Learning to relate to difficult people is one of the most common and anguishing problems I’ve encountered in many years as a Christian psychotherapist. Toxic relationships between two parties seem to endure as long as healthy ones, and sometimes longer, for they tend to be permanent. The difficult party holds more power than the other, who is forever trying to please or get the approval of the dominator. The dominator remains inflexible in rejecting very imaginative attempts by the subjective party to achieve victory. But no success is ever possible. No matter what the words or actions of the pleaser, the unpleased remains unmoved and continues to insult and otherwise depersonalize the one in the position of being less powerful. We all have seen these destructive arrangements between husbands and wives, siblings, close friends, and other social connections, including the workplace. Whether at work or at home, negative forces such as these tend to enslave. The power holder maintains position throughout time, and the underling obeys the rules of the relationship as well. Even though the unspoken agreement between the parties is absurd, it is honored nonetheless. Oddly, the subservience of the underdog fosters quite admirable achievements. Therefore, it is not usual for the pleaser to attain a higher social or professional rank than the one who will never be appeased. I have seen this regrettable dynamic at play most often between mother and daughter, with competition between siblings running a close second. One of the worst examples is the proverbial mother whose daughter is never permitted to please her. The mother communicates without words that it’s your job to make me happy, but nothing you ever do will work. Some of these daughters develop anorexia as a result of feeling as an absolute failure in their only mission in life. Even though there seems to be no solution, there really is. One of the parties must break a major rule governing the contract. In other words, somebody needs to start acting and reacting in ways that the other would never predict. By far the most effective response is for one of the parties to refuse a cue and not respond at all. The initiator, never having faced such a surprise, has no way to come back. Further, the dominator is foiled in the insane game’s objective to wound the other. The pay-off is denied. In the movie “War Games”, a hit many years ago, a computer in the War Room of the Department of Defense is put through an accelerated exercise to predict the outcome of various military strikes with the probable retaliatory action by the enemy and vice-versa. The enlarged computer screen becomes a flashing light, a rapid strobe, as the computer rushes through every possible scenario. Then the display goes blank. After a pause, the words appear, “The only solution is not to play.” So it is in painful human relationships that never budge but continue to inflict internal harm in both participants. The only solution is not to play. Fr. Heyward B. Ewart, Ph.D., is president of St. James the Elder Theological Seminary, a distance-learning institution at http://stjamestheelderseminary.org. He is also author of “AM I BAD? Recovering from Abuse” (Loving Healing Press).
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