Insights

Freedom Can Save A Marriage

November 22, 2020 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Do you believe it’s possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons? Love without freedom isn’t real love. You might be following the letter of the law but miss the spirit when your heart isn’t in your actions.

God’s standard is freedom. He wants us to want to follow His instructions. But no one is perfect. The law He provides shows us how our hearts fall short of having pure motives. Following orders under strict obligation misses the mark.

The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
2 Corinthians 9:6-7 ESV

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:1 NIV

Obligation Results In External Motivation

Performing a task under obligation indicates only a limited amount of self-control. For example, wearing a seat-belt out of obligation will protect you just as well if you agree it is a good idea, provided you buckle it correctly either way.

Compliance works at first, as long as there is accountability. If you don’t agree with a law and there isn’t any enforcement of the law, what is likely to happen?

You probably won’t wear your seat-belt every time.
You might not buckle it correctly every time.

The motive to wear your seat-belt will come from law enforcement; you will be externally motivated. Sometimes this is the only motivation we have. It is adequate but not ideal. You might only comply with the law when you know someone in authority is watching. Even then, you might not recognize anyone in authority.

Freedom Results In Internal Motivation

Rebellion happens because of our innate desire for freedom and autonomy. In this sense, rebellion is a good thing. Everyone needs to learn how to develop responsibility when they have freedom. It’s possible to have both. When you do, what is likely to happen?

You will wear your seat-belt most of the time.
You will invest in learning the correct way to wear your seat-belt.

The motive to wear your seat-belt will come from your heart; you will be internally motivated. You will be in agreement with the law, even if you don’t follow it perfectly every time.

Relationships Need Freedom

Relationships need freedom to function properly. Obligation opens up relationships to other sins like control. If I am obligated to serve you, then I might resort to control to attempt to prevent you from taking advantage of me. This intensifies when I believe I must continue to serve you even when it is harmful to me.

Freedom allow genuine love and care to develop in a relationship. With freedom, I can serve with joy in my heart. The value I have for another person motivates me.

Relationships Need Boundaries

Boundaries provide a natural way to escape the vulnerability of obligation. Boundaries promote healthy attitudes in both husband and wife. They are necessary when one person lacks the desire or ability to follow the way of love. When this happens a person could respond with good or bad control.

Unhealthy control attempts to manage another person. Healthy control attempts to manage yourself. If I am obligated to serve you, I believe I must serve you or I suffer guilt, so my only other option is to try to manage your behavior.

A home can be a good analogy for boundaries. Imagine a husband as a home and a wife as a home. What happens if the husband blames his wife that his home isn’t clean and the wife believes she is obligated to serve her husband by cleaning his home? They will probably end up in a dysfunctional pattern because of the unhealthy dynamic of taking advantage of another who feels obligation to serve.

In this example, the wife could attempt unhealthy control by focusing on her husband’s flaws. “You don’t love me.” “Your house is too dirty.” “You only want me in your life because I’ve been cleaning your house.” This sounds like nagging, doesn’t it? She feels trapped and hopes her husband will accept responsibility for his home. But she is the one working hard to convince him to change.

While these attempts could lead to some fruitful discussions, they place too much of the control outside of the wife. She would be better off focusing on what she can control. She only needs to recognize her opinion on the matter. “I don’t feel comfortable cleaning your house.”

She doesn’t have to participate in something that violates her sense of self. She has the freedom to choose to clean or not to clean. She can use discernment to decide whether cleaning is a good idea. This way she maintains a healthy amount of control over her situation.

For more on boundaries.
Image by Anja from Pixabay

How To Ensure Your Empathy Is Healthy

November 7, 2020 by Matt Pavlik 2 Comments

Have you ever taken on someone’s pain as if it were your own? How about feeling the same way someone else is feeling? Only one of those is healthy empathy.

The primary difference between healthy and unhealthy empathy depends on how much self-awareness you have.

While listening to someone, the more you lose touch with your opinions, desires, and needs, the more likely you have an undeveloped sense of self. Some people might object by pointing out that good, empathetic listening means the listener forgets about their perspective. That is true. But it must remain a choice to de-emphasis one’s desires in favor of another’s. The unhealthy alternative is to default to what another wants because you have no idea what you want, or worse, you avoid exploring what you want.

The choice to focus on another must be positive. If you focus on another but harbor resentment or build up irritation, your empathy probably isn’t healthy. If you feel empty inside and have never really taken the time to understand your needs, your empathy probably isn’t healthy.

If you focus on another, feel pain, and think it is their pain, you might be deceiving yourself. Without a developed sense of your identity, it’s easy to become confused about whose pain your feeling. In reality, any pain you feel is your own.

Identity Guides You To Healthy Empathy

Whenever you are relating to another, keep one foot planted firmly in who you are and the other reaching out to the person who needs help. It can be difficult to do this perfectly, so you might temporarily (for a few minutes) lose touch with your identity. When you become confused by taking on other’s pain as if it were yours, ask yourself questions like:

Who am I?
How do I feel about what the other person is going through?
What part of my life reminds me of the other person’s pain? Often, you can be focused on another person’s pain, but are really feeling pain from your own life.
How have the difficult life situations I’ve been through taught me to surrender (or perhaps “forget”) who I am when I’m around other people?
What are my limits when it comes to experiencing someone else’s raw pain?

If you lose yourself while focusing on someone else, then you are already past your limit. When you reach your limit, you should excuse yourself from the conversation until you regain your strength (your sense of self).

When you take on another’s pain, it probably means you are needing self-care or someone to care for you. If you continue to help another person without a sense of who you are, you are leaving yourself in a state of self-abuse, and you won’t be much help to someone like that. It doesn’t work to abandon yourself in order to help someone else.

Ownership and Responsibility Guide You To Healthy Empathy

Women are usually better at empathizing with others, but healthy is healthy. Everyone needs to be fully willing to feel and respond to their own pain.

Consider a wife who is listening to her husband. No matter how much she cares and wants to help him with his pain, she can’t work through his pain for him. It’s his pain. Only he can do something about it. She can help by listening, but his pain is still his responsibility. In this sense, pain only multiplies. If her husband chooses to deny or disown some of his pain, his wife can’t make the situation better by taking on more pain. The increased pain she might feel doesn’t directly reduce her husband’s pain.

Self-Care Guides You To Healthy Empathy

If after you’ve been listening to someone, you notice that you have lingering pain, realize it’s your pain, not the other’s pain. You have some issues to work through, so it’s time to focus exclusively on yourself. If you lose touch with yourself while trying to be empathetic, you should be able to get back to yourself in minutes, not days or weeks.

To help you connect with yourself, you might try journaling your feelings and answering questions like the ones listed earlier and these:

What do I need to help the pain in my life?
Who do I have to listen to me?

Healthy empathy is knowing what it feels like to walk in someone’s shoes and communicating it to them without judging them. Unhealthy empathy would be wearing someone else’s shoes and thinking that they are your shoes.

3 Steps To Achieve Healthy Grieving

October 25, 2020 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Grieving allows the healthy emotional resolution of a disturbing event–especially when the event seems impossible to accept.

All grieving is temporary. It is time-limited. It has a beginning and an end. Yet, it is possible to become stuck in grief. This happens because we are unable or unwilling to face the reality of a difficult event (or multiple events).

When the event seems to be too much for you, how can you become free again? To be stuck in grief is to be stuck in time. Events happen in time. Memories of those events are reminders of what you’ve been through.

1) The Past Helps You Achieve Healthy Grieving

To move forward in grief, you must first move backward in time. A substantial part of the grieving process involves working with your memories. There is a lot you can do (and perhaps need to do) in order to fully process a memory (see additional posts about this at the end of this post). But if your goal is to become unstuck, the first question to ask is: What did the event cost you?

When you attempt you answer this simple question, you have little choice but to re-enter the memory and recognize the true nature of your loss. What changed? How did the event affect your life?

You might not be willing to relive the event, but maybe you are willing to look at how your life changed for the worse because of it? After a negative event, you are never the same again. What did the event cost you?

2) The Present Helps You Achieve Healthy Grieving

After you have a clear picture of what the event cost you way back in the past somewhere, the next step is to see how the cost carries forward in your life. What is the event still costing you today?

This question helps you see how well you’ve managed the cost over time. How has the cost changed? Is it worse, the same, or improved? It can be a shock to realize how much an event from years ago is still influencing you today.

Have you been ignoring the cost or actively managing it? To complete this second step, you need to know the overall impact of the event on your life. What additional opportunities have you lost since the original event?

3) The Future Helps You Achieve Healthy Grieving

If you’ve completed steps 1 and 2, you’ve accomplished a lot. However, you can still be stuck if you haven’t allowed the event to propel you forward in some new, ground-breaking direction.

In step 1, you recognize you’re in a hole. In step 2, you learn your resistance to getting out. Step 3 pulls everything together: you determine to not only get out of the hole but build and climb a ladder that takes you higher than you have ever been. What do you want to do about the event now?

Your grieving and recovery are not fully done until you look beyond your loss to how you can change for the better. For example, if you lose a job you loved, you probably won’t get the job back, but you can focus on what you love even more which could lead to a different but better job. Or, you might even decide to become a job coach to help others with their job losses.

Another example is the loss of a loved one. You can struggle that you will never see the person again. That’s step 1 and 2. Step 3 is figuring out how your loss is changing you and how you want to make a difference because of who you are.

In step 3, you shift your focus from what you can’t do to what you can do. You can’t bring your loved one back, but, because of your loss, you can more fully realize what is most important to you and to God.

God wants you to make it through your grieving, so you can see what else is possible in your life. Grieving is necessary, but it’s not the end. You can grieve your losses, discover the cost, and find a way forward that brings positive change to yourself and others.

Image by kirillslov from Pixabay
Read more about healing memories.
Read more about growing through change as God makes all things new

4 Signs You Were Neglected

October 18, 2020 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Your parenting style probably says a lot about your emotional development. If you were neglected, you might overcompensate by overindulging your child. Or, because you lack internal resources, you might repeat your neglect with your child.

The lessons we learn as children are hard to forget. We might not have been able to prevent our own pain, but there is at least a chance we can help our children to avoid the same pain.

This can be an adaptive approach to life, as long as it doesn’t cross over into extremes. How will you know if you are overcompensating for your own childhood neglect? Here are four motivations to watch for:

1) You Were Neglected So You Spoil Your Child

Have you ever thought, “I want to give my kids what I never got”? It’s fine to want to improve upon your childhood. You might be able to provide a lot more than you ever received.

Overcompensating looks like attempting to prevent your child from ever lacking anything. Everybody needs to experience the reality of life’s difficulty at some point. You can allow your children to feel reality without neglecting them.

If you have thought, “I want to prove I can do better than my parents did,” you might be caught in unforgiveness. One thing you should know is that no amount of making your child feel better is going to heal your emptiness. Keep giving, but seek the attention you need for yourself.

2) You Were Neglected So You Can’t Tolerate Your Child’s Discomfort

Have you ever thought, “I don’t want to discipline my children because I don’t want to be mean”? Giving your child what they want instead of what they need might seem generous but it is actually selfish.

For example, your child might want more candy but need to eat healthily and brush his teeth. I remember how strange it felt to deny my child a treat. I believed my child wouldn’t be able to handle not receiving what seemed good.

Even if your giving is helpful for your child, it can’t do much for you. Giving to others feels good, but it can’t heal. Healthy giving usually happens the other way around. You can be a healthy giver after you learn how to receive what you need but didn’t get.

3) You Were Neglected So You Neglect Your Child

Have you ever thought, “I don’t know how to play with my child”? If you didn’t receive enough attention, giving to others is challenging.

One, you lack modeling. You might simply not have enough experience to know what is the right behavior. As you receive, it equips you to give to others.

Two, you need to feel your own desire to play before you can play with your child. Numbing yourself to your needs is one way to cope with neglect. But it gets in the way of connecting with your child.

4) You Were Neglected So You Make Your Child Your Top Priority

Have you ever thought, “My spouse can go without my attention, but my children can’t?”

Certainly, children need attention. The younger they are, the more they need it consistently. So there are times when a dependent child must be your top priority. But I am thinking of an all-or-nothing pattern.

Some parents find it extremely difficult to ever put their children lower in priority than their spouses. If you identify with being a child more than an adult, you could be susceptible to favoring your child. If your pain is great enough, you could even favor your child over your spouse without being aware of how unhealthy it is.

In all of the four examples, the driving motivation is the parent’s own emptiness. A need unfilled is an extremely powerful motivator. It is so strong it can convince parents to rationalize some outrageous behaviors, unfortunately.

Parenting is hard work and no parent is perfect. Even if you’ve done better than your parent, you probably fall short is some ways too. Fortunately, children are resilient, especially when God is working in their lives.

Since you were a child at one time, you are resilient too! Resilient doesn’t mean you can thrive without getting what you need, it means you won’t be able to easily give up on your desires. Your needs are preserved even through difficult times.

It is time to consider your needs. You can take care of yourself even if you were neglected.

Image by Maurizio Dongiovanni from Pixabay

Man desiring to be powerful, looking to God for help.

Be Powerful Without Being Self-absorbed

October 4, 2020 by Matt Pavlik 1 Comment

The quickest way to be powerful is to develop healthy doses of humility and confidence. If you lean too far in one direction then life becomes unbalanced and can lead to a world of hurt and trouble. But, healthy humility and confidence result in joy.

How does joy related to power? To answer this, I first want you to consider the following four possible combinations of humility and confidence:

Self-loathing: a false humility without much if any confidence means harmfully low self-worth. This person actively rejects the truth about who God is and who He made them to be.
Self-deprecating: a helpful amount of humility without enough confidence leads to questionable self-worth. This person is healthy when they have a lighthearted ability to laugh at their mistakes. However, their negative self-expression can also come from a poisoned self-image.
Self-confident: a helpful dose of humility and confidence means self-care without arrogance. This person lets God be God while also feeling good about who they are.
Self-absorbed: too little humility with too much confidence results in an inflated sense of importance. This person becomes overcompensates for their low self-worth by focusing too much on trying to feel powerful. Increasing focus on self becomes a dead-end at self-loathing. An unhealthy preoccupation with self misses out on what God has to offer.

People become self-absorbed when they look only within themselves to heal their brokenness. In futility, people try to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But, the power that originates anywhere except from God promises only the illusion of confidence.

For example, if self becomes everything and God is minimized, then God isn’t in His rightful position in our lives. We’re not really going to succeed – maybe we’ll succeed with financially or something – but overall for God’s kingdom and his purposes we won’t be succeeding.

Be Humble So You Can Be Powerful

The world says you must be strong and independent to be powerful. But an “I can do it all by myself” attitude fails to activate God’s power.

Do you want to be full of your own power or full of God's power? You can be humble, confident, and full of God's power. Why settle for only what you can muster without God? Click To Tweet

God says to be powerful, you must be weak enough to accept His help. A healthy weakness is a vulnerable dependence. Depending upon God activates His power.

Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.
2 Corinthians 12:9 NLT

Be Confident So You Can Be Powerful

If you focus too much on God, if that’s possible, and minimize yourself then you can develop self-loathing where you don’t feel like you’re much of anything. Self-loathing is simply another form of arrogance that blocks God out of your life.

God’s power isn’t going to shine through you then. You need to have a right view of yourself so that God’s power will rest on you and work through you.

Be Joyful So You Can Be Powerful

The joy of the Lord is your strength (Nehemiah 8:10). How can you experience joy if you carry the heavy load of bitterness toward your own spirit?

Passively waiting for God to make you powerful doesn’t work. To be full of power, you must actively allow God to fill you, which also means keeping yourself empty of substitute fillings. Being filled with the Spirit means having great joy in God.

So be very careful how you live, not being like those with no understanding, but live honorably with true wisdom, for we are living in evil times. Take full advantage of every day as you spend your life for his purposes. And don’t live foolishly for then you will have discernment to fully understand God’s will. And don’t get drunk with wine, which is rebellion; instead be filled with the fullness of the Holy Spirit.
Ephesians 5:15-18 TPT

How Can We Be Powerful And Not Self-absorbed? How Can We Be Confident While Also Humble?

If we want to be powerful, we must be joyful. If we want to be joyful, we can’t live rebelliously independent from God. We must stop living with the habits of self-deprecation and self-absorption. The antidote for poisoning shame is to look to God for help.

Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces.
Psalm 34:5 NLT

So we should go for everything. We should do all that we can – shoot from the moon so to speak – but also keep that in check by accepting whatever God provides or doesn’t provide in our lives.

He may have a different plan than the one on our minds, and it may take some time to figure out what that is, but it doesn’t mean we should just be sidelined and sitting back and waiting for something to happen either.

We should take the truths in the Bible that God has given us and run with them as best as we can. But ultimately it is up to God to author our success.

The inspiration for this post came from a conversation I had with Kidron Tirey.

Image by İbarihim Halil Uyğur from Pixabay

Headship And Submission Are The Big Guns

September 20, 2020 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

If you’ve ever been in an argument, you know it can escalate quickly. Before long you both can resort to bringing out the big guns–meant to finally win the battle. If you find yourself using the biblical roles of headship and submission to make your point, realize that you could be using the nuclear option.

Demanding that your spouse submit or sacrifice for you isn’t a healthy way to resolve conflict.

Some conversations attempting to resolve conflict are messy arguments and some are civil discussions. Sometimes an honest discussion can be heated, and that’s okay, provided you know how to repair any collateral damage.

All healthy discussions need to be based in reality. There is no perfect wife and there is no perfect husband. The Bible sets the bar high for how to treat your spouse, but God doesn’t intend for anyone to “weaponize” the scriptures.

God commands the husband to lay down his life and the wife to submit, both in service to the common good. The command comes from God. It doesn’t work when it comes from your spouse.

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
Ephesians 5:22-27 NIV

Healthy Headship and Submission Preserve Unity

Headship and submission allow a marriage to work. They are needed to find the way out of a stalemate (no pun intended). They are really meant to be a last resort to preserve the unity in your marriage.

You can resolve a large majority of conflict by using good communication skills. If you have good communication, you shouldn’t have to mention the words headship or submission. If you can’t resolve most of your issues with a win-win result, you have a different problem. Playing the “you’re supposed to submit” or “you’re supposed to sacrifice” card won’t help you find a win-win.

Healthy Headship and Submission Avoid Sin

If your issue isn’t life or death, then likely you don’t have to make an immediate decision one way or the other. Instead, move forward when you both have peace. God cares more about how you get along than whether you decide to buy a new car or not.

For a wife, there’s a difference between submitting to your husband’s healthy ideas and his sin. For example, God doesn’t require a wife to submit to a husband who wants to rob a bank. The same applies to a husband and his sacrifice. God didn’t want Adam to follow Eve into her sin.

You sacrifice or submit when your spouse has reached their limits. When your spouse’s maturity level blocks the conflict resolution, you yield out of compassion for them. You bear the consequences of their sin, forgiving them.

This requires healthy discernment. Both husband and wife should be committed to growth, but God allows you to yield to your spouse when their distress is too high.

Healthy Headship and Submission Encourage Equality

It would be wrong to give in to your spouse all the time just because of God’s command to you. Promoting ongoing selfishness in each other is its own sin. You will reach peak marital satisfaction when you are both happy most of the time. It’s okay to get your way some of the time. But you might also need to hear that it’s okay to not get your way some of the time.

However you resolve your conflict, it’s important that you return as quickly as possible to the sense that you are equals. Headship (love) and submission (respect) give you the opportunity to meet some of your spouse’s deepest emotional needs.

Image by Michael Drummond from Pixabay