Your Relationships Have Been Trying to Tell Yo

By Kiné Corder | Bronzecomm Hub

The second biggest source of stress in most people's lives is not a stranger. It is someone they love.

Last week we talked about money stress and how your emotional relationship with money affects your mental health in ways most people never connect. This week the stressor is closer. It is sitting across from you at dinner, calling you on a Sunday afternoon, or waiting for you to respond to an email you have been putting off for three days.

Relationships are the second most consistent source of stress in most people's lives and also the least examined. We examine our finances when things go wrong. We examine our health when something hurts. But relationships we tend to endure rather than evaluate, because examining them feels like a betrayal of the people in them. It is not. Examining your relationships honestly is one of the most loving things you can do, for yourself and for everyone who depends on you. Because a person stretched across too many relationships, trying to be everything to everyone, ends up being fully present for no one, including themselves.

The Relationship Web

When we talk about relationship stress we are not talking about one thing. We are talking about an entire web of connections, each one carrying its own weight and its own demands. There is the romantic relationship, the one most people think of first. Then the parent-child relationship, whether you are the parent, the child, or both at the same time. There are extended family relationships, siblings, cousins, in-laws, and the aunts and uncles who have been calling you by a nickname since you were seven. There are work relationships, friendships, and your involvement in your broader community, your church, your neighborhood, your civic organizations.

For the average Chicagoan who grew up in this city and stayed connected to it, that web is dense. The relationships that make up that web are not burdens. They are the texture of a full life. But when you are embedded in a community as rich and interconnected as yours is, the demands of that web can become the primary source of your stress.

If you have moved out of Chicago, or your loved ones have, maintaining these relationships becomes harder. You are not stressed because you love too many people. You are stressed because you have not decided, or perhaps never been taught, how to organize that love in a way that does not cost you your mental health.

Being All Things to All People

There is a particular kind of person who shows up in every family, every church, every block association, and every workplace in the world. They are the ones people call. They are the one who shows up, remembers the birthdays, organizes the gatherings, handles the emergencies, and somehow always has something to give even when they are running low.

If you cannot think of who that person is in your circles, there is a reasonable chance you are that person. It is often a gift, but it can turn into a curse if you do not manage it properly. It becomes a problem when the giving has no structure behind it, when you say yes by default rather than by choice, when saying no to someone who needs you carries more guilt than saying no to your own rest, your own health, or your own peace.

You cannot be fully present in ten places at once. And trying to be is not devotion. It is depletion wearing the mask of dedication.

The stress that comes from this pattern is subtle at first. It shows up as fatigue that sleep does not fix, a low-grade irritability you cannot quite explain, and a growing sense that you are doing a lot but not getting anywhere because your energy is spread too thin to run deep enough to produce real satisfaction. Your worries about everything do not allow you to sleep, and that eventually weighs on your mental health and turns into physical illness.

The Relationship Hierarchy

Your relationships need a hierarchy, because every relationship requires a different kind of investment at a different season of your life. Make sure your hierarchy matches the season you are in.

The first relationship in the hierarchy is the one with yourself. A person who does not tend to their own mental, physical, and financial health becomes a liability to everyone who depends on them. You are the foundation, and the foundation comes first.

The second tier is your immediate circle, your partner, your children, the one or two people whose lives are genuinely intertwined with yours on a daily basis. These relationships require consistent presence, not perfect presence.

The third tier is extended family and close friends, the relationships that give your life depth, continuity, and connection to your history and your culture. The fourth tier is your community, your workplace, your civic and spiritual involvements, where your gifts serve something larger than yourself but where most overextended people are spending disproportionate energy while their first and second tiers go unattended.

The hierarchy is not a ranking of who you love most. It is a framework for how you allocate yourself so that the people who need you most receive you at your best, not your most depleted.

The Emotions That Live in Your Relationships

Relationships trigger emotions and those emotions can trigger stress that keeps you up at night. Becoming aware of these emotions can help you take the necessary actions to build stronger relationships.

Guilt is one of the most common emotions in a dense relationship web. The guilt of not responding, not cooking, not feeling up to attending an event. You want to keep up appearances, meaning be seen. But you also hide the emotions you are feeling so you appear to be keeping up.

Guilt is worth paying attention to because sometimes it signals that your actions are out of alignment with your values, but more often it is simply the residue of other people's expectations that were never yours to carry in the first place.

Obligation is guilt's little cousin. It is the sense that you owe people your presence, your resources, or your energy because of what they have done for you or simply because of who they are to you. Genuine relationships are built on willingness, not debt.

Irritation is an emotion often left over from obligation. After you get past the guilt you start to resent all the requests. You can go into the woe is me feelings or the martyr feelings. You complain about your burdens and the relationships start to suffer because the communication is off. You can distance yourself but that could lead to isolation, which is another common emotion.

Grief is present in more relationships than people acknowledge. This is because grief is not just about losing someone, but the grief of a relationship that has changed. A parent who is aging, a friendship that has grown distant, a marriage that has shifted into something neither person planned for, these are all relationship changes that can trigger grief.

And then there is the emotion that rarely gets named, mainly out of guilt: relief. The relief when a draining obligation is cancelled. The momentary exhale when someone who takes more than they give does not call. Even the relief you feel when someone says they are done with you, and you hope they really are, because the relationship was tiring. It is a signal from your nervous system that a particular relationship has become more costly than it is nourishing, and that something needs to change.

Where You Start

As we said in Part 1, this month your only job is Awareness, the first of the 3As: Awareness, Acceptance, and Adjustment. You do not have to fix anything today.

Take fifteen minutes and write out your relationships on paper. Put yourself at the top, even if that is not where you have been putting yourself. Then list as many as you can think of, write down every relationship that carries regular weight in your life. Do not keep it general like: family, romantic, work, community. Get specific if you really want to create awareness.

Then next to each one write one word that describes how that relationship most often makes you feel. Not how you wish it would make you feel or what it used to make you feel, but how it honestly most often makes you feel today. Now this is the hard part.

Try and make a new list of the weight you would like these relationships to have in your life. Where would you like to spend your energy and time? Would you prefer to be with family members but you spend more time with co-workers? Would you like to see your friends more, but you find yourself organizing church or community events with people who are more associates than friends?

This list is valuable and it is private. You do not have to share it with anyone if you do not want to. If you have a therapist you can share it with your therapist. However, what you do next will move you into the Acceptance and Adjustment phases of the 3As of change. You do not have to go there yet if you are not ready. Just notice what is happening, how you feel, and how you want to feel. Later if you feel motivated you can start to take the next steps.

Next week we will wrap up Mental Health Awareness Month and move into June, which is Men's Health Awareness Month. Part 3 of this series, Your Body Has Been Trying to Tell You Something, will speak to how stress can use your body to get your attention. We will talk about why so many people, especially men, treat their body like the last item on the list instead of the first.