Consider your life as a story. What chapter are you in the middle of? What have you, the protagonist, had to go through to get where you are now? Who are the key characters who have influenced you, and who do you rely on now? Where is your story going, and what obstacles stand in the way? Narrative Therapy provides a way for people to shape the stories about their experiences, relationships, and lives in order to make sense of and find meaning in the world.
Anger has the capacity to be constructive and purposeful, but more often it becomes destructive and vengeful. To avoid such negative outcomes, we could withhold or suppress our anger entirely, but this tends to produce resentment and passive-aggression which ultimately lead to equally negative results over time. So what are we to do with our anger? How can we defuse the destructive aspects of anger so that its constructive and important aspects can be clearly expressed?
When it comes to experiencing loss, ambiguity can be hard for us to manage because it often results in feelings of confusion and uncertainty. If given the option, we would prefer to have a sense of closure. But what if closure is not the most beneficial goal to set for ourselves when experiencing ambiguous loss?
In a literal sense, margin is the open space circumscribing the writing on a piece of paper. It designates the space that the writer is not supposed to write in. It is intended to create a tidy boundary that contains the content of the rest of the page. Without margins, the page would feel overcrowded, overwhelming, confusing, and possibly illegible, even if filled with lots of good content. Margins in life serve the same kind of purpose – to keep the busyness and fullness and necessity of life (all of which might be very good and important stuff!) from overflowing beyond its proper place and invading the open spaces that allow such valuable work to be sustained.
We know that finding space for peace, quiet, and stillness is somehow essential for our souls. But it can seem so elusive, almost as if the whole world is conspiring against us being able to ever really experience it. Or maybe it’s something within ourselves that keeps driving us away from silence. If this describes you too, then I want to encourage you to recognize all of the small ordinary moments that are actually available to you throughout most days and simply allow them to be silent.
Self-talk can be used as an effective form of self-motivation and self-regulation, but, when dominated by the voice of the inner critic, its effect is anything but helpful. It tends to keep us feeling defeated, alienated, and exhausted. Moreover, the inner critic distorts our view of self so that we begin to define ourselves more by our perpetual insufficiencies rather than the absolute and unchanging sufficiency of God’s love for us. So what can be done to put this inner critic in its rightful place and better align our self-talk with the realities of God’s love for us? Our team shares their own personal insights and practices on this all-too-familiar challenge.
Listening is an exercise in love and humility. It requires us to recognize the sacred image of God that even the most infuriating among our so-called enemies possesses as a fact of his or her existence. It requires us likewise to remember our own human fallibility and finitude, that our knowledge and understanding are incomplete unto themselves. By listening, we are putting two essential beliefs into practice: 1) the other person matters and therefore they matter to me and 2) the other person might just have something important that I need to hear through them.
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