In my last blog, I spoke of the importance of naming your feelings and begin to place your emotional experience in the context of the larger story of your life. Regardless of whether you are fixated on a horrifying moment in your life or you are bending under the cumulative effect of having experienced a series of negative experiences, it is critical that you begin to recognize that your life is more than those particular experiences. The dis-ease of those experiences are real but they are not the whole you.
The purpose of placing those experiences into a narrative form is to rebuild those often isolating traumas with the larger part of your life. The next step is to share that narrative with others. This helps break through the isolation and reconnect you with community. Pain isolates. As Genesis says, it is not good for man (humans) to be alone. We were meant for community. When we feel like we are falling apart, community can hold us together. However, it has to be honest community — a community that knows our secrets and at some level shares our pain. If you have ever listened to a person who has come out of a negative moment and makes use of that experience to help others, you are watching them rebuild community.
For believers, a next step towards wholeness is to connect their story with the larger narrative of their faith. When our story finds its connection with the larger biblical story, we discover another break from isolation. Now we are part of a larger, God directed, journey of faith that is not defeated by the negative.
So once you have been able to give narrative form to how you are feelings, a next step is to try to discover biblical stories that can help you give purpose to your experience that transcends the moment. This is not to justify your experience or to suggest that in some twisted way that God chose to provide you with that negative experience, but rather to rediscover how God can work through even the most negative reality and provide a transforming possibility. That is, after all, one of the central meanings of the cross.
