Reactions

 

I had a friend, 10 years older than I, who I knew for a long time. We’d golf together, then dine together, then get royally drunk together until the bar kicked us out. The ban never lasted long, because we spent a lot of money at the place. Then came the point in time when we’d golf—but he’d go home to eat and spend the evening at home. Some years passed, until one night I came home drunk and couldn’t stand myself living like that anymore so I instinctively called that friend to come get me because I was sure I was going crazy. He did, and he took me to his place to talk and have coffee. That was when I found out he had stopped drinking and started living. That was the early turning point in my life.

In ensuing years, our relationship as a couple of guys living a sober life became very special. He willingly shared a lot of wisdom about life with me. One of the things he shared was about reactions and their effect on relationships. He shared that when he was drunk, his wife knew where all the buttons were, and she would push them unmercifully, and he would react—usually in an inappropriate manner. With sobriety, he found that by not reacting inappropriately when his buttons were pushed, the marriage improved, and the times that the buttons were used diminished. One of the things he shared was, “I found out that when I react in a bad way, it is like sticking a knife in the heart of our relationship—and the heart gets damaged.”

We don’t have to be drunks to react in a bad way when we are in less than pleasant discussions do we? Yet, don’t we often do that—perhaps because we may think that we will somehow get an upper hand by doing so? Even during the course of a perfectly normal conversation we may get offended erroneously because we take something we hear personally, when that intent was never present. And if we react in a way we shouldn’t, even if it feels natural to us, aren’t we really just like sticking a knife into the heart of the relationship? Reactions can be relationship killers or relationship healers. We have a choice of which type to use.

Bottom Line Thought: Have you gauged how your reactions affect your relationship?