It is healthy for us to be connected to and to have a sense of ourselves in our own stories. This means we have “at hand” everything, good and bad, that has happened in our lives in the past and present and we can see ourselves moving into the future with a coherent sense of who we are. This is another way of being “present”.

When bad things happen or our anxieties are raised, things tend to get fragmented. We disconnect because those things are frightful, allowing them to sink into our subconscious. Most of us have done this with the painful past and we keep on avoiding anxiety-producing things in the present (which tend to be similar to the painful things in the past), hoping they will just go away if we avoid them.

But these things we have buried keep affecting us in a subversive manner. It is not that we need to dredge up every single painful thing, but it is helpful to stay connected with our emotions and memories and move toward them rather than away. We must make sense of them in order to produce change in ourselves and our relationships. How do we allow these things to be incorporated into our stories and redeem them? There must be some mechanism that helps us absorb and sublimate them: forgiveness, kindness, hope, love. Our stories cannot be without pain, but these latter things are what make them worth living. My hope is that we can find redemption in our stories.