Ask several people how they feel about their plans to be with loved ones over the holidays and you will likely get a spectrum of reactions ranging from the positive—excitement and gratitude—to the negative, like apprehension, dread, apathy, or discouragement. Many might even express mixed feelings because their affection for those they see doesn’t override the painful interactions generated by their time together.

Over the years I’ve noticed that this relational pain is often the result of two common experiences (1):

The first is the experience of rejection. This includes relationships in which we have pursued and invested in someone, but they have not reciprocated our interest or investment in the relationship. They have avoided us (or at least avoided crucial discussions with us), prioritized other people or tasks over giving us their attention, reacted to our expressions of care with ambivalence, apathy, or hostility, or withdrawn or shut us out in response to our pursuit.
The other is the experience of someone mishandling or exploiting our vulnerability. This includes relationships in which someone has taken advantage of our generosity, treated us like an object instead of a person, pressured us with unsolicited advice, expressed unfair or insensitive criticism, or intruded upon our privacy. Maybe they have imposed themselves or their demands upon us, betrayed our trust, or let us down when we were depending on them.

At some point, we all are bound to experience rejection or being mishandled (or both) by someone important in our lives. And following a God who grieves relational distance and abandoned or broken intimacy and pursues restoration with his people even when it hurts (2) means we are called to do the same.

But for those of us who struggle with over-responsibility, discerning how to fulfill this calling can be particularly tricky. Over-responsibility is habitually assuming responsibility that is impossible to fulfill or not ours to claim. And those who struggle with over-responsibility are often tempted to either overestimate our ability or assume too much responsibility to fix these dynamics, putting an impossible burden on our shoulders and compromising our judgment. We shift our focus from honoring others to frantic attempts to produce outcomes that symbolize, to us or the other person, a sense of connection, commitment, or closeness rather than the real deal.

How do we know if we are being over-responsible? For several reasons, it can be hard to identify. Here are some diagnostic questions to help you discern if you are assuming too much responsibility to fix a painful or broken relationship.

Have you felt preoccupied with analyzing or fixing a relationship?
Have you noticed that you are less focused on loving these individuals and more focused on appeasing them?
When you talk about these patterns with them, do you find yourself trying to prove you are “in the right”?
Do you feel a sense of urgency to resolve conflicts or achieve reconciliation?
Have you subjected yourself to the same mistreatment or betrayal over and over because you are convinced that Christian love requires you to offer second, third, and fourth chances?
Have you reached a point where someone’s inability to meet your expectations has tempted you to manipulate, attack, or punish them? Or do you find that you have a great deal of contempt toward them in your heart?
Have you noticed a tendency to vacillate between black-or-white assessments— “It’s fine” vs. “It’s hopeless”, or “It’s all my fault” vs. “It’s all their fault”? Or feeling forced to choose the lesser evil, i.e. intimacy that feels painfully unsustainable and tempts you toward resentment, or wall yourself off from intimacy for the sake of self-protection?

If any of these tendencies resonate with you, God may be inviting you to identify false assumptions about your abilities and what he’s asking of you in these hard relationships. He may be calling you to accept that you don’t have the power to sufficiently prevent or address the distance, and he may even be leading you to limit how you engage or rely upon the other person. But to confidently do that with a clear conscience, we need to first consider his design for intimacy and how he uses distance in continuity with it.

God’s Purposes For Relational Distance and Boundaries
While we typically describe intimacy with experiential categories and subjective standards, true intimacy has a fixed nature and objective standards because it originates in God himself. And so, whenever people rebel against God’s fixed design for intimacy, relational distance is not just a penal consequence but a natural and necessary one.

We see this clearly in the garden. Adam and Eve’s rejection of God’s ways was ultimately a rejection of God’s invitation to closeness with him and each other. As a result, the intimacy they enjoyed was lost. We might wonder if something could have been done to prevent or avoid this tragic outcome of distance, but God’s design for intimacy has inherent requirements that made this impossible:

If true intimacy requires voluntary consent, God’s people had to have the freedom to reject him and his offer of intimacy. The only way God could have closeness with his people was to honor their distinct personhood and thereby give them the power to choose either intimacy or distance.
True intimacy requires relational maturity—a holy ability and dependability to relate to God and others according to his designs and commands—and Adam and Eve’s immaturity became a threat not only to their relationship with God but to their own well-being. God sent them out of the garden to prevent them from eating from the tree of life, which would have made their broken relationship a permanent reality. In blocking their reentry he was not only preventing this fatal outcome but preserving the possibility of future restoration.

If we fast forward in the story and observe how and when he brings his people back into communion with him, we see an additional characteristic of God’s design: relational restoration is dependent upon his timing and his intervention. Despite God’s hatred of relational separation, he allows the process of restoring intimacy to play out over a lengthy period of time both in his people as a whole and also in our individual lives.

What bearing does this design have on our decisions about our broken relationships? To answer that, let me flesh out four implications.

First, our highest priority is not securing intimacy with others, but pursuing faithfulness to God and submitting to his design for relationships. We face a constant temptation to overwrite God’s definition of intimacy with our own false one, especially when our over-responsibilty tempts us to assess their choices based on their immediate outcomes like feeling valued by someone or making them happy with us. Jesus is our empathetic companion here: his commitment to fulfilling his Father’s will caused many people to reject him, abandon him, and even seek to take his life. There were temptations from his disciples and Satan to choose a path that falsely promised he could avoid loneliness, persecution, shame, and death, but his Father’s fellowship, guidance, and promises kept him grounded in what was unseen but true, and we need to do the same.
Second, God’s design will at times require us to allow distance in order to dignify the other individual’s personhood and choices. Manipulating, guilting, or pressuring others to be intimate never creates true closeness, and allowing others to treat us this way or constantly excusing and mitigating the consequences of their actions is not honoring or dignifying to either party nor is it sustainable long term. Again, we see Jesus dignify others in this way: if they rejected him, he didn’t force them to change their minds. On the contrary, he told his disciples to move on and shake the dust from their feet. We might assume that Jesus is responding with indifference or spite, but his actions honor people as moral agents and reveal that he wants their hearts, not forced obedience. This was a display of his faith. He trusted his Father with the final outcome, and we have the opportunity to exercise the same faith.
Third, at times we need to allow or pursue distance and maintain boundaries when either person in the relationship lacks maturity. God makes us stewards over our relationships and resources and calls us to use discernment in how we invest or entrust those things to others. So while we are called to love everyone, we are not called to accept intimacy and vulnerability with those who have proven incapable of stewarding our trust. This is why Jesus cautioned the disciples not to give to dogs what is holy or cast pearls before swine: to love and honor others involves aligning our expectations with their demonstrated capacities, lest we allow them to cause harm to us or our relationship. And the reverse is true as well: because closeness gives us the power to impact the other person, maintaining relational distance and boundaries may be the best immediate response when we are not confident we have the wisdom, maturity, and support needed to address relational breaches.
Fourth, if true intimacy requires ongoing investment and develops over time, we can’t have an all-or-nothing or one-and-done approach to our relationships that is driven by angst and reliance on our capacities. We need a step-by-step, “as fits the occasion,” God-dependent approach. At times this will feel scary or more labor-intensive than we anticipate, but it is the true way to develop the kind of intimacy God intends for us. This approach also provides an opportunity to seek and receive God’s daily grace, discernment, and courage.

In the coming weeks, if you find yourself feeling anxious or heavy about your anticipated time with others, or confused and conflicted about how to address the painful patterns that repeatedly surface in a relationship, consider it God’s invitation to come and reconsider with him what yoke he has actually given you to bear. And remember that the One who is intimately acquainted with relational hurt and temptations is eager and ready to guide you as you seek to walk in love and faithfulness.

(1) The following content was adapted from the article God’s Purposes for Relational Distance: A Means to a Good End, from CCEF’s Journal of Bibilical Counseling 36:1
(2) All of scripture could be described as a story of God’s unhappiness with broken intimacy, and the lengths he will go to restore closeness. We see a glimpse into this when Jesus laments over Jerusalem’s unwillingness to receive and follow him (Matt 23:37; Luke 19:41-42), and yet he chooses to give himself up as a sacrifice so that this relationship can be restored (Eph 5:2).

This is Part I in a series on navigating and healing from over-responsibility in relationships.

Laura Andrews has been counseling, consulting, coaching, teaching, and writing since 2009, and one of her greatest passions is strengthening and supporting ministry leaders and their families. She holds an MDiv in Counseling from Westminster Theological Seminary and is currently pursuing a certificate in Evidence-Based Coaching at Fielding Graduate University. She most recently held a faculty role at the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation (CCEF) and was a lecturer at Westminster Theological Seminary. Her specialty is working with those struggling with over-responsibility, recovering from ministry trauma or burnout, or navigating difficult relational dynamics or life transitions.