Dear Posterity,
If you rebuke a mocker, he will hate you, but if you rebuke a wise person, he will love you (Proverbs 9:8). The Bible is very clear about confronting foolish people: you invite pain and insult on yourself when you confront an irresponsible person. And by irresponsible I mean the kinds of people who never learned how to be responsible for themselves, their behavior, or their sin, as well as how to be responsible to others they have injured. This is ALWAYS due to development injuries and leftover childhood needs that were never addressed. These kinds of people only know how to operate with passive aggressive communication patterns, or entirely sweep things under the rug instead of being honest with themselves and others. In short, they’re underdeveloped. They have some “catching up” to do in confronting past boundary violations that they never realized existed, write Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend, New York Times best selling authors. Here’s how to interact with underdeveloped people, according to Cloud and Townsend: simply stop interrupting the law of sowing and reaping, and instead allow the person to reap what they’ve sowed.
The law of sowing and reaping can be interrupted when someone who has no boundaries rescues another from the consequence of his sowing, preventing the reaping from taking place. By rescuing the irresponsible person from natural consequences, you enable him to continue in irresponsible behavior. The doer is not suffering the consequences; someone else is. This type of rescuer is called a codependent, someone who cosigns the contract with an irresponsible person, which means they’re perpetually left with the bill…emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
Boundaries, on the other hand, force the person who is sowing to also do the reaping. A person will never feel the need to change if he doesn’t feel the pain of his behavior. However, confronting an irresponsible person is not enough, and if it’s a scoffer, confrontation will result in you promptly becoming Public Enemy #1; only consequences can bring about change.
You cannot change others, but you can influence them. But there’s a trick to this: you must change yourself so that their destructive patterns no longer work on you. Change your way of dealing with them…perhaps it will motivate them to change their old ways, perhaps not. The point is that their behavior has no control over yours.
Lastly, be ready for more toxicity when you pursue this avenue: when you begin to let go of others, you begin to get healthy, and that invites envy. Self-centered people often get angry when someone tells them no.
Ask God for help you in clarifying your boundaries with this kind of person. You need the wisdom to know the difference between what you have the power to change and what you do not. And for that, you need the Holy Spirit. Godspeed.
With every esteem and respect,
