For those who find themselves in a destructive relationship, it’s difficult to know where to turn for help and discern a way forward. While it is normal to be disoriented by the chaos, in Navigating Destructive Relationships: 9 Steps toward Healing, counselor Brad Hambrick helps readers understand that they do not have to remain passive in response to their loved one’s destructive patterns.
In this support group curriculum, Hambrick helps participants learn to take steps to establish an environment of stability and counter the destructive beliefs they have embraced about themselves, God, and life. Built on a nine-step program, this guide provides a roadmap, a community, and the necessary support to both encourage and challenge the reader. Participants will learn to assess safety concerns, begin wise self-care practices, and accurately allocate responsibility for life choices.
Navigating Destructive Relationships is part of the Church-Based Counseling series, built on the G4 model of subject-specific, lay-led counseling groups, designed to help churches create sustainable lay counseling ministries. The G4 peer support and recovery group ministry and the Church-Based Counseling series were developed to help churches mobilize volunteers to utilize levels of care from friendship to mentoring to counseling groups.
Q: What defines a destructive relationship? Most people probably think of a marriage/dating relationship or maybe a problematic situation with a family member, but could Navigating a Destructive Relationship also be applied to a difficult circumstance with a friend or coworker?
A destructive relationship is present when one person has disregard for the damage their actions have on another person. Often, we just think about the intensity or extent of damage when defining a destructive relationship. Those are important factors, but disregard is a neglected (and perhaps defining) factor. Think of it this way: you can get into bankruptcy by a few big expenses or by ignoring a series of small to moderate expenses that are above your budget. Either way, you’re losing your home.
For good reason, much of the existing discussion around destructive relationships focuses on either husband-wife or parent-child relationships, but Navigating Destructive Relationships has a broader focus. You can have a controlling friend almost as easily as you can have a controlling spouse. You can have a negligent coworker who damages your business and reputation as easily as you can have a negligent parent.
When the destructive relationship is within your home, there is more opportunity for negative impact. Also, when the destructive relationship is in your home, it is more private (i.e., hidden). However, the criteria for identifying destructive patterns and basic principles of a wise response are largely the same. That is why Navigating Destructive Relationships takes the approach it does.
Q: Are all destructive relationships similar, or is it helpful to cluster some types of destructive relationships based on patterns or motives?
In Navigating Destructive Relationships, I discuss two primary types of destructive relationships. The first are abusive relationships which are those where power and control are often the primary motives. The second is relationships marked by addiction. In this case, pleasure and escape are often the primary motives. In both cases, the person being destructive has disregard for the impact of their actions, and the person being harmed learns that crossing their loved one’s motive comes at a significant personal cost.
In addition to these two types of destructive relationships, Navigating Destructive Relationships also helps the reader see how their destructive relationship shapes their relational style. The category used for this is what Proverbs calls the fear of man. It is understandable how this emerges. In a destructive relationship, the oppressed person quickly learns that to speak up creates harm. As the oppressed person is conditioned in this way, they surrender voice and agency. They begin to live as if what they say and do don’t matter.
In this sense, Navigating Destructive Relationships has a twofold approach. First, it helps the oppressed individual identify the choice he or she can make to pursue safety and restore order (a big part of this work is identifying areas of false guilt, where they wish they had more influence than they do). Second, it helps the oppressed individual regain a sense of voice and agency.
Q: What is the difference between a sin-based struggle and a suffering-based one? Do groups address each differently?
A plumbline statement for G4 is, “The gospel speaks to both sin and suffering, but it speaks to them differently. The gospel offers forgiveness and freedom from sin, while offering comfort and meaning amid suffering.” That’s more than a poetic statement. It has immense implications for how we bring our various hardships to God.
Sin-based groups are for struggles that emerge from our choices, beliefs, and values. At G4 we often call these responsibility-based groups because we are directly responsible for the cause of our life struggle. Suffering-based groups are for struggles that emerge from the choices of others or the hardships that come with living in a fallen world in aging bodies.
While every Christian is simultaneously as saint, sufferer, and sinner, when it comes to particular struggles, either sin or suffering is more at the forefront of the experience. For example, addiction and anger are things that we do or choose, while trauma and grief are the result of things that happen to us. At G4, we want participants to know there is hope in the gospel for both, and with this confidence, we want participants to get more comfortable “sorting their moral laundry.”
Q: Navigating Destructive Relationships follows a 9-step model of recovery from a suffering-based struggle. How is this process different from recovering from a sin-based struggle?
I think one of the great misunderstandings about suffering in the church is the notion that if we acknowledge suffering, it necessitates a passive mindset of victimization. While that can happen, it is not a necessary implication of acknowledging suffering, and the cost of ignoring suffering in this way is severe for those who are oppressed.
The 9-step model for suffering-based struggles help readers name and understand the impact of suffering. When suffering has become so normal that it’s almost all you know—as it often does in a destructive relationship —that is often more difficult than we imagine.
Suffering also has a distorting influence on our identity, how we see the world around us, and how we relate to other people. Because of the persistence of suffering in a destructive relationship, these inaccurate beliefs take root at a fundamental level. They become the kind of beliefs we don’t even question anymore. Naming and grappling with these beliefs are an active response to suffering.
Finally, when suffering can be countered or the impact of suffering alleviated, that is a redemptive good. We can’t “stop suffering” like we can “stop sinning” because we don’t have direct control over suffering like we do our sin. Yet when we limit suffering, we are serving a salt and light function in our world.
Q: In this case, the nine steps are divided into three phases. Can you briefly describe each phase?
In the suffering-based curriculum like Navigating Destructive Relationships, the nine steps cluster into three phases. In each phase, the three steps within work together toward a common objective.
Phase One: Steps 1–3strive to help the reader establish an environment of safety and stability. Destructive relationships are often dangerous and steps toward safety are warranted. Destructive relationships are almost always confusing and disorienting. Imagine being dizzy and needing to run from an emergency. How hard would that be? Phase one is about becoming less dizzy in the crisis.
Phase Two: Steps 4–6help the reader articulate, grieve, and counter the destructive beliefs that often emerge from a destructive relationship. G4 uses the language of narrative because these beliefs form the life story that cause someone’s decisions to seem logical to them, even when those choices are perpetuating the destructive pattern.
Phase Three: Steps 7–9, once stability and clarity have been established, invite the reader to identify healthy ways to reengage with life and relationships. Important choices must be made. The earlier steps were about gaining the stability and clarity necessary to make those choices in a principled, rather than reactive way.
Q: What are some situations where you can’t simply just dissolve the relationship and leave?
One of the statements made in Navigating Destructive Relationships is, “Divorce doesn’t end a relationship. It only rearranges it.” Sometimes divorce can be lifesaving and a God-honoring way to call your spouse to see the impact of their unrepentant sin. When divorce is seen an “answer” to a destructive marriage, however, it is often disappointing. Child custody and battles over shared assets reveal that the relationship has only been rearranged.
Similar dynamics exist when the destructive relationship is with a parent. Even if you decide it is wisest not to see them on holidays, there are still a myriad of ways that parents continue to influence our lives. When a peer in your friendship network is destructive, they often continue to have influence even if you limit or cut off direct interactions. Navigating Destructive Relationships works to help the reader make decisions in light of this reality. That means, even when we’ve done all that we can to limit the destructive influence someone has in our lives, we still need a plan for how to manage the unavoidable, ongoing interactions that persist.
Q: What happens when you go through the process of getting gospel help for the relationship you are in but the other person doesn’t take responsibility to correct their hurtful actions and attitudes?
Romans 12:18 says, “So far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” The implication is that the ability to live at peace with another person does not reside exclusively with you. There comes a point where you have done all that God would have you do and the relationship is still destructive. At that point, you are faced with a choice. Navigating Destructive Relationships does not claim there is one right choice in these situations.
Some will choose to end the relationship and not be a slave to the consequences of their loved one’s sinful, destructive choices. Others will choose to continue the relationship with tighter restrictions on when or how they will interact. Still others will absorb the cost of their loved one’s actions and change very little (other than their sense of false guilt).
This reality helps you understand two points made early in Navigating Destructive Relationships and repeated often. First, you will make every choice on this journey. Navigating only seeks to help you identify and select the best options that fit your situation and faith commitments. Second, good choices may not be easy choices, so don’t confuse regret with guilt. Just because you wish things were different doesn’t mean what you’re choosing is wrong.
I genuinely wish I could end here with more hope than that, but I can’t. That is the nature of destructive relationships. They limit our number of good options and limit the impact our best available choices may have. However, by the end of Navigating Destructive Relationships, I believe you can have confidence that the approach you’ve selected very much honors what God asks of you in Romans 12:18.
Q: What additional resources are available online for group leaders, to support them as they lead a group through this curriculum? What other topics will you be addressing as the Church-based Counseling series progresses?
One of the most intimidating factors for lay people when they consider leading in a counseling ministry is the perception that they must be an expert. In group-based counseling, the leader isn’t an expert; instead, they are merely someone who has progressed further on a shared journey and are willing to serve as the facilitator for the group. That is a much less intimidating role to step into.
To help reinforce this expectation, each G4 curriculum has a free series of video-based teachings where I introduce the content to the participants. For Navigating Destructive Relationships, the videos can be found at bradhambrick.com/destructive, and Overcoming Addiction (released at the same time), they can be found at bradhambrick.com/addiction.
In addition to decreasing pressure on the leader, these videos are meant to aid participants. When we are tackling a life-dominating struggle, we are prone to read literature on that subject in the voice of our fears, insecurities, or the voice of others who have been condemning of us. Each 10–15-minute video segment helps participants hear the content they are about to work through in a warm, redemptive voice that is cheering on their continued progress.
The current plan is to release six more G4 curriculum: (1) sexual addiction and adultery, (2) marital betrayal, (3) depression-anxiety, (4) trauma, (5) disordered eating, and (6) anger. Like Overcoming Addiction and Navigating Destructive Relationships, each of these curricula have been field tested over the last decade in the G4 ministry where I serve as Pastor of Counseling.
Navigating Destructive Relationships
All relationships disappoint us from time to time. But some relationships are destructive, especially those marked by addiction, abuse, and/or life-dominating problems. Navigating Destructive Relationships, a support group curriculum, provides you with a safe and stable place where you can name what’s going on and turn toward God. You are not alone. God sees and cares for your suffering.
