When you experience major relational upheaval, it feels like the rest of life should be put on hold. Yet, so often, when we face addictive or abusive challenges in our relationships, life continues “as normal” because no one else knows what’s going on. This can be both disorienting and offensive. Doesn’t anyone care? Can’t anyone see? We feel hurt, angry, and alone.
However, so far this study has primarily been a major deconstruction project; we have broken down your experience and its fallout in many ways (hopefully insightful and helpful). The result is, while you may feel like there is hope for things to be better, you likely also feel like a person without a story.
That is what this chapter begins to address. In this chapter you will begin to put the pieces you deconstructed into a new narrative; not a narrative that makes the “sad things untrue” but a narrative that allows you to understand yourself, God, your life, relationships, and the future in ways that are healthy and hopeful.
This new narrative will likely not answer the nagging “why” question. Think about most suspenseful movies you’ve seen or books you’ve read. When is the “why” plot revealed? At the end. Where are you in your journey? Still in the middle. It is unlikely at this stage in the journey that, however God intends to redeem your experience, that this could be clear to you now. Guessing at God’s intention will likely place you in a series of all-or-nothing moments; the kind of thinking that tends to add to the destructiveness of unhealthy relationships.
Instead, at this stage in your journey, it is recommended that you seek to understand yourself, God, others, your setting, and your future in a way that both sets you up for stable-healthy living now and allows for redemptive moments in the occasions when healthier styles of relating hold promise to be fruitful (the focus of Step 7). We will seek to do this by walking you through six questions that help you identify key ways God would have you understand your experience.
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