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On the first day of graduate school in New Orleans, I was fresh from St. Louis with everything I owned crammed into my Honda Civic. I sat in a classroom full of strangers who would eventually become some of my closest friends, when my first professor posed a question I’ve never stopped thinking about:
What single thing — event or relationship — has resulted in the most negative or damaging consequences in your life?
What single thing — event or relationship — has resulted in the most positive or healing consequences in your life?
My mind immediately started flipping through a rolodex of faces. People who had hurt me. People who had changed me. Challenged me. Carried me. Mostly people, not events. And when Dr. Sphar asked the room who had thought of a person rather than a thing, every hand went up.
That’s the thing about us. We are wired for relationship. The highest highs and the lowest lows in a human life almost always trace back to another person.
The quality of our lives is largely determined by the quality of our relationships.
Three Relationships. One Life.
A therapy model I was trained in during those New Orleans years — Reconciliation Focused Counseling — is built around the idea that humans are designed to connect in three specific relational domains: with God, with others, and with ourselves.
This isn’t just a clinical framework. It’s woven into the fabric of how we were made.
Jesus names all three in Mark 12: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength… Love your neighbor as yourself.” God. Others. Self. Right there, in the two greatest commandments, is the whole picture.
The degree to which you are healthily connected in each of these three areas has everything to do with the quality of your life and relationships. Not perfectly connected — that’s not the goal and it’s not available to us. But genuinely, honestly engaged.
Let me show you what that looks like.
Connection to God
A strong connection with God goes beyond the observable stuff — church attendance, Bible reading, prayer habits — though those things matter. At a deeper level, it looks like this: you feel like you actually have the right to talk to God. You’re not performing for Him or trying to earn your way into His attention. You’re not walking around with low-grade resentment toward Him, or a quiet suspicion that He’s disappointed in you.
A rich connection with God looks like resting in His love. Bringing Him into the actual texture of your daily life, not just the crisis moments. Trusting, even imperfectly, that He has your best in mind.
When that connection is strained or absent, it tends to show up as anxiety (a quiet inability to trust that things are being held), a melancholy that doesn’t fully respond to circumstantial changes, or a kind of spiritual flatness — going through the motions without any sense of being known or met.
Some people aren’t sure there’s a point to connecting with God at all. I’d just say this: every major thread of happiness research in recent decades points to the same thing — connecting with something larger than yourself is not optional for human flourishing. It’s structural. God can be that, in a way nothing else fully is.
Connection to Others
A strong connection with others isn’t about having a lot of people in your life. It’s about depth with a few. You have people who actually know you — not just what you do or how you present, but what’s happening internally. And you know them that way, too. You feel both known and loved, and you extend that to others.
The problems tend to show up at the extremes.
Under-connection looks like a social life that stays permanently at the surface. You make conversation, you’re pleasant, you show up — but no one really knows what’s going on inside you. This kind of isolation is quieter and more socially acceptable than it sounds, and it tends to produce depression over time.
Over-connection is the other edge. This is when a relationship (or a few) becomes so central to your sense of self that the lines blur. You’re not sure where you end and the other person begins. Boundaries feel threatening rather than clarifying. This often presents as anxiety, emotional exhaustion, or a pattern of feeling taken advantage of.
Connection to Self
This is the one that gets skipped most often, and it might be the most foundational of the three.
A strong connection with yourself looks like knowing what you’re feeling and not judging yourself for it. You check in. You give yourself permission to be human. You’re not white-knuckling through life with your head down, and you’re also not so consumed with your own inner experience that every day feels like navigating a minefield.
Under-connection with self is what I know best, personally. For most of my life, I would have told you I didn’t really have feelings so much as thoughts. I was wrong about that, but it took some work to find out. (If you want the full story, I wrote about it here.) When you’re under-connected with yourself, you keep moving, keep functioning, keep producing — and the cost of all that carrying goes unexamined. It tends to surface eventually, one way or another.
Over-connection with self swings the other direction — hyperawareness of every internal shift, a nervous relationship with your own emotions, a tendency toward anxiety or self-centeredness. You’re too tuned in, and it’s exhausting.
The goal is something in the middle: a settled, honest relationship with yourself that doesn’t require external approval to stay intact.
I say it to clients this way: I bring my acceptance with me. Because I have a solid enough relationship with myself, I’m not dependent on what others think of me to feel okay. What they offer me — love, affirmation, approval — is a genuine gift. I receive it gratefully. But I’m not bankrupt without it.
That’s what a healthy connection with self produces.
What It Looks Like When All Three Are Working
Shortly after I moved to New Orleans, I got into not one but two nearly identical car accidents in quick succession. Bless my heart.
The first one felt like a fluke. The second one sent me straight into a shame spiral. Why didn’t I know better? Do these wrecks mean I never should have moved here? Did I misread God completely?
I was in a bad way in my relationship with myself (shame) and in my relationship with God (doubt). And I was brand new to the city — my relational support was thin.
But a friend I knew from home came and found me at school. She sat with me. She was tender and direct in the way only a good friend can be. She reminded me that circumstances don’t determine God’s will, and that it’s okay to be human and make mistakes. She said the things I couldn’t say to myself in that moment.
After she left, something released. The shame loosened. The doubt quieted. And I went home and fell asleep almost immediately — and it felt, in a way that was almost tangible, like the kindness of Jesus tucking me into bed.
That’s what I remember from that night. Not the accidents, not the shame spiral. The tucking in.
That’s what it looks like when the three connections work together. A friend who is healthily connected to herself and to God showed up for me (others). Her presence helped me get back to a truer relationship with myself (self). And somehow, through all of it, I felt met by God in a way I hadn’t orchestrated (God).
We are wounded in relationships. And we are healed in them, too. This is not an accident. It’s the design.
A Simple Self-Assessment
So where are you?
As you read through the three domains, something probably registered — an area that feels solid, or one that’s been quietly struggling. Pay attention to that.
A few honest questions worth sitting with:
- In your relationship with God: do you feel like you have access to Him? Or does that connection feel distant, obligatory, or complicated by unresolved anger or doubt?
- In your relationship with others: do you have even one or two people who know you past the surface? Or is your social world functional but fundamentally lonely?
- In your relationship with yourself: can you name what you’re feeling most of the time? Do you treat yourself with basic compassion, or is your inner voice mostly critical?
You don’t have to be thriving in all three to have a good life. But most people, if they’re honest, know which one needs the most attention right now.
That’s enough. Start there.
If you’d like some support in strengthening one of these areas, that’s exactly the kind of work we do at Crossroads. You can learn more or reach out here.
