When we go to therapy, we might find It daunting at first to re-tell our life story to our counsellor.
But this bit is important as it gives context to what we’re going through right now.
Why we’ve chosen to work through this stage of our lives in therapy at this particular point in time.
We might be going through something specific – perhaps a stressful work situation with a colleague or manager, burnout, relationship issues with a partner or a friend, a significant loss, or something else I haven’t mentioned here.
As humans, we tend to work in patterns, and in order to figure out what pattern might be playing out, we might need to delve into our past – as painful as that may be and as in much or as little detail as we’re comfortable with – to figure out what is still impacting our present life, why we’re reacting or behaving a certain way – in order to move forward with our lives.
Jocelyn Bryan discusses the relationship between meaning-making, purpose and wellbeing in Chapter 1 of The Bible and Mental Health.
As we begin to process what has happened, we may find ourselves learning from it – some lessons are really hard and we’d rather not have learned them, but we can’t delete the past or present; we can only begin to figure out what it means for us now.
So, narrative and story-telling isn’t just for the sake of it – either in counselling or in The Bible.
Our story, or even reading someone else’s biography, or even watching someone talk about their life story in a podcast, might lead us to understand something about ourselves that we can do something about in the here-and-now.
For example, if we think about what Job went through, there was a lot of pain – the loss of his children, his health, and the life he had known. God allowed Satan to test Job’s faith (that’s an interesting one for another time – why did God allow him to do that, and is He going to do that to us too?), while his wife and friends offered some rather questionable advice in their attempts to respond to his suffering.
Throughout Job’s story, we see him wrestle with grief, suffering, confusion and his relationship with God. He questions what is happening to him and why, while those around him try to make sense of his suffering too.
Eventually, Job’s story becomes one of humility, a deeper understanding of who God is, and restoration. His circumstances change again, but perhaps more importantly, his understanding of himself, his suffering and God has changed too.
When we are in the middle of a distressing time in our lives, we can be like Job — overwhelmed by what has happened, struggling to make sense of it, needing support to find our feet again, wondering who we can trust, even questioning God…
All of this eventually leads us to learn from what happened – some lessons are really hard and we’d rather not have learned them but we can’t delete the past or present, we can just figure it out.
So when the narratives and stories we tell ourselves about ourselves start sounding like:
“I’m unlovable”
“I probably deserved all this mess that’s happening to me”
“I must not be a good person”
“do I deserve to start over again or is this it for me”
From a Biblical perspective, we can turn to the Word of God and ask whether the story we have come to believe about ourselves reflects what God says about who we are.
And in therapy, our counsellor can help us explore where those stories came from, notice the patterns that keep reinforcing them, and begin to see ourselves and our experiences from a different perspective.
What stories are you telling yourself about yourself?
What needs reframing or discarding and starting anew altogether with a fresh perspective of who you are, where you’ve been, what’s going on now and where you want to head after you’ve worked through it all?
