How Low Can You Go?

The year was 1988. I was two weeks into my first call at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Lombard, Illinois. Pastor Oetting had told me to reserve two weekends for a Calling and Caring Ministries training. It was a listening-skills training so that we could minister to inactive church members. There was so much that touched me during that training, and it has continued to deeply impact my ministry, my marriage, and the path my life would take. 

There was one lecture during that training that was particularly fascinating and I still use it every time I am with a counseling client to this day. The lecture was about the skill of Story Listening. We were shown a diagram like this:

In a nutshell, the listener hears data back then, feelings back then, and feelings now levels of stories that ultimately have either pain or joy beneath those stories. As the story listener listens to these stories, a mirror image of those stories happens with him. This is called the counterstory. When we’re listening to someone else tell a story, we all have a counterstory that matches the theme of the story being told. For example, if I tell you the story about my dog Princess, you think about your dog or some other dog-themed story from your own life. The problem with staying with somebody’s story is that as they go into pain, so will we. If I tell you about my dog dying, you think about the pain of losing a pet. We, as the story listener, experience pain…that is, if we can stick with their story. You see, we also have a hundred ways of pulling somebody out of their story, and may not even know that we’re doing it. We might tell our counterstory, minimize their story, compare them to someone else, theologize their pain, or simply change the subject. But if we can stick with them in their pain or joy, we can help them heal, and become more whole.

Understanding that we all have a bottom to what we can tolerate, leads us to Jesus, who can stick with somebody’s pain, no matter the depth. Deuteronomy 33:26-27 says, “There is none like God, O Jeshurun, who rides through the heavens to your help, through the skies in his majesty. The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” (ESV) You see, there is no bottom to the depth of pain that God can go to with someone. Those everlasting arms that are underneath, have nail marks in them! Isaiah 53:4-6 says, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Jesus can bear our pain to the very greatest depths because he is perfectly compassionate, all-powerful, and has already traversed the journey of his own pain literally to hell and back.

The only way that we can stick with somebody else’s pain, is by having done our own work of engaging our story. I’ve seen this multiple times within this last week. On Tuesday, I met with my DCE cluster. One of the DCEs started sharing about the pain of losing his father. Immediately, several of us were feeling the pain of having lost our fathers. As he shed tears of grief, our pain had to also be endured so that we could minister to him. Then on Thursday night, during my internship class, a cohort member shared a clip from a counseling session. She shared that her client could not go into emotion. However, when we watched the portion of her session with that client, there were a few of us who commented that we did sense emotion in her client. The intensity of emotion and being able to dip down comfortably into one’s limbic system is on a continuum, and clearly, my cohort member was picking up on something in her client. 

I remember at the very first kickoff of my Master’s, when they shared with us that “It’s not that you don’t have emotion, you may just not have access to those emotions yet.” Both of the examples from my week are good examples that all of us can grow in the ability to feel emotion deeper than we presently can. This is doable! Personally, this involves us getting back in touch with parts of ourselves that have been shut down through life experiences. Together with someone else, this is where containment comes into play so powerfully. Wherever the storyteller is at, there is a deeper level of emotion just beyond their ability to contain that emotion. If we, as the story-listener, have done our personal work, we will be able to contain their emotion, and in the process help them grow. This is why it is so important that we never stop growing ourselves. We need to be receiving containment from somebody else (e.g. a counselor or other safe people in our life) so that we can then be there for others who need us. Blessings to you as you live out your story and as your emotional world comes alive. The question is, how low can you go?