The Ache You Keep Blaming on Them

The fracture didn’t start with them. It started with misalignment.

You keep finding yourself in the same pattern.

There’s no fight.
But it doesn’t feel right anymore.
The closeness is gone.
The ease is gone.

You don’t know if it’s them, or you, or the season.

You try to explain it, but every attempt sounds like blame.

So you stay quiet.
But the ache keeps rising.

Most disconnection isn’t relational.

It’s spiritual.

I’ve seen it in my marriage.
In friendships.

In work relationships that once flowed but now feel forced.

We refer to it as poor communication or a mismatched value.

However, that’s not usually the root cause.

What’s really happening?

You’ve fallen out of rhythm with God.

And when that happens, internal peace starts to fray.

Once you’re disconnected vertically, you can’t find clarity inside.

And when there’s no internal clarity, you start relating to people from a place of confusion, not truth.

You can’t skip the order

I’ve tried fixing the horizontal first.

Better words.
More empathy.
Self-regulation.
Reading their cues more carefully.

None of it held.

Because alignment doesn’t start with the dynamic.

It starts with the design.

Vertical alignment with God enables internal alignment.

But internal alignment still requires your active participation…with Him.

And only then can you begin to align horizontally with the people in your life.

That’s the real sequence.
Ignore it, and nothing sticks.

I know because I ignored it.

I stood inside my marriage where the words stopped working.

I’ve poured into friendships that felt one-sided.

I’ve run team meetings from a place of quiet soul-depletion.

But when I returned to God, not the idea of Him, but His actual order, things started shifting.

Not magically. Not instantly. But steadily.

I stopped blaming everyone else for what was missing in me.

And I stopped expecting people to fix what only He could restore.

It’s not just the ache, it’s the pattern.

When you’re out of alignment, the disconnection isn’t random.

It repeats.
You shrink, or you explode.
You give too much, or disappear altogether.
You reach for control or abandon hope.

Not because you’re broken, but because the ache got buried under a protective pattern that once served you, but no longer does.

You’re not failing.

You’re just compensating for a deeper misalignment that no one taught you how to name.

Want to know why it keeps happening?

I wrote something for this exact ache.

Not to fix the other person, but to name the hidden rhythms that quietly keep us from each other.

The 5 Hidden Patterns That Quietly Destroy Relationships

It won’t give you scripts.
It will reveal what’s truly beneath the surface.

If one of those patterns hits, don’t ignore it.
Because it’s not just tension, it’s misalignment.

And you can’t repair a connection when you’re living out of rhythm.

Read it alone.
Share it with someone you trust.
Use it to begin again.

👉🏻 Get The 5 Hidden Patterns That Quietly Destroy Relationships now.

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From my radiant Maverick heart,
– Jeff ❤️‍🔥

🔁 Do you know someone who's circling the same ache in their relationships?
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