Think of a time you heard someone’s story of abuse, neglect, or loss that was more severe than anything you have experienced. Typical reactions are shock, sorrow, and a desire to provide care and justice that counterbalances the hurt that person experienced. Also, you likely felt an appropriate helplessness. What can I possibly do to make this better? Where do I even begin?
As it turns out, the first step of caring for the hurting does not start with their story but yours. In short, you must first receive God’s care for your wounds if you are to care well for the wounds of others.
The apostle Paul writes about this order in 2 Corinthians 1:4. God “comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” The call to care well for others is not a call to pronounce information about comfort but to share the comfort we have received. Paul models this in the following verses as he describes “the affliction we experienced in Asia” in which “we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death.” Paul speaks truthfully and honestly about his affliction and the impact it made on him and his fellow workers. He also relays the outcome of this trial spiritually: “But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.”
Counselors often speak of “processing” our emotions around grief or pain. If you think about materials we extract from the land, we refer to crude oil versus refined oil or unprocessed ore versus processed ore. In their raw forms, these cannot be used for good. They must go through a process.
Our emotions must also be processed when we have painful relationships or events in our past. When someone sobs at a funeral or screams when a spouse confesses infidelity, these are raw emotions. They are appropriate responses. Depending on the severity of the trauma, the emotions may remain raw for a season. But in this raw state the person is not in a place to be a source of help to others.
Often we neglect these emotions rather than facing what caused them. We believe that “time heals all wounds” and move on with life without processing what we have experienced. This may help us survive and function, but it can become a roadblock to caring well for others. When another person discloses a painful experience or a difficult situation, it may crack open the door to the closet where we have locked up our unprocessed emotions. If we are not able to sit with someone in their sadness (because we have not dealt with our own sadness) or listen as someone vents their anger (because we have unprocessed anger) we can stymie that person’s healing process.
So as you consider what it means to care well for others, bring this question to God in prayer: Do I have experiences of abuse, neglect, or loss that I have not processed? For Rachael and me, some patterns that have highlighted unprocessed emotions are feeling a visceral outrage when a child shows disrespect, feeling the shame of failure for allowing a check to bounce, feeling the need to be the best student in the class, or feeling an inward retreat when another raises his or her voice.
These events begin our journey back to unprocessed emotions. There is no precise roadmap for this journey, but here are some signposts that we can follow: [ . . . ]
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