What makes for a healing story?
CW: adoption
The ending of a story…
changes our understanding of what came before.
So until you turn the page and see what comes next, be slow to foreclose on a chapter’s meaning.
You may be tempted to grasp at a conclusion—don’t.
Do give voice to the verdict you’re tempted to seize upon: “something’s wrong with me”, “I’m disqualified now”, “my life is ruined.”
Whisper your suspicions to a trusted friend. Write them on a page in your notebook. Then tear the page out and burn it (safely, dear). Now allow the smoke to signal to your brain: these conclusions are not written in stone.
Remember, your story is not entirely your own (as much as we wish it were).
A wise client said it beautifully: we all enter a moving story—the story of our parents, family, culture, and larger community.
The story I entered was framed by a feeling of unsafeness I couldn’t articulate or explain for a long while. I didn’t think of myself as feeling unsafe. But I was very aware I suffered shame-storms. Another friend calls this shamesickness.
Finally, one day I coaxed the shamesickness to speak. And to my surprise, it spoke, and said some very unexpected things.
Listening to it required me sitting very still and being very patient, something I found difficult in that season.
In A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer writes, '“The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge.”
On this day, I sat very still and listened for the shame, tracking its location to the heat and tension in my gut. I coaxed it out of hiding and asked, “When did you first learn to do this?” “How are you trying to help me?” “What are you seeking to protect me from?”
And then I remembered.
Or rather, I recognized something so obvious, I was puzzled why I hadn’t seen before.
The shame-storms were a flare-up of a feeling of unsafeness that grew for me after my brother Gabriel was given away. I don’t know why the dots hadn’t connected before. I wish I’d been able to verbalize the story earlier and process it sooner. But sometimes the controlling theme of your own story will be hiding in plain sight.
Gabriel (3 years, left); me (2 years, right); our cousin’s backyard, Austin, TX, 1979.
The story I remember being told was that Gabriel had been dropped as an infant. He came to live with us when I was eighteen-months old and he was three. It’s possible a brain injury made it difficult for him to remember things. My earliest memories are of Gabriel and they’re loving and tender and comforting. I felt safe with Gabriel, and as we grew closer as sister and brother, I didn’t understand we weren’t biological siblings.
My parents were planning on adopting Gabriel. They got him surgery to uncross his eyes, and therapy to help with his speech, behavior, and learning. But after some time, it became clear the arrangement wasn’t working. My father lost his temper when Gabriel failed to remember things like table manners or how to ride a tricycle. There were frightening incidents; the situation became unsustainable.
Soon plans were made for Gabriel to go live with another caregiver. I think she was one of the therapist who had been treating him for speech difficulties. Our parents loaded Gabriel and me into a blue station wagon and drove us to her house; she had chickens and a piano in her living room.
I never saw Gabriel again.
I don’t remember our family talking about him or offering an explanation for why he was gone.
In the absence of a story, your childbrain fills in the gaps: “My brother couldn’t learn.” “My brother made too many mistakes.” “My brother needed too much help.”
I quilted these scraps into a patchwork story: “If children need too much, they are given away.”
The story became, “Children are give-away-able.”
Whenever I visited the houses of friends and witnessed them behaving fearlessly around their fathers, I felt puzzled and confused. How was it possible that other children were not aware they could be given away at will? How did my friends feel so shockingly free to ask for help? Why did they trust their father wouldn’t lose his temper and eject a child from the family?
From there my story evolved: “Safety is for other people’s children.”
Eventually it to a point: “Safety isn’t for me.”
“So glad I was to be shown the line... I took it as a kindness.”
Forty years, I added chapter upon chapter to that story: “Safe relationships are for other people, not me.”
Your story—whatever it is—ends up running you on the inside. It shapes your perception of reality, defining your field of choices. Safe relationships weren’t on my menu, so I never requested them. My menu was full of dishes that lacked vital nutrients. But I wanted to sit at the table, so I ordered off that menu of malnourishment again and again.
Sometimes the least nourished among us become experts who specialize in delicious, nourishing dishes for others. We obsess over cookbooks. We train whole kitchens of staff who create innovative, safe, nourishing dining experiences. We earn Michelin stars for feeding others.
For me, sitting at the table—or working in the restaurant—put me in close enough proximity to nourishment, I wasn’t about to sacrifice it.
I was also trespassing as a woman. In my religious circles during those years, vocational freedom was suspect for women. Those years, I often felt I was somehow femaling wrong. But that table—where recipes of theology, ritual, tradition and pressing questions of human existence were being feasted upon—that was the table I knew best. So whenever a pastor would pull me aside and tell me what I was or wasn’t allowed to do as a woman if I wished to continue sitting at that table, I’d respond with gratitude. So glad I was to be shown the line—and so fearful I was of crossing it unknowingly and being given away without warning—I took it as kindness.
And yet I crossed those lines, repeatedly.
Well, not so much me.
As for me, I too was suspect of those parts inside me wishing for vocational freedom. I looked for ways to slaughter those parts of me on the altar of what is required of “a woman who wants to sit at the table.” I resigned to order à la carte from my anemic menu; those parts of me that hungered for a full course meal, I tied them to the chopping block. Oh man, I tried slaying those parts of me a hundred different ways. What can I say? A hundred-one times they were resurrected. I’d think they were dead. “Finally! I’ll be content to eat off the menu for women and I won’t cross any more lines; the line-crosser inside me has given up the ghost.” But the moment I wasn’t looking, she’d slip off the altar and show up again at the university.
Your story is shaped by your brain’s pathways, much like a driving route through a city is determined by the architecture of the road system.
And when we speak of “healing,” “learning,” or “maturing,” we are talking about physical changes in the brain—neural pathways linking up differently. Your story’s ending changes your understanding of what came before by linking up the pathway of that old story with your new thoughts, perceptions, or memories.
For your story to change, two conditions must be present: 1) your distressing story pathways must be “lit up” or engaged, and 2) a new pathway must also be activated. You can think of this as “dual awareness,” and it’s what helps your story pathways link up with new pathways to give your story a new ending.
When we read of people leaving Jesus and feeling differently, something in their brain may have been “rewired”. In Matthew 8, we read that Jesus spoke with people and “cured” them, many things could be happening in those stories–but here is a possibility for consideration: those who were sick, differently-abled, or suffering may have been living a story that said, “love isn’t for me.” They may have believed, “God’s love isn’t for me,” especially when religious teachers falsely taught that suffering is a sign of God’s lack of forgiveness.
“Your body will begin to feel different.”
In Mark 2, we read that Jesus healed a man who was paralyzed–not by fixing his legs right away– but by forgiving him. The religious teachers protest, “Hey only God can do that!” So now the paralytic has a new ending to his story: “God has forgiven me, and my legs still don’t work… my suffering was never a sign of God’s lack of forgiveness… God’s forgiveness is for me.”
How your story ends changes your understanding of what came before. And the hopeful news is that once new linkages are established, the new pathways can be reinforced through attention and repetition. And your body will begin to feel different.
Therapists will call this a “corrective emotional experience,” one that defies your expectations so it gives us your story a new ending. For a long time, my own experiences in therapy only served to reinforce my story; but then I had a surprising encounter with a therapist.
At the time, I had been shattered by a sudden, devastating loss.
“Safety isn’t for me,” was the flashing billboard.
But slowly, patiently, the therapist persuaded me that safety was still on offer. I wasn’t fully aware at the time, but he was learning what I expected—the responses my story predicted—and setting about to defy those expectations.
When out of exhaustion I dropped all my tricks for getting someone to like me, he inexplicably but convincingly liked working with me.
When I lost my capacity to make a man feel good at the expense of my own wellness, he communicated in a dozen ways, “Good! That won’t work for me either.”
When I was entirely persuaded of my “give-away-ableness”—such that I was prepared to give myself away before anyone could—he doubled his commitment to not going anywhere.
“Understanding how the brain rewires removes none of the mystery.”
A year and a half into therapy, I started to feel different.
I was aware that the experience I was having in therapy was giving me a second chance—the chance to taste what my friends growing up who trusted their fathers experienced without ever questioning it.
The contrast between my nervous system before therapy and now is difficult to convey properly; it’s on the scale of automatic transmission or technicolor film.
If you were born missing a lung, you might keep up with your two-lunged peers. But you’ll be oxygen deprived, possibly with nobody noticing. You’re be exerting tremendous effort, chronically fatigued. Your breathing will be unexplainably labored. You won’t know what two-lunged people are experiencing, but they’ll seem to be accessing a fuel source you can’t find.
Your story is the fuel-source.
Therapy gave my story a new ending.
Rather than, “My brother was given away because he needed too much help,” the fuller story is, “Our father couldn’t cope.”
Instead of “Safety is for other people’s children,” the fuller story is, “Safety is for everyone.”
I remember the precise moment that new thought occurred to me; I was in my living room. The thought was startling, like an electric jolt. I wondered if it could possibly be true. Could it be that safety is for everyone?
Well, it had never occurred to me to think a lung transplant was possible for someone like myself, and yet somehow I landed in the therapy office of someone who knew that procedure. And here I am; the unfathomable occurred. I’m learning to breathe like a two-lunged person. I’m feeling, thinking, and relating like someone who grew up with a different father. I know in my bones that relational safety is for me. And if that’s true, then it must be for all of us.
But what if therapy is not available? What if corrective emotional experiences never come? Those are good questions. Relating with a person who defies our expectations is a powerful way to rewire our story. But I don’t think it has to start there, and I know it doesn’t end there.
My new story, “Our father couldn’t cope,” led to a surprising new question, “What if God is a different kind of father?”
When that thought occurred to me, I was still in my living room. My felt sense in that moment was of God coming gently, safely close—closer than I’d ever experienced—face to face. The expression was one of attentiveness, patience, eagerness to help. It was startling. I’d never known God like that before. My relationship with God had never been “fatherly,” how could it be? Rather I trusted God like a boss: benevolent enough; so long as I performed my tasks satisfactorily I would not be given away. Now suddenly, I had an entirely new story. What if God is actually like a safe father or parent? One who inexplicably likes us, who grabs our hand when we go to sacrifice ourself, who will never give us away and is committed to not going anywhere, who insists we belong at the table and should be able to order off the full menu of human experiences.
Spiritual and relational safety is for all of us.
We can experience it with a good therapist.
We can experience it with God.
Safety is for all of us—no one is disqualified.
∞
Understanding how the brain rewires removes none of the mystery about the fact that it does. The fact that this happens—and can happen rather quickly if the conditions are right—is awe-inspiring. Whenever new linkages are created, we might have played a small part in creating the proper conditions, but we are not the ones creating the actual linkages. I believe when our brain heals, learns, or rewires in a way that’s helpful to us, we may understand ourselves always as having been helped by someone—another person or the Spirit—likely both.
Listening with you,
Questions for reflection:
When have you experiencing healing or “rewiring” and how did that happen?
Who has defied your expectations in a way that gave your story a new ending?
In what ways might your experience of God be shaped by your childbrain story?
Further reading:
Luke 9:11; Mark 2:5
A Grief Ritual in Four Movements
The Brain & the Spirit, Chapter 5, A Healing Story, “The Neuroscience of Healing,” pp. 106–107.
