Stop killing relationships with kindness

As my son overwatered his new plants, God said, “That!” It’s the word that most gets my attention in terms of God speaking to me. I knew straight away what ‘that’ was about. Like he’s done a few times beforehand, my son was killing his plants with kindness.

You know where I’m going with this; we do the same thing with our relationships.

We kill our relationships with kindness in this entitled age. As empaths, we enable our narcissistically-oriented partners, parents, siblings, children, co-worker/boss, friends (etc, etc) by doing things for them, by allowing them to treat us disrespectfully, by always being the one to go the extra mile, by always being the first to apologise, by offering the other cheek time and time and time again, by rescuing them in a hundred different ways, by ensuring they will never learn… ad nauseam. 

We pretend to overlook things that should be confronted—thinking we’re being good Christians to do such things—but really, we’re avoiding conflict that needs to take place.

If we can’t have the conflict, presumably because we have a partner, parent, sibling, child, co-worker/boss, friend (etc, etc) who will not react well, we have deeper problems. But you know that already.

Now kindness is very important—yes, it’s a biblical trait to be kind. But it isn’t kind to be submissive in the midst of an aggressor, and someone who’s always taking advantage of us is an aggressor—particularly (as the test would have it) if and when we would say, “No! Enough’s enough!”

It isn’t being kind being the doormat all the time. We gave them a chance; perhaps we’ve given them a few hundred chances. It isn’t kind to them or us to continue to submit to familial tyranny.

No, rather the kind thing would be to call it to gentle account. See where it goes. Calling a matter to conflict is the surest way of doing a true kindness.

The only way others can learn how best to interact with us is if we give them feedback. “I didn’t feel respected when you did that… what I’d prefer you do next time is… can you come toward me this time?”

Feedback is crucial if we aim to be genuinely kind.

It’s kind to offer others the truth about how we feel after engaging with them.

The only way we can learn if we’re in a safe relationship or not is through challenging the status quo. If we’re ‘allowed’ to challenge our partner, our parent, our child, our sibling, our co-worker or boss, our ‘dear’ friend, we can tell we have an authentic, trustworthy, safe relationship—one worth keeping.

But if we find that our challenge changes things between us—and we find there’s a degree of conditionality about the relationship as far as the other person sees it—then, too, we know where we stand.

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Being truly committed to kindness ensures we speak our truth in love. It also means we give others this same consideration—that we respect their kindness of truths spoken in love.

When we do this, we don’t fall into the trap of ‘keeping the peace’ which is literally about killing the relationship with [a fake] kindness.

What I find often in coupling counselling, especially in the early going, is the phenomenon whereby either or both partners were being too ‘kind’ to express what they really felt. And it always ends badly, because it’s a shock… “You were thinking and feeling THAT?”

Actually, I could extend this observation out to any relationship, and especially workplace relationships. Most conflicts are either avoided or they destroy the relationship. There is a third way.

In reality, what most concerns us is if we speak up, we fear being rejected, ridiculed, talked down to, or them giving us feedback we don’t want to hear. It’s actually the other way around in great relationships. We need to be able to speak up in order to have a relationship worth keeping.

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We find this most compelling in reflection upon some relationships that died long ago. They died because we overwatered them. We didn’t trust them with our truth, they didn’t trust us with theirs, and when we finally spoke the truth to each fracture occurred.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash