single man who feels so anxious, so stressed-out, so fearful of being rejected, that he creates a powerfully toxic environment wherever he goes. His fear of rejection leaks out, and when young women try to approach him, they see the relational smog clinging to him.
Eeuuu,
they think,
I don’t want to be a part of this
.