Overcoming the Frenetic Standstill

It was night and I was driving on an unfamiliar, curving country road. Tamarah was with me, and I was toggling back and forth between chatting with her and looking at the map on the car screen. Though my wife might beg to differ, I consider myself a better than average driver. That said, I wasn’t paying attention to anything going on behind me.  

 

It was more than alarming, then, when out of nowhere an ambulance with lights flashing—no siren—showed up hot on my tail. Then, ALL AT THE SAME TIME: there’s a ditch on my right, there’s oncoming traffic, Tamarah is shouting at me to use the approaching driveway, and the ambulance driver decides to bring clarity by turning on his siren while also stomping on his horn like someone’s life depends on it.  

 

Whatever is the opposite of grace under pressure, it was happening in our car right there. I was scrambling to make everyone happy—the ambulance driver, his fellow EMT, the supposedly dying patient, my wife—but no one was happy.

 

In my binary spectrum way of considering personality differences, we have leader traits and helper traits. These are not mutually exclusive, but you will tend to be more of one than the other. I spent last month’s post writing some observations on and words of encouragement to those who have helper traits. This month, I want to make a couple more observations about those with helper traits—of whom I am chief.  

 

As I wrote last month, I consider people with helper traits to be emotional processors. Such people think via our emotions—that is, we use our emotional state for sensing, motivation, and decision-making. There are pros and cons to this way of processing.

 

One deficit of emotional processors is that we’re prone to getting flooded. When too much information comes upon us quickly—like that crazy ambulance scene that occurred just two nights ago—people with helper traits react by involuntarily shutting down or by flipping into uncharacteristic aggressive control mode.

 

Shutting down is essentially going into survival mode—flight, fight, or freeze. To borrow a phrase from the French cultural theorist, Paul Virilio, “frenetic standstill” captures the idea—that everything around us is in flux and yet nothing is happening because nothing can happen. On the other hand, flipping into aggressive control mode in the hands of an emotional processor is a last-ditch effort to get all the craziness going on in their head to stop.

 

Another deficit of emotional processors is the strong desire to please. Put negatively, people with helper traits try to avoid situations in which personal rejection is possible. People like this tend to compromise themselves to keep the other emotionally stable and safe. Think of helper traits as room regulators, always trying to keep the relationship temperature comfortable.

 

This tendency can help at times, as in de-escalating a conflict. On the other hand, such acquiescing is how people like this end up getting lost in their marriage, bound to family systems and secrets, and rolled over in work environments. To keep the peace and/or the status quo, helpers regularly give in. Why would someone do this?

 

Because a core value—if not the main value—of people with helper traits is attachment. The pain worse than me doing what I don’t want to do is the pain of another acting or sounding like they are rejecting me—conveyed through something as mild as a negative tone to something more extreme like physical violence. When the desire for attachment is elevated to the level of need, psychologist refer to such a relationship as “fused.”

 

Fused relationships cannot be described in any biblical way as loving since the need for attachment means I’m loving you not for your sake but for my sake. Truly loving relationships develop and mature over time, but fused relationships do not since the needy one seeks regular contact, validation, and agreement from the other. Any sense of individuality within the relationship is blurred as the helper-trait is seeking over-attachment out of the weakness of need.

 

Evidence that someone with helper traits is growing in Christ is that they are increasingly willing to risk finding their voice and differentiating themselves from the other. As in, can I be okay even when I know someone I love is not okay with me? People with leader traits have little struggle doing this since they tend to be more internally secure and confident. But for people with helper traits to speak and act more autonomously as a secure individual requires something beyond their natural instincts.  

 

For example, let’s say a young adult man with helper traits gets married and then finds that his mother and his wife don’t get along. He is regularly frustrated as he finds himself trying to keep both women happy. It’s an impossible task. When he comes to my office, we’ll eventually get to the point where I’ll say to him something like, “You cannot have it both ways. One of these women is going to be disappointed or upset with you, and you get to decide which one.”

 

If he decides to play it both ways, then he’ll be miserable as neither one of these women will feel his love and neither will respect him. If he decides to commit to loving his wife as he should and placing limits on his mother, then he’ll feel the periodic displeasure of his mother. But that will be more than compensated for from the love and respect he’ll get from his wife.  

 

As a Christ-follower, differentiating oneself from others means that you can maintain yourself in relationship with another, especially when the other is pressuring you to conform to what they want. That young man can agree with his mother if he genuinely agrees, but he can also respectfully disagree with her without feeling like he’s losing himself when he gets pushback or threats. He also shouldn’t leave the relationship altogether just because he’s feeling the discomfort of his mother’s disapproval.

 

Where does the Christ-follower get this ability? The answer is one’s ongoing and growing relationship with Jesus and his Spirit. Whether it’s Moses speaking to Pharoah, Esther speaking to king Ahasuerus, Daniel’s three friends speaking to Nebuchadnezzar, or any of the prophets speaking truth to power, they share what Peter and John experienced when engaging the Sanhedrin: “When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

 

Or, to turn that around, we test out God’s promises by practicing standing, speaking, and acting according to the wisdom and truth entrusted to us. We find out that in the crucible of relationship friction, as uncomfortable as that can be, we don’t die. In faith, we believe Christ’s Spirit is right there with us, in the fire and in the flood, keeping us fully attached to Jesus.

 

Because maturing Christ-followers are increasingly less needy for others’ approval as we grow in our internalizing of God Almighty’s eternal approval of us in his Son.