“I know I will stay alive. I’ve got all my life to live.
I’ve got all my love to give and I’ll survive. I will survive.”
sung by Gloria Gaynor
When I was a kid, my older brother got a job sacking groceries at a nearby grocery store. He told us about a woman that shopped there regularly and every time she got to the checkout line, without fail, she barked, “Don’t mash my bread!” No doubt, at some time in her past, the poor woman got her bread mashed. It changed forever how she related to grocery baggers.
Every experience in life causes us to adjust, if even slightly, the way we relate to others. So a painful experience, especially one that involves another person or persons, is going to impact our interpersonal nature. The reason is usually some combination of loss of trust, fear, and our old friends, fight or flight.
When we get hurt, trust is almost always a casualty. Our willingness to trust the words, actions, and motives of others, and in some cases of God himself, can be compromised.
The essence of survival mode is insulation. It puts emotional distance between us and everything else (including God). Trust is the antithesis of that. Trust opens our arms and hearts to let others in. The Fortress by its very existence keeps them out.
We want to avoid pain. So, we raise our quills and keep our distance. The walls go up. Trust dies.
Even as a kid we learn this. Stick your hand in the fire and you’ll get burned. It doesn’t take too many times before we stop sticking our hand in the fire!
The vacuum left by trust is frequently filled with fear, which also changes the way survivors interact with others. Once we’ve been burned enough times, we not only avoid the flame, we tend to stay away from matches, wood, paper and anything that burns.
“What’s he really up to?” we ask ourselves.
“I can’t go there,” we convince ourselves.
“I can’t go through that again,” we conclude.
We hear the voices. They haunt us. They keep trust from returning, and our arms and hearts stay closed.
Fight or flight, one of the characteristics of survival mode, by their very nature affect how we relate to others. After all, if we are running away or fighting, we aren’t relating well.
Sadly, being the flight person that I am, when I’ve moved to another city in an attempt to leave my problems behind, I’ve left friends behind, too—completely behind. Some, thankfully, have found me over the years and relationships were restored to some extent.
I was talking to a young man the other day, giving him the benefit of my “wisdom” regarding jobs. “Always keep networking,” I said. I went on to explain that I wasn’t talking about shoving business cards into people’s hands at networking luncheons, but rather building and maintaining relationships.
“If I had maintained my contacts over the years,” I went on, “I would have hundreds of people I could turn to.” But, alas, they are relationships left behind and discarded in misguided efforts to leave behind bad memories and find the “greener grass.”
The fighters have their own issues as well. To stand and fight might be admirable on the battlefield, but in day-to-day life, “friendly fire” takes down a lot of folks. I can’t tell you how many bitter people I’ve met. And although their bitterness can sometimes be traced to a major hurtful event, their front lines fighting attitude carries over to most other relationships. If you are constantly fighting an ex, for example, chances are that you are fighting most everyone else, too.
Your relationship behavior is affected by your survivor instincts. That doesn’t make it right or wrong; it just is what it is.
It took me years to realize that some of the things that I experienced early in life had a hugely negative effect on my ability to have healthy relationships. Being the tough guy that I was, I discounted those experiences as insignificant (not unlike most men). But they certainly were not.
I went through life with this suppressed anger that surfaced from time to time and I had no idea why. Once I connected the dots (years later), I realized that my life had been forever affected by these experiences and the resulting defenses that I now refer to as The Fortress, or survival mode.
Now at least, I am conscious of what’s going on rather than also living in denial.
When we go into survival mode, we tend to relate to the world around us with some level of anger, fear, lack of trust, and possibly running away. It may be surviving, but it sure isn’t thriving.
Surviving says, “Danger! Danger! Stay away from the flame!”
Thriving is roasting marshmallows.
