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The Grace of Healing Love
Ollie & Sandy
Ollie:
Healing Love is the gift we have as a couple that allows us to heal
and be healed by each other. It restores and revitalizes our love.
Many differences and hurts take place in our couple relationship
within a single day, never mind a lifetime. The gift of healing
love allows us to heal each other by allowing us to reach out to
forgive and forget. It’s important to remember that being
open to the gift of healing requires a decision. A decision by both
spouses to respond. It’s a two-fold decision. A decision to
heal and to be healed; one without the other makes it all null and
void.
Sandy and I would like to share with you a time when we experienced
the gift of healing in our relationship. Our lives had been so hectic
that we decided to take Sunday just for us. We made love, read the
paper, talked, laughed, and we even talked about the week ahead.
Sandy said she’d do the potato casserole Monday morning so
today I could just sit back and relax. When I woke up from my nap,
I thought about all the things that we needed to do -- Sandy didn’t
have any more time then I did, so while she slept I went to the
kitchen to get the potatoes started.
Sandy:
I was overjoyed in our day together -- in my mind it was long overdue
and I wasn’t the least bit interested in letting anything
interfere with it. When I found Ollie in the kitchen, I felt crushed
like a rose run over by a dump truck. I could see that our special
time together was OVER in Ollie’s mind. I stuffed my crushed
feeling, took a deep breathe and decided if this is what’s
important to Ollie, I’d do whatever it took to get it done
and get back to time for us.
Ollie:
Sandy asked what I was doing. The FIRST SIGN that something was
not right between us --- and I MISSED it. It was OBVIOUS to me what
I was doing - peeling potatoes - WHAT ELSE!?!
Sandy:
For each peeled potato I gave Ollie -----he found something that
I had missed -- a brown spot ----- a sliver of peeling. It seemed
there wasn’t anything I could do right! His every comment
just added salt to my wounds. I felt prickly like my leg does when
I start to walk on it after it has fallen asleep. I went downstairs
to the computer to bury myself in work so that I wouldn’t
think about it any more.
Ollie:
When Sandy came back upstairs her comments where short and clipped.
In my best “thinker” style, I asked Sandy to sit down
and tell me specifically just what I did to make her so angry. I
was fairly certain she COULD NOT come up with a single issue. She
stood by the kitchen sink and said - she thought SHE was going to
do the potatoes on Monday. I could hear the tenseness in her voice
and see her teary eyes as she said, “You just don’t
trust me to do it correctly. It seems no matter what I do, it’s
just not good enough for you.”
Sandy:
No sooner had I finished when Ollie quickly said, “I am sorry
for hurting you, please forgive me.” His tone of voice was
so placating - I thought he was just trying to smooth my ruffled
feathers. Without much thought to what he had said, I fired back
at him in machine gun speed:
· “How can you just say you’re sorry?”
· “Isn’t there a behavior here that you need
to look at?“
· “Is this supposed to cover EVERYTHING???”
· “OR are you sorry for not talking to me first so
we could decide together what needed to be done?”
· “OR are you sorry for picking at me when I peeled
the potatoes? “
· “OR are you sorry for not seeing the hurt in my eyes?
“
· “OR are you sorry for not keeping your promise of
just spending today on us and nothing else?”
Ollie:
I shot back, “How can you woman just spiel those things off
the top of your head?” Yet I could see how hurt she was. All
I was trying to do was help; instead, all I did was hurt Sandy by
not including her in the decision as to when and where we could
help each other. So much for my good intentions! I then said “So
did you want a general ‘I am sorry please, forgive me’
OR did you want an incident specific ‘I am sorry, please forgive
me.’”
Sandy:
Instead of being open to Ollie, his words just fueled the hurt and
anger inside of me. It scared me to realize how cold and hard I
felt inside - cold like an iceberg and hard like a steel door. I
knew Ollie was trying hard and I just wasn’t open to being
healed. I said a quick prayer asking for God’s help. When
Ollie’s made his glib comment it caught me totally off guard.
Inside, I could feel something break - like a tightly closed door
had just been cracked open slightly. A faint smile formed at the
corner of my mouth and I said “Incident specific. please”.
Ollie:
I got up from my chair, went over to Sandy, picked her up, put her
on the counter top and said “All of this over some lousy mashed
potatoes.” I told Sandy that I squished her “helper”
like a pimple and then said, “I’m sorry for not talking
to you about what needed to be done, please forgive me for my insensitivity.”
When she said, “Yes I forgive you,” I knew we had started
the healing process. I just stood there holding her, as we both
laughed. Looking at this whole process has just reinforced for me
that, as a thinker, I need to think with my heart as well as my
head.
Sandy:
I told Ollie that I thought it went deeper than mashed potatoes.
It was really about our personality styles and how we’re so
opposite each other. His need to think about and plan for all the
things that were ahead for us the next few weeks and then independently
deciding what needed to be done, versus my need to be intimate and
belong more fully to him. I felt relieved and could feel the tension
start to drain out of me. Relieved is finding that road you’ve
been looking for when you been lost for over an hour. I knew we
were on our way back to working on our relationship.
Little hurts happen often in our relationship. We may want to
sweep those little hurts under the rug and play down our brokenness,
instead of allowing the gift of healing to resolve these hurts when
they are still small. Healing small hurts prevents them from growing
into large hurts, which are more difficult to deal with. All hurts,
large or small, create a barrier to our intimacy. The quicker we
deal with these hurts, the closer our relationship will be.
Click
here for a printable page (PDF, 13KB)
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