Chris and Beth Bruno host conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. This podcast is powered by ReStory Counseling.
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We are Chris and Beth Bruno, and this is the Walking With Podcast.
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a team of brave and brilliant story work counselors and coaches around the country, all committed to helping you come alive. Join us as we explore the sacred landscape of the human heart at the intersection of theology, psychology, and ministry.
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One of the challenges of running a counseling center and podcast that's connected to it is to really communicate kind of the heart of what we want to communicate and to show, peel back kind of the door and show what goes on inside some of those rooms and the power of what's happening there is that it's all confidential. And we can't, we can't tell those stories. But also even if we could.
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would we? And you and I have talked about this term of actually trafficking in stories and how one could easily do that. It could be sensational. It could be powerful for teaching, of course, but what does that do? How does that dehumanize the actual story?
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that we're sharing. And so there's just such a challenge in that. And so here we come to this, wanting to better explain the role of evil.
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in the the re-story process that we talk about and and it would be so good to be able to do that with some real situations but we can't. But we can't. So how do we come close to really being able to communicate what we mean by the role evil plays in the first and the second story that you were describing last episode?
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It is such a challenge because as we were thinking about how to explain this, so many stories just came flooding through my head of, uh, of clients that I've worked with, of people that have given me the honor of journeying them into their stories of harm and trauma and pain. And, uh, you know, if, if I were to summarize it, I would say that evil wants nothing more than to dehumanize.
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and diminish the glory that God has written into a person. And he also wants us to believe that it is our participation in that dehumanization against ourselves that we then own our own shame. And so that is what shame is. He wants us to experience shame. The shame that says
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I am not enough, or if I had only done something different, or if I hadn't done something, then I would be okay. But because I did, now I have a different story.
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Now I am in the second story that I can't get out. Now I am an addict. Now I am depressed. Now I am afraid of people. Now I am hypervigilant. And if I just hadn't done that, or if I just had done something different, then my whole life would look different. Talk to me a little bit more about that word diminish. The evil one can do nothing.
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to scar the face of God himself. He cannot approach the throne of God without God's permission. And so he goes to the next best thing, those that bear the image of God, that reflect who God is to the world. And he approaches us, God's children, to steal, kill, and destroy whatever he can.
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that looks like God. In the image bearingness of who we are, he wants to diminish, destroy, totally decimate that part, those specific parts of us, so that we will not look like or remind him of God. You talk a lot about...
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your approach, the Restory approach, is to not just collect those stories. Yeah. You said at the very beginning here that you've been privileged to journey into stories of harm with clients. And I want to hear more about that. How do you journey into those places where evil has diminished? What does that practically look like?
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There's very simply put two extremes. There is the extreme of being alone and then there is the extreme of being with. And I believe that the core of the gospel is all about connection, all about the whiffness of us with God and God with us and us with one another. And any place where the enemy can
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can destroy that with-ness, the possibility of it, our belief that we are worth being with, that we can be with, anything like that, he will seek out a way to destroy that. And so in the work that we do in entering those stories and journeying with people into those stories of trauma and pain and struggle, whatever it might be, woundedness, is not just for someone to tell me about those things.
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but it is for us together to go into a place where I can be with them in the narrative, in the story, and join them in the specific particular scenes where the enemy was at work. And instead of joining the enemy's work in that scene.
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to bring a level of kindness, which we'll talk about next episode, but to bring something different than what was experienced, to bring the witness of what the gospel is all about rather than the aloneness that in trauma we experienced far, far too much. What you're describing is shalom, a right relationship with God, ourselves, and others, and it was shattered.
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in the first story. Yes. And so what I'm hearing is that the restory approach is a seeking of shalom. Yes. And it is the difference that that shalom that witness we can have traumatic experiences that don't live within us as trauma.
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And the difference is that in the traumatic experience or around the traumatic experience, if we had someone else with us or help us process that with us, then it no longer lives within us as trauma. But trauma is the result of aloneness. Trauma is the result of being left on our own in the, in the experience that we had without someone else entering it with us and being with us. And that's,
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gospel because the very name of Jesus is Emmanuel, the God with us. And in the beginning of the scriptures, we have Eden, where God is with humans. And the very end of the scriptures, we have Revelation 21-22, where God is once again with us. And Jesus's mission on earth is for us to be united again with him and him with us. That's ultimately what is going to bring healing.
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It's not going to be some tools and techniques for me to mitigate my anxiety. It's for someone to enter into the places of my story where I first learned that anxiety was a way for me to cope. Anxiety was for me a way to navigate my feelings of aloneness. And let that be anxiety or depression or addiction or whatever it might be, that's where we need to go in the stories with people. And that's how we recover
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that first story that I talked about, because only when we are there can we be witness to the first story. Otherwise, we're always fighting against the second. Say that again. What do you mean by we are always fighting against the second story? The second story is the story that Shane wants us to believe that the first time
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for example, the first time that a child cut themselves, or the first time that they took, you know, drank too much, or the first time they looked at pornography, or the first time they found some way of coping with the world was because they were not enough.
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because they couldn't find their own way out, because there was something wrong with them, that they went to that coping mechanism or whatever. That's the story that Shane wants us to hear. There's something wrong with you. There's something wrong with you that you picked up the bottle. There's something wrong with you that you opened the computer screen and directed your browser to Pornhub.
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There's something wrong with you. And the reality is that the first story is that there's there is a glory within you. There is a glory within you that when we can be witness to the glory, those other things become so much less important. And that's where I wanna say, for many of my clients, I'll say, of course, of course you picked up the bottle.
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Of course you ran away. Of course you became sexually active. Of course these things began to happen in your life because that was the best option you had in that moment. Those were survival strategies. They were survival strategies and the fact that you survived and that you're here today.
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and that you still struggle with those survival techniques or strategies, that's so much less important than what you were trying to survive. Right. And yet that is what is so often the focus of more traditional.
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That's what so much of other kinds of therapies are trying to help you do because they become maladaptive. And so you want to stop drinking or you want to stop viewing porn or you want to stop feeling anxious. But if we don't attend to where they came from and what you were trying to survive in the first place, we'll just find ourselves back here again later. And so in the restory process approach that we have, it is first a firm belief.
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that there is a second story that has been an assault against your heart. It has been an assault against who you are and who God designed you to be. And yet, that has now become the ruling narrative of your life.
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However, before that, there was another story that has been long forgotten, if it was ever fully known in the first place. And it is the first story of God's design for who He made you to be that we are on a quest together to go recover and find, and to bring a sense of generosity and kindness and awareness of how evil has been particularly intent.
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on destroying the image of God in your face and in your life so that you won't be all that He designed you to be. And that's good news. And that's such good news. Thanks for listening to the Walking With Podcast where we've spent the last year bringing you conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. As a part of our Restory focus, we're changing the name this fall to the Restory Podcast.
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It will more broadly encompass what we're trying to do at Restoration and bring under one umbrella our work in the Counseling Center, in our digital laboratory, and with our brother and sister organizations, Restoration Project and Fierce and Lovely. You can find us in the exact same place, so don't go anywhere. The Big Shift comes on September 1st. Until then, join us next week as we continue to explore the Restory approach. See you then.