Ch. 13: Change of Plans

The Roles We Play, a Serial Memoir

A crisis can serve as a good thing.

Now before you hear what you’ve been primed to hear about that, based on your own lived experience, let me take care to explain exactly what I mean when I say a crisis can serve as a good thing.

I don’t say it in a punitive-theology way, like when people misuse God’s sovereignty to imply that God causes bad things to happen for a reason. Nor do I mean “a good thing” in a spiritually opportunistic kind of way, like when people remove the variables of compassion and time from the healing equation, flattening someone’s crisis into an opportunity for correction, judgment, criticism, or degradation, masked as religious care.

Instead, I say a crisis can serve as a good thing as a therapist, clinically and theologically trained to walk with clients through crises in ways that hold out hope for the future. In ways that set a crisis as a prelude to development, formation, and growth.

In the early stages of therapy, a therapist’s job is to be empathetic and present to a client’s pain and suffering surrounding the crisis that sparked enough change to lead the client toward counseling in the first place. The therapist ought to communicate and demonstrate support in a way that builds trust, builds human connection, and takes care not to re-traumatize a client in a critical, vulnerable state.

But behind the scenes, from the very start, a therapist is also mentally setting a client’s story in the long-term context of hope. The client looks at their conditions and feels stuck. The therapist looks at a client’s conditions and sees it as background for formation and growth.

But a client has to be ready—has to understand that moving through a crisis is a process that’s often painful before relieving, scary before courage-building. See, a crisis often brings about high exploration of new thoughts, ideas, identities, and ideologies, and potentially, a lower commitment to old ones. For a person experiencing this shift without a framework for moving through it, this psychological phenomenon can be frightening on top of an already-fragile emotional state. But when a person has a framework, and seeks out support, community, and professional help to empathize, encourage, and empower them along the way, a moment of crisis can morph, over time, into perspective, something more freeing and less constricting than before.

A therapist’s long-term job is to track, to the best of their ability, this shift in client affect and mindset, sitting with and supporting, skill-building and encouraging, and giving name to glimmers of a client’s courage, healing, and growth.

After years of studying the psychology of change, growth, and development, I entered into my own personal crisis: an active two-year infertility journey with a pregnancy loss in the middle. The range of emotions I felt was not particularly pleasant to feel. Nor would I have chosen that crisis to facilitate my growth. But I did perceive my therapeutic training as God’s grace; to understand my psychological process largely eliminated the secondary suffering of not knowing what was going on inside of me or why.

Again, my understanding did not, in any way, assuage the distress or exhaustion of the experience itself. But rather than skipping or jumping over my emotions, rather than avoiding my conditions or praying them away, it was the act of moving through my emotions and coming to accept my conditions that led to my hope and faith forming into a substance more solid than ever before.

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