Are you struggling with unresolved fury caused by a broken promise, failed expectation, or other hope you had for your relationship?
I've been talking a lot about the contractual nature of relationships. I believe this is an important step to better communicate and harmonize with the people in our lives. Contracts are the relational motor oil that decreases friction caused by misunderstandings. Contracts are also the runway to maximize fulfilling and fruitful relationships. Ultimately, I believe that the divine nature of our human design is the pursuit of purposeful productivity—especially in relationship to one another.
Breach of contract is a form of interpersonal friction. It is a type of disappointment in the relationship. It is the failure of expectations. Breach is the broken promise—expressly given, understood by implication, or imagined from the nonverbal hopes and dreams of the unrealistic. Whatever the case may be, we should all ask ourselves a series of questions whenever an offense creates or increases relationship friction.
Am I responding to your broken promise with hurricane gust force winds of wrath, fury and vengeance? Or am I responding on the opposite extreme by refusing to talk to you, cutting myself off from you and avoiding the conversation?
These extremes to navigating breach are both harmful to one’s own emotional, spiritual, and even physical health. In addition to inflicting harm on oneself, either one of these responses are harmful to the future of the relationship. And that's why I want to challenge you to consider the path of grace whenever you're dealing with a breach within your relationship contract. One way to approach this strategically is to first examine the breach for intentionality.
Did this person intend to hurt me?
Even when we consider ancient Biblical law (or other ancient civil codes for that matter), the law makes a clear distinction between intentional and unintentional harms. Accordingly, intentional acts of passion, malice, or hatred understandably result in harsher consequences than those which result through accident, mistake or negligence. Unfortunately, for many of us, we rapidly jump to conclusions when friction arises in our relationships. Fueled by pain, we expedite guilty verdicts imposing malicious intent.
This analysis applies in most relationships. However, I'm speaking primarily of intimate relationships here, such as marriage, parent-child, and close friends. The more intimate the relationship, the more the emotional pain from a breach. Because of the pain associated with the degree of intimacy, it is more tempting to process our own pain by assuming the worst intentions.
In other words, if they really cared about me, then they would not have hurt me so badly.
They would've never breached the contract if they really loved me.
This is the logical sequence that we attach to intimate relationships. Handling that breach with grace, however, requires an analysis of intent. I can definitely attest to this necessity as one who serves as a neutral third-party within intimate disputes. From my observations, the resulting harm in 75% of intimate disputes is actually unintentional. Three out of four times, the harm results from a place of ignorance or not understanding, not having certain types of information, or life skills that would've helped the breaching party make a different decision in a given moment. You may be asking:
“Okay, so what about the other one out of four? What about when they meant to hurt me?”
“What about when there was malice, a forethought?”
How do I deal with that kind of breach with grace?
I’ll give you my tried and true insights in the next post.
Be blessed and encouraged,
Judge Char
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