Learning how to detach with love will revolutionize your life and relationships. People in difficult relationships have trouble separating themselves from other people’s actions and reactions. Everything other people do affects them at some level: emotionally, physically, financially, mentally, and spiritually. They take the blame thrown at them. They feel responsible for the other person’s choices. They are upset by the moods. They adjust their actions based on the accusations and threats. They allow their lives to be turned upside down by the crises. They bail the person out and attempt to fix things that aren’t theirs to fix. They are constantly reacting to the other person instead of living their own lives.
Detaching is about separating yourself emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually from other people and what they do. Here is what you can learn to detach from:
- Behavior
- Anger
- Moods
- Blame
- Opinions
- Manipulation
- Guilt
- Threats
- Crises
Your life does not have to revolve around what other people say and do, no matter how closely intertwined your lives are. You are a separate person with the responsibility and right to live your own life and make your own choices and to experience the consequences or rewards from them. Other people have the responsibility and right to live their lives and to make their own choices and experience the consequences or rewards from them. You can learn how to detach from other people and especially from difficult people with this Christian relationship help.
Detaching will enable you to do the following:
- Observe the relationship dynamics objectively
- See who is responsible for the problems in the relationship
- Choose how you want to act instead of automatically reacting
- Prevent you from becoming a part of the dysfunction dynamic
Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t care about people. Only in extreme situations will you need complete physical detachment. You continue to engage respectfully in the relationship, recognizing that people are responsible for themselves and that you don’t cause them to be like they are and therefore aren’t responsible to fix them. You can even learn how to detach with love, treating people with courtesy and kindness while you give them the dignity to live their own lives.
God detaches from us with love. He cares deeply that we make the right choices. Yet he allows us the right to make our own choices, even when they are wrong. He doesn’t intervene and force us to do what we don’t want to do. He simply steps back and allows us to suffer the consequences of those choices in the hope that we will learn to make different ones, all the while having unconditional love toward us.