Found in Chosenness

What makes something valuable is harder to pin down than it seems. Value can't just be a feeling. Some days I don't feel valuable at all, and I don't think that means I lost it. It can't only be measured by what we do either. If it could, the first time we did something wrong we'd be worth less than we were the day before.

We don't even value things that way. We keep mementos, heirlooms, and old shoes long past their usefulness. My wife calls them cute. A ruby isn't valuable because of what it does. Its value is ascribed to it, placed on it by someone who decides it's worth something.

That's the hard part. We don't get to choose our own value. It's placed on us by the one who chooses us. The truest kind of value isn't being chosen for what I do or how I benefit you. It's being chosen for what you see in me, by a love that sometimes sees more worth in me than I see in myself.

When we feel unchosen long enough, especially early in life, a story grows around the hurt: I'm unchosen because I'm not enough. The more hurt, the more practiced the story, until it settles into a belief. No one will ever love me the way I long for. Then when someone finally moves toward us, we can't take it in. They must want something. My value must be in my usefulness, because I've never felt valued apart from what I do.

That belief invalidates every attempt at love before it reaches the heart. We discount it, put up walls, lean on a front of self-sufficiency. And because you haven't seen my heart, I become terrified to show it to you. The closer you get, the more I hope, and the more it will hurt when it fails.

God loves us with our hearts still in a box. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. He loves first and enters our experience so we'll trust him enough to open the door. And we don't open it well. We open it vulnerably, clunky, in need of reassurance. His grace is sufficient for that. His strength is made perfect in our weakness.

God rarely rescues us from suffering. He didn't rescue himself either. He knows the pain of suffering for one you love. That’s why he runs toward ours, embraces it in all its pain and shame, and walks through it with us. There's an intimacy that only comes through shared suffering. He invites us into his and wants to be invited into ours. Much of the pain in our marriages comes from each of us suffering alone. We haven't learned how to be with one another in shared pain.

Heaven will have no more tears. The intimacy we build through shared suffering here, we carry into eternity. Joining someone in their suffering may be the greatest gift we can give this side of heaven.

Marriage works the same way. You don't love your spouse for everything they do for you. They don't do it perfectly or consistently, and you still love them. You find them worthy of your love, and so they are. Your spouse loves you the same way, because you're you.

Underneath the hurts and stories is something like this: I love you with the pain you carry, not in spite of it. Your wounds matter to me, even if I caused them. If my suffering with you could set you free, why wouldn't I?

You are the thing your spouse longs for. Not your behaviors, not a checkbox, not perfection. Just you. You can see it in what happens when they can't reach you. Some of us pursue harder, get frantic, try to control. Some of us shut down, withdraw, disappear. All of it because we don't have each other.

You're already chosen. The path back to each other can be learned. It just takes some risk, some failure, and a lot of grace.

For reflection:
When your spouse moves toward you, what do you tend to tell yourself about why?
Where do you notice yourself discounting love before it reaches you?
What pain have you been carrying alone that you could invite your spouse into?

-Aron Strong, LMFT

When Friendships Turn Into Rivalries

My wife is a Dodgers fan. She sees someone wearing a Dodgers hat and calls out. For about four seconds, they go from strangers to friends. I have a friend who does the same thing with a drawn-out Chieeeeefs, and it works every time.

We are built to do this. That point of connection causes something in us to relax. You're one of mine. All it takes is a logo, an accent, even a shared complaint.

The reverse is just as true. Same parking lot, rival jersey. A sneer replaces a call out. Stiffness instead of ease. Two people giving each other a side-eye as they walk by.

With sports, that's mostly fun. It stops being fun when the marker is ideological. The friend you've had for fifteen years posts something you find not just wrong, but disturbing. The guy in your small group says a thing and you feel your body instantly on high alert.

That reaction is real. Your nervous system registered a threat and threat responses don't wait for evidence. The rhetoric we are inundated with every day is designed to produce exactly that. Every position is framed as an existential danger, every disagreement as the leading edge of something catastrophic. It plays on our fundamental safe/not-safe neurobiological machinery.

And it works.

The conversation stops being about what is right and becomes about who is right. The first one can be explored together. The second one has to be won. Once you're in the second one, your friend isn't a person with a view anymore, they're a position to be defeated. And the relationship suddenly becomes the thing you’d rather lose.

Love held hostage to an issue kills a love that covers a difference.

We all have friends we love but can disagree with. This is different. Requiring someone to adopt your side as a prerequisite to remaining in relationship creates a divide that extends far beyond friendship. It impacts our entire society. The moment we diminish a person to their ideology, trade their humanity for their political posture, we lose the thread of unconditional positive regard therapists are trained in and believers are called to.

Here's what changed things for me. It’s not my job to change someone’s mind.

That sounds like giving up. It isn't. It's an accurate accounting of what I actually have access to. I don't have access to the twenty years of experience that formed my friend's convictions. I don't have access to what will finally move him, or when, or through whom. I have access to whether I stay in the room. That's the whole list.

Presence has more reach than arguments. Compassion has more power than rejection. Nobody has ever been argued out of a position by someone they see as an enemy. The condition for being heard is being safe to be near. If I've made myself unsafe, my correctness is irrelevant — I've disqualified myself from delivering it.

God has access to what I don't. He's been working on people through means I can't see for a long time, and He doesn’t ask me to close the gap by force. He asks me to love the person in front of me.

The bridges we need aren't built by people who agree. They're built by people who stayed in relationship when agreement is off the table.

For reflection:

When you find fundamental differences with someone, what happens next — do you get curious, or do you prepare your arguments?

Have you let a friendship go over a difference, and what would it cost you to reach out without reviving the argument?

Are you carrying the burden of changing someone's mind and what would happen if you pursued presence over pressure?

—Aron Strong, LMFT

Control Dressed as Holiness

His face turned red as he took a deep breath. His hands clenched and his eyes went hard. She saw it too and I saw her whole body brace even as she dropped both her eyes and shoulders. It looked to be a familiar scenario — whenever he was challenged, he escaped behind a posture of spiritual hierarchy and delivered with a preacher’s tone. He gave it to me point by point: she was not the spiritual head of the family, he was. Her job was to submit to him and support him in his leadership. 

I’ve seen it happen the other direction as well. She swells in outrage as she names his spiritual failures with precision. He doesn’t lead. He doesn’t pray with the kids. She names his failures as nearly heretical in their betrayal of both her and God, often in that order.

Whichever direction it flows, spiritual abuse uses scripture designed to hold the speaker accountable as a means of getting their personal needs or desires met. You can tell the difference by noting who will most benefit by obedience. It is control dressed up as holiness. It is condemnation clothed in righteousness. It’s selfishness wrapped in spirituality. Verses written to require something of the reader get redirected to require something of the spouse.

Scripture definitely isn’t gentle at times. It directly addresses thoughts and behaviors that separate us from God and harm others. However, its discipline ultimately produces righteousness. Feeling shame when facing our mistakes is normal. Healthy shame is designed to lead us to humility. Healthy shame keeps us out of judgment and condemnation of others because we are well connected to our own propensity for failure and sin. 

Spiritual abuse, however, uses toxic shame to force compliance rather than invite transformation. Compliance is compelled when a true offering is not forthcoming. Dominance is preferred when vulnerability holds the potential of disappointment. 

The posture of power and authority is purposefully intimidating. Their vehemence is designed to make others hesitate, their conviction to make others question themselves. But pull the curtain back on the loud, booming, authoritative voice and the picture changes. Behind is a small, frightened person at the controls. We see a person who is trying to save themselves by sacrificing the one they really want. The person who cannot bear what scripture requires of them decides to require it of someone else instead.

For therapists in the room, naming what’s happening without condemning the condemner is worth the effort. Understanding the function of the frame helps you differentiate accountability from abuse. The person being abused often doesn’t have language for what’s happening — only fatigue, confusion, and a steady erosion of self that has been spiritualized into proof of their own failure. The person abusing rarely has language either and may not perceive the truth behind their behavior. Clarity, when it is accepted, is the gift that often allows us to move out of blame and into true accountability. 

For friends, pastors, family — your work is just as important. Stop confirming the louder voice as the spiritual one. Stop validating the more articulate scripture-citer as automatically the more faithful spouse. Your silence is often perceived as implicit agreement and your avoidance of conflict keeps you from offering challenge where it is most needed. Of course, it rarely works to do to a spiritual abuser what they are doing to another. Rather, we are called to be a model of what inviting another into accountability should look like.

The Wizard of Oz was never the booming voice and the smoke. He was a man hiding behind a curtain pulling levers, terrified of being seen. The spiritual abusers we are describing are not different. The loud spiritual authority is the curtain. What is behind it is the one God has been trying to reach all along.

For reflection:

When you have watched this dynamic in a couple you know, what stopped you from naming what you saw?

Where in your own marriage or close relationships do you reach for scripture to hold someone else accountable in ways you would not want it applied to you?

If the loudest spiritual voice in a marriage is most often the most frightened one, what does that change about how you listen — to others, and to yourself?

 -Aron Strong, LMFT

Already Worked It Out- AI in Relationships

"I'm actually fine. I worked it out already."

Sitting across from me, he is noticeably calmer. He tells me he’d typed out his argument with his wife in ChatGPT. It told him what was really going on. He has a framework now. Language for it. A couple of practices to try. He wants to use our hour for something else.

I've started hearing some version of this in and out of the therapy room. Couples are processing the fight long before actually talking to one another. Regulated and articulate, not because they engaged their discomfort long enough to find clarity, but because something faster did it for them. Perhaps you've even done it yourself.

AI does in seconds what we used to do over hours with Google searches and forum threads and three friends on speakerphone. It mirrors back. It validates. It offers a story that explains our experience in our context. The relief is real. The brain settles when it has a story to explain distress.

But underneath the relief is a problem most users don't see: when you process your relationship with a chatbot, it only hears one side. The output feels comfortingly tailored because it's responsive to your language, your framing, your read of what your partner did. That responsiveness is the bias — what AI researchers call sycophancy. Its wide range of frameworks is applied through your lens, not against it. You're not getting insight. You're getting the most articulate version of the story you already had.

This is why we tell couples not to vent to their parents. A parent biased toward their child is exactly what we don't want when we're trying to see our spouse clearly. AI does the same thing, just more efficiently and more invisibly. It is just as blind as your folks, seeing your partner through your lens rather than for who they really are.

That doesn't mean AI has no use. The freedom to vent without consequence has a place. Sometimes naming what we're feeling, even imperfectly, even one-sidedly, is what makes us able to turn back toward the person we're actually in relationship with. While AI is better than nothing, it is not better than a person who knows and loves both you and your partner, who can attend to your distress without losing sight of the one you're frustrated with. If you don't have that person in your life, finding one is important. It’s a role a chatbot can't provide and shouldn't be able to. 

The work of relationship is real. It is knowing when to assert your needs so they can be met, and when to hold your needs aside for the other. It's discovery — finding out what's actually beneath your partner's reaction, and beneath your own. It's accountability — owning what you did, not what you meant to do. It's repair — the slow, specific labor of turning toward someone you've hurt or who has hurt you and saying, "I want to try this again." None of that happens with a chatbot. It can't. The chatbot won’t be there on Tuesday in the middle of your next argument. You will.

There is real danger here. When relief is cost-free, we return to it. This isn't unique to AI. It's the same mechanism as pornography — the vicarious experience of being desired soothes loneliness and distress immediately, at the cost of the actual relationship. AI may not be sexual, but the structure is similar: a fast, available, risk-free hit of affirmation and soothing. Over time, the easier comfort makes the harder work feel harder. We stop building the courage to turn toward our partner because we never have to.

Chatbots have no risk. They will never be wounded by what you share. Be disappointed in you next Tuesday. Owe you anything. The vulnerability that builds intimacy requires another person who could leave, who could be hurt, who carries the relationship forward with you. The relief of talking to AI is partly the relief of being known without risk. Being known without risk isn't actually being known.

The way God models love to us is through the cost he’s willing to pay for us. Presence in flesh. Time spent. Willingness to be wounded. The model for our relationships is the same. Love that costs nothing isn't quite true love yet.

Use AI to regulate if it helps. Then close the app and turn toward the person who is actually waiting for you. They don't need the processed version. They need you.

For reflection:

When you turn to AI to process something about your partner, what is it letting you avoid saying directly to them?

Who in your life can sit with your distress and still hold both you and the person you're frustrated with? If no one comes to mind, what would it take to build that?

What would it look like to bring an authentic, vulnerable version of yourself to your partner instead of the sculpted version AI helped you frame?

-Aron Strong, LMFT