35
2
SUF FERING ALONE
How Loneliness Grows a Wound
Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of
an empathetic witness.
G AB O R M ATÉ
PIERCE SITS ACROSS FROM ME
on the edge of the couch, his foot anxiously
tapping, his eyes scanning my office. I’m his pastor, and he’s come to ask
for advice about his brother.
Chase, his twin, is a thirtysomething marijuana and opioid user who
also attends the church, but who often arrives disheveled and, at times,
high. He struggles to keep jobs, sometimes teetering on the edge of
homelessness.
Pierce, on the other hand, shows up at church early each Sunday, a
bright and charming full participant who seems to be adored by everyone.
He dresses well and always appears cheerful.
I don’t know either man well, so Pierce tells me a bit of their backstory.
They grew up in a wealthy community in the South Bay, their father a high
powered lawyer for top Silicon Valley tech companies. “Dad’s affairs and
Mom’s depression wrecked Chase,” Pierce tells me. “It’s sad to see him
suffer while I’ve managed to navigate it all so well.”
Pierce’s comment provokes curiosity, so I ask him about successfully
managing these challenges. “Be strong,” he says. “People will let you
down, but you can always count on yourself!” For Pierce, to be a real man
is to never ever need someone. This is the lesson he learned from his father.
As I spend time with Pierce, the fuller picture begins to develop. While
Chase’s substance use seemed to sabotage any forward progress in career or
relationships, Pierce took a different route. He followed his father into law,his new wealth funding an extravagant lifestyle. That included consensual
hookups, Pierce admitted. Early on, one son began coping with substances
while the other chased success and sex.
But each was running from a painful wound.
Pierce doesn’t expect what I share next. “Somewhere along the way,
you both lost track of yourselves,” I say. I tell him how sad I feel. And he
sees and feels my sadness. “You seem so very lonely, too,” I tell Pierce, my
eyes now welling with tears.
I expect him to evade or disengage, but instead he locks eyes and lets
me see him, even the emptiness behind his eyes. “I’ve been so worried
about Chase,” he says, “but I sometimes feel as lost as he is.” Hanging his
head, he finally lets the tears come. And he allows me to sit with him, no
longer alone in his pain.
All the Lonely People
Instead of catching the bus after leaving the office that day, I walk down
Van Ness Avenue to Market Street, through San Francisco’s Castro district
and uphill toward our new apartment in Noe Valley, where we moved in
hope of a bit less fog. Inspired by Pierce’s vulnerability, I walk deliberately,
making eye contact when I can with people I don’t know.
God’s first question, “Where are you?” grows as a longing within me,
for myself and for each image bearer designed for worth, belonging, and
purpose whom I pass that day.
Unlike my normal routine of walking with eyes averted and ears
covered by headphones, I try to stay present amidst a sea of lonely
strangers, each with their own story, all in a rush to get somewhere, perhaps
even to evade themselves. Continuing on, I find myself pondering the
Communion table, where I’d met Chase and Pierce time and again. Do they
know how hungry and thirsty they are? Is there any deep satisfaction in the
food and drink God offers? In their lostness, do they feel found by God
each week? Suddenly, I am overcome with the collective ache of the
hundreds of people who come to the table each Sunday with their own
stories, their unique pain, and their irrevocable inheritance of worth,
belonging, and purpose. Can they let their hearts be touched? I imagine
myself asking each one of them the same question: “Where are you?”
36Even as I ponder it, I recognize how ironic it is that I, their pastor, feel
so lost and lonely too. The truth is, so many of us are alone in our pain and
alienated from our deepest selves in God.
“Disconnection in all its guises—alienation, loneliness, loss of
meaning, and dislocation—is becoming our culture’s most plentiful
product,” addiction and trauma expert Gabor Maté observes. “No wonder
we are more addicted, chronically ill, and mentally disordered than ever
before, enfeebled as we are by such malnourishment of mind, body, and
soul.”[1] We’re literally lost without connection. We’ll go searching, to be
sure, just as Pierce and Chase did, surviving off the breadcrumbs of pseudo
connection. But it’s a recipe for painful isolation, even unhealth.
Yet it’s the recognition of this aloneness that is a necessary first step
toward reconnection with ourselves, with God, and with those we love.
Alone in our Pain
“To suffer is as human as to breathe,” the wise Hogwarts headmaster Albus
Dumbledore declares.[2] Indeed, none of us are spared from the struggles
and sufferings of life within the 1,185 chapters between creation and re
creation. What wounds the soul to its depths, however, is solitary suffering.
Here, our pain simmers unaddressed. Here, we begin to forget who we are.
And this was the case for Pierce, for me, for each of the people you’ve been
introduced to in the book thus far. The fig-leaved array we’ve created to
protect ourselves from our fear, shame, anger, and more keeps us from
being seen and known. God whispers, “Where are you?” but we are lost,
even to ourselves. Lost—and alone.
It wasn’t meant to be this way, of course. “It is not good for the man to
be alone,” God says (Genesis 2:18). God’s imagination is for a world where
humans are offered the chance of real spiritual, emotional, and physical
companionship with one another. And in the very first chapter of Scripture,
this design is described as tov meod in the Hebrew—“very good” (Genesis
1:31).[3] Even before birth, we were designed for connection, for slow
growth within a human womb, nine months in complete union with our
mothers, literally connected to them for support. This is our very first
embodied taste of Eden, of home. And when we’re ready, we’re born into
the world with indispensable, relationship-rich needs to feel safe, seen,
37soothed, and secure.[4] Connection is the most important need of any
infant, essential not just to survival but to human flourishing. Without
connection, an infant will die. Indeed, without connection, we cannot truly
live.[5] Connection is how we are equipped to navigate life’s inevitable
trials, how we can experience emotional regulation after we’re hurt, how we
gain the resilience we need for whatever comes next. Connection is our
relational home and the biggest hint of our spiritual inheritance.
But suffering is inevitable. And suffering alone is what leaves an
incalculable wound. Trauma’s best-kept secret, well-articulated by therapist
Bonnie Badenoch, is that the “essence of trauma isn’t events, but aloneness
within them.”[6] What has been called a “loneliness epidemic” is now
known to be dangerous to both our physical and emotional health. “Being
lonely, like other forms of stress, increases the risk of emotional disorders
like depression, anxiety and substance abuse,” observes John Leland. “Less
obviously, it also puts people at greater risk of physical ailments that seem
unrelated, like heart disease, cancer, stroke, hypertension, dementia and
premature death.”[7] Chronic disconnection magnifies the risks of illness
and death, mimicking the impact of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.[8]
Humans literally wither without connection.
Think of it like the thirst your plants experience when they’re not
sunned and watered. Not long ago, my family and I returned home from
vacation to bone-dry plants, their leaves curling and wrinkling. The deep
greens had faded, and the plants appeared lifeless—until Sara fed them the
water they’d been craving. And so it goes for us in the drought of
connection. When we’re alone and go it on our own, we, too, begin to
wither and fade. In time, we may actually habituate to our dulled and
lifeless state, creating the conditions for the festering wound of trauma.
Connection is water and light to weary and withered souls.
In our suffering, we need an empathetic witness, someone to say,
“Where are you?,” someone who’ll see us as we are, someone who’ll be
with us in it. Absent this, the wound festers, it severs, it tears us up from the
inside.
The Slow Wither of Loneliness
38Pierce began to see that though he’d never arrive at church without a
companion or eat a meal by himself, he was just as lonely as his brother.
And I’d once come to realize that I was withering too. In the first years
after I lost my job, I worked hard to assure our family’s survival, my
survival. Within, I heard the voice of a cruel critic: You’re stuck here, and
no one’s coming to your rescue. Just tough it out and get through the day.
Little by little, I became like a porcupine, head down, quills out, self
protected. I let no one know how much I was struggling.
But even still, I couldn’t shake the growing sense that going it on my
own was costing me and those I loved.
An expert on stress and how our bodies hold it, Peter A. Levine writes
about how subtle the path to loneliness can be:
In short, trauma is about loss of connection—to ourselves, to our
bodies, to our families, to others, and to the world around us. This
loss of connection is often hard to recognize, because it doesn’t
happen all at once. It can happen slowly, over time, and we adapt
to these subtle changes sometimes without even noticing them.
These are the hidden effects of trauma, the ones most of us keep to
ourselves. We may simply sense that we do not feel quite right,
without ever becoming fully aware of what is taking place; that is,
the gradual undermining of our self-esteem, self-confidence,
feelings of well-being, and connection to life.[9]
Of course, things happen that throw us out of sorts temporarily. But
what Levine is describing is what happens within, a slow habituation to a
withered state where it feels like life itself is being drained from us. The
stresses of life compound, sending us into a self-protective mode, our
body’s energies shifting from life-giving connection to life-preserving
survival. In time, this withered state we’re living in may become our new
normal.
This is trauma. And more of us live here than we’re willing to admit.
Stressful things happen, to be sure, but stress can grow and
metastasize, turning a temporary state of panic into a continuous state of
overwhelm. Consider the science of stress for a moment. Therapist Aundi
Kolber writes, “A traumatic event includes anything that overwhelms a
person’s nervous system and ability to cope.”[10] In these crucial moments,
39Kolber notes that our bodies engage in automatic processes within, geared
to our survival amidst the overwhelm. No one is exempt; no one is immune.
If you’re reading this and happen to be human, you’ve got a nervous
system, and that nervous system goes haywire when your survival is
threatened in any way. Hormones such as cortisol, adrenaline, and
norepinephrine fire within your brain as your heart rate increases and your
fight-or-flight response is activated. Your brain’s control tower—the
prefrontal cortex—goes offline. Other nonessential systems shut down, and
key integrative functions cease. At worst, your brain’s hippocampus can’t
do its job of narrating what happened in conscious memory, sabotaging
your capacity to remember and process the pain.[11]
Of course, stress doesn’t always turn into trauma. Levine notes that “all
traumatic events are stressful, but not all stressful events are traumatic.”[12]
In other words, people may go through identical incidents, but what
happens within them may be vastly different. Two people may live through
the devastation of a hurricane that destroys their homes and community.
One person may find refuge with good friends, allowing her tears to flow
freely amidst the empathetic witness of beloved companions who
acknowledge her terror and loss. She may come away rattled but not
traumatized. The nervous system that jumped in to protect the woman
during the hurricane helps her come home to herself when the stress is over.
Yet another person may hunker down alone in a hotel, numbing himself
amidst the growing rage within. Rather than processing the stress, he may
do everything he can to escape it, compounding the overwhelm. One person
experiences connection while the other suffers alone.
And this is where I found myself, along with Rebekah, Pierce, Chase,
even Jeff and Johanna. None of us could have told you how the shift from
connection to survival happened, but it did. In time, we didn’t feel like
ourselves. Coping became the norm. We didn’t notice that our leaves were
curling, that our color was fading. We certainly didn’t think it was trauma.
Too often, we adapt to states of survival, of coping, of disconnection. It
doesn’t happen all at once but slowly. In time, we realize we’re far from
home, internally. This adapted state becomes our new normal, but it’s a far
cry from the flourishing we were created for.
It is not good for you and me to be alone. Toughing it out is not a
virtue. In fact, it’s a recipe for overwhelm, exhaustion, isolation, and
addiction. God’s design for interdependence, relationship, and a vulnerable
40“knowing and being known” is where we thrive. We need to be seen and
known amidst our challenges.
Say “Ouch”
One summer, I convened a support group for survivors of significant
spiritual abuse, all of whom were former members of a large church. The
stories of harm from this diverse array of folks were held in a space of
compassion and curiosity. There were beautiful moments of vulnerability,
but there was also a cautiousness that I couldn’t quite make sense of.
After some gentle prodding, someone said, “I know it’s bad, but she
had it a lot worse than I did.”
An offhand comment, but with that, the comparison game began. A few
more began to minimize their own experiences, gaslighting themselves: “I
don’t know why I’m crying. . . . I only worked there for five years when
some of you worked there so much longer.” Instead of witnessing the
impact of trauma within them, they began playing a game of “who had it
worse.”
Somewhere along the way, we learned that there’s always someone
else, somewhere in the world, who has it worse than we do. And somehow,
we’ve translated this into stop complaining, it’s not that bad.
“You know, each of you has a nervous system,” I told the participants.
“And your nervous system isn’t comparing what happened. It’s coping with
the consequences, and it’s craving connection.” Each of them had suffered,
and though their stories were different, their weary and wounded nervous
systems needed tender care.
We heal when we attend to what happens within, when we see that
each of us is wounded in our own way, each of us coping, each of us often
more alone in our pain than we’d dare admit. No matter the supposed size
or scope of what happened, we all need care and presence, safety and
attunement.
Connection shifts our body out of survival mode and into a state of
calm and connectedness again. Psychologist Peter A. Levine, author of
Healing Trauma, shares a remarkable story of the power of connection
amidst acute trauma after he was hit by a car a few years back. The first
person on the scene was an off-duty paramedic who attempted to stabilize
41him, but whose reactive presence and rapid-fire questions were agitating to
Peter. His initial pulse reading was 170 bpm. Peter was succumbing to
shock. And he felt all alone.
Soon after, a woman came to help, a pediatrician who immediately
attended to him as a person. He shares what happened next:
“Please, sit by me.” And she did and she grasped my hand. And I
could feel her hand and I could smell the scent of her perfume, and
the soothingness of her voice. And all of that gave me the feeling
that, “I’m not alone,” and by having that feeling, I was able to go
into my body, into my body, and feel where the shock was locked
in my body.[13]
Levine credits her presence and care for his capacity to navigate his
body’s automatic responses. In fact, shortly after she first attended to him,
his pulse dropped to near normal levels, a sign that his body was
experiencing safety, regulating itself because another person had met him in
his suffering.
What Levine’s story tells me is that no matter how we’ve suffered, we
need attuned care and compassion amidst it. We need someone to say
“Ouch!” We need a present person who will be with us and who won’t
minimize what we’re feeling. Think of how a good parent responds to a
child whether she scrapes her knee or falls out of a tree. A good parent
shows up either way, with empathy. A good parent says “Ouch!” no matter
the size of the injury. A good parent connects.
And this might begin for you right here as you’re reading, as you
decide that what you’re experiencing—no matter how big or small you
perceive it to be—is significant. When you’re withering, this kind of
reconnection begins to heal you.
“Where are you?” God asks, a kind move toward you amidst your self
protective, porcupine-like posture. God doesn’t want you to be alone in
your suffering. Don’t let the serpent’s lies lull you into believing that
someone has it worse, or that God has more important things to tend to than
to meet you tenderly in your pain. Don’t let the serpent convince you to go
it on your own, into a land where wandering and withering are inevitable.
With a kind “Where are you?” God is addressing you. What is the particular
42pain you carry? How have you carried it on your own? How has it cut you
off from vital connection to yourself, to others, to God? What is your
experience of it within you?
And what might be possible if you were to let yourself be fully known
in it?
The Practice of Befriending Suffering
“Embrace your grief, for there your soul will grow” noted the great
twentieth-century psychologist Carl Jung.[14] In chapter 1, I offered the
practice of coming home to yourself. Now, I suggest a second practice to
build upon it: the practice of befriending your suffering.
In inviting you to befriend suffering, I’m not imagining some
masochistic exercise. The need to suffer in masochism is yet another means
of avoiding or managing real pain. No, I’m more interested in following the
invitation of Jesus when he says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they
will be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).
To mourn is to bring your suffering into the light before God and
others. To mourn is to refuse to suffer alone anymore. To mourn is to live in
truth, to acknowledge that you’re hurting, to seek care rather than self
soothing. As Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened,
and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Indeed, God’s credibility for
meeting us here is that he suffered in the flesh, experiencing the ache of
disconnection and feeling forsaken (Matthew 27:46). Jesus felt alone in his
suffering. And he cried out. Perhaps we can too.
God runs to you, even in your suffering, longing to reconnect with you.
Will you allow yourself to receive God’s compassionate care? Will you
allow God to see and to know not only what happened to you, but what’s
happening within you as well? To be sure, many voices will echo the
serpent, telling you to go it on your own. But you weren’t created to cope
alone. And the flourishing you’re longing for emerges only as you’re
known.
While it may sound complicated, I’ll often tell people that this practice
might just begin with a simple, “Ouch, that hurt!” Yes, it does. That thing
that happened to you hurt you. What happens within as a result wounded
you. Living life in these 1,185 chapters in between is sometimes painful.
43It’s time to name what hurts, and to name it specifically. Some will tell you
that this is a morbid or joyless way of living, but ignoring your pain only
leads to further weariness and woundedness. There is no real power in the
so-called power of positive thinking because it’s a recipe for bypassing your
pain, a self-help setup for further hurt. Befriending suffering opens the way
for reconnection and joy.
“Suffering is inevitable,” South African archbishop Desmond Tutu
once noted, “but how we respond to that suffering is our choice. . . . We are
fragile creatures, and it is from this weakness, not despite it, that we
discover the possibility of true joy.”[15] This fragility isn’t simply the result
of some bad thing we did. It’s the reality of being human, limited, even
mortal, as theologian Kelly Kapic writes.[16] It is the invitation to
acknowledge our weakness, even our neediness. To acknowledge that real
strength, even joy, emerges through the embrace of our weakness (2
Corinthians 12:9).
In his lovely work on grief called The Wild Edge of Sorrow, therapist
Francis Weller muses on the practice of befriending suffering with
compassion. He warns us that when we refuse to befriend our suffering,
“we will find ourselves acting out of compulsion, reacting to scenes in our
life with the same consciousness that was traumatized in the first place.”
This is where I found myself in my second pastoral role in San Francisco,
thousands of miles from where I’d been fired but in the very same body and
with the very same consciousness that had experienced that acute pain.
However, when we come home to ourselves, centered and secure, we
can approach the pain within us and the suffering outside of us well and
wisely, with an empathetic presence. Weller continues, “What we can do is
work to maintain our adult presence, keeping it anchored and firmly rooted.
This enables us to meet our life with compassion and to receive our
suffering without judgments. This is a core piece in our apprenticeship with
sorrow.”[17]
This isn’t to say that we should overidentify with our pain. Too often
we say, “I’m depressed” or “I’m addicted” when in reality, we’re feeling sad
or struggling with addiction. This distinction makes all the difference.
Your depression, your anxiety, even your addiction, is not core to who
you are. Instead, each of these realities within you needs the balm of
reconnection, needs a witness to its pain. You bear God’s image, and you
are “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3) and “rooted and grounded
4445 in love” (Ephesians 3:17, ESV). Anchored here at home within, you can
notice your pain within not as you, but as a part of you, perhaps an
experience you’re having or a way you’re currently coping. Anchored here
at home within, you can join the Spirit of God within you as an empathetic
witness to your own pain, a vital part of the healing process.
There is an old hymn that offers you an invitation:
Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish;
Come to the mercy-seat, fervently kneel;
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish,
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.[18]
You don’t have to suffer alone. Bring it into the light and let your
leaves unfurl.
RESOURCES
Amanda Held Opelt, A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in
Rituals of Grief and Healing
Dennae Pierre, Healing Prayers and Meditations to Resist a
Violent World
Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We
Believe about Ourselves
Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal
and the Sacred Work of Grief
Reflection
Even if we experienced great care growing up, almost
everyone has some story of suffering alone at some point.
And almost everyone can think of some message they
learned about being tough or strong or independent.1.
Can you think of an experience from any period of your
life when you suffered alone? What was it? How did it
feel? If you were eventually met in it, how did that
help? If you weren’t, how does it feel even today
reflecting on what it was like to suffer alone?
2. How did your family talk about painful things? How
were you attended to when you were hurt? Was there a
particular mantra that was spoken or an implied
expectation about how to get over it or through it
quickly? See if you can name some of the childhood
lessons you learned about how you were supposed to
deal with pain.
3. Has suffering alone become normalized for you,
perhaps to the point that no one really knows what
you’re experiencing? If so, how might it feel to open
yourself up to God by acknowledging that it hurts? How
would it feel to share some of what you’re feeling with a
friend?
4. We sometimes tend to minimize our suffering through
comparison. How have you done this? What is it like to
consider that your unique struggle—no matter what it is
—is the very place where God meets you?
Practice: Befriend Your Suffering
In coming home to yourself, you learned to reconnect, to
breathe and to ground, and to attend to God’s kind “Where
are you?” Now, in this practice, you’ll learn to begin to name
the ache within.
Writing your laments
46Psalms of lament were spoken as an antidote to suffering
alone. They were pleas to God in the midst of isolating pain.
It can be helpful to write your own reflection in the spirit of
these biblical psalms. There are psalms of individual lament
—Psalm 3, 5–7, 13, 17, 22, 25–28, 32, 38, 39, 42, 43, 51,
54–57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 69–71, 86, 88, 102, 109, 120, 130,
and 140–43. There are also psalms of communal lament—
Psalm 44, 74, 79, 80, 83, and 89.[19] You can begin by
reading through some of these to see which one uses
language or a tone that resonates with your own soul or
struggle. You might then just grab a pen and a journal and
begin writing your own prayer of lament. Capture on paper
what feels faithful to your experience without trying to mimic
the psalmist too closely, recognizing that God wants to hear
your unique experience. As you listen to God’s “Where are
you?” perhaps you can honestly name what you are
experiencing.
Separating and attending
Amidst disconnection, you can slowly begin to believe that
you are your emotions, or even your addictions. Sometimes
you may be so overwhelmed by an emotion or an
experience that you can’t return to yourself in order to
approach your pain from a place of care and compassion.
In these moments, it can be helpful simply to name what’s
happening within. This exercise can help you both return to
yourself and begin to befriend and name how you’re
suffering. Practice the following exercise:
I am not my ________________ [sadness, rage, panic,
shame, etc.]. I am simply feeling _________________
[sadness, rage, panic, shame, etc.]. This isn’t me. It’s a
47part of me that needs my care and compassion. At my
core, I’m loved by God and created for worth,
belonging, and purpose.
or
I am not my ______________ [addictive tendency]. I am
simply coping right now by __________________ [name
the way you’re coping]. This isn’t who I am; it’s just the
way I am dealing with my pain right now. At my core,
I’m loved by God and created for worth, belonging, and
purpose.
In this practice, you might see if you’re able to identify
where you are feeling particular feelings or sensations in
your body. Then place your hand there (over your chest, on
your cheeks, or on your belly, for example), and breathe in
slowly, according to the exercise in chapter 1 (see pages
29–30). On the out-breath, imagine yourself breathing
compassion into this area of your body or into this particular
internal feeling or sensation.
Companionship
Practice asking for care. Practice being known. When we
struggle alone, we’re more prone to becoming
overwhelmed, even traumatized. Is there someone you can
invite into this reading and reflection with you? Perhaps
someone you can find a one-hour slot each week to
process with? Maybe even someone you can engage the
“separating and attending” exercise with? If so, begin
practicing a kind of soul companionship where you can
know and be known. Simply start with the question “Where
are you?” and see where it leads. Maybe the examples in
this chapter offer some helpful connections to your own life
and show how each of us, like Adam and Eve, wander and
48get lost. Be as honest as you’re able. And then follow this
up with another question: “Is this where I want to be?” Or
“What do I long for?” Begin here, and we’ll build on this in
the pages to come.
[1] Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic
Culture (New York: Avery, 2022), loc. 4553 of 12186, Kindle.
[2] J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (London:
Pottermore Publishing, 2017), act 4, scene 4.
[3] For a beautiful picture of tov community, particularly amidst contemporary issues of church
abuse, see Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer’s Pivot: The Priorities, Practices, and Powers
That Can Transform Your Church into a Tov Culture (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2023).
[4] See Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, who talk about the importance of feeling safe, seen,
soothed, and secure in their book The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes
Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired (New York: Ballantine Books, 2020).
[5] See Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown,
2013).
[6] Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of
Relationships (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), loc. 649 of 6331, Kindle.
[7] John Leland, “How Loneliness Is Damaging Our Health,” New York Times, April 20, 2022,
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/nyregion/loneliness-epidemic.html.
[8] See Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic
Culture (New York: Avery, 2022), 293.
[9] Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2008), 3–4.
[10] Aundi Kolber, Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival
Mode—and into a Life of Connection and Joy (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2020), 34.
[11] For more on this entire process, see Janina Fisher, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A
Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (Eau Claire, WI: PESI Publishing, 2021).
[12] Peter A. Levine quoted in Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal, 24.
[13] Peter A. Levine, “Video: Dr. Peter Levine on Working through a Personal Traumatic
Experience,” PsychAlive, https://www.psychalive.org/video-dr-peter-levine-on-working
through-personal-traumatic-experience/.
[14] Quoted in Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of
Grief (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2015), 11.
49[15] As quoted by Bethany Dearborn Hiser in her book From Burned Out to Beloved: Soul Care for
Wounded Healers (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 162.
[16] See Kelly M. Kapic, You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why
That’s Good News (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2022).
[17] Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, 161–162.
[18] Thomas Moore, “Come, Ye Disconsolate,” 1816, first verse,
https://www.hymnal.net/en/hymn/h/684.
[19] “Psalms of Complaint—Study Guide,” Yale Bible Study,
https://yalebiblestudy.org/courses/psalms/lessons/psalms-of-complaint-study-guide/.
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