Father <heywardew...@bellsouth.net>

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).