Story Matters Podcast
In the Story Matters Podcast, Hosts Ryan and Emily Baker discuss the intersection between theology and psychology helping listeners to better grasp how their particular stories have shaped them.
Story Matters Podcast
52.Can We Just Not Tie a Bow On It?
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Season Four wrap up! When stories are unresolved, our bodies feel the tension so we often divert by looking for a way to tie everything up with a bow. “It’s fine.” “It’ll all work out.” Even faith language can become a bow we use to exit the pain before we’ve actually felt it.
We talk about silver linings that bypass grief, the pressure to explain suffering, and J. I. Packer’s train yard illustration for why we can’t stand in God’s control room and demand a full map of every “why.” Rigid explanations, loyalty to families or organizations, and “closed book” testimonies can keep real wounds off limits, leaving shame or resentment to simmer.
Writing a single, contained story with sensory details slows you down enough to reveal truth you had not seen. We end with a challenge and a limited offer for a free story engagement - fresh eyes on a story you may have previously tied up with a bow. Does this offer appeal to you? Or, share this with a friend who ties things up too fast, and leave a review so more people can find story work that makes room for both honesty and hope.
Welcome And Big Picture
SPEAKER_01Welcome to the Story Matters Podcast. I'm Ryan Baker.
SPEAKER_00And I'm Emily Baker.
SPEAKER_01We believe people grow and heal through understanding how our stories are rooted in God's redemptive story.
SPEAKER_00We hope our conversations encourage you to engage your story in the world around you with a new lens.
SPEAKER_01We're glad you're here.
SPEAKER_00Alright, we're gonna wrap up season four with this episode, and we are going to have a fun challenge and an offering of 10 free story engagements that Ryan offered at the very end. So stay to the end of this podcast, listen to what we're talking about, and see if this is something that you would enjoy.
SPEAKER_01We are wrapping up season four, and in light of that, we want to talk about a topic that often comes up with clients or just in our own conversations about our lives, and that is as people, we really love to make meaning. And it's difficult to enter into any kind of a story and not have it make sense or have meaning. And so often what we do is we try to tie it up with a boat. That is, we take the story, the situation, and often it's done in a way that we you kind of know it's not even right, but you'll be talking, and yeah, I guess it is what it is, or it's all good. But it's all good, it'll all be okay. But this tendency keeps us from entering the complexities of the story, the harm. So if we're in the midst of exploring something and our body begins to sense this is hard, this is dark, this is going in places I don't go. I've drawn up blocks, I don't and of course none of this is happening in our cognitive mind, but this is what's actually going on. What's gonna happen is we're gonna use cliches or statements or bypassing language to essentially try to keep the story, the situation tied up neatly.
The Bow Metaphor And Bypassing
SPEAKER_00I'm imagining as you talk about this kind of like a coffee date or hanging out with a friend. It's not like the things you said are done individually as we think about our life. It's when we're in conversation and a friend has shared something difficult or we've shared. And I have this temptation all the time. I feel the tension rising as I'm explaining maybe something that's just happened to me and there isn't a resolution yet. And yet I want my friend to know about it and I'll say things like, but it's okay. It is okay. I'm trying to convince them I'm all done talking because the tension's rising. But I think our topic about wanting to wrap up our season but not tie bows on each other's stories or on our own is the desire not to resist the tension of living in our stories continually.
SPEAKER_01Yes. So let's just take the metaphor of a bow, right? Just to use that for this conversation. The first meaning would be a bow is a pretty thing. If you wrap a gift and you think, I need to put a bow on this, that's I want to make this more than just a package. This is gonna be special, this is gonna have meaning. It's beautiful. And so to take that metaphor for what we're discussing, especially in the realm of story work proper, where someone has written a story of harm, it's being engaged, whether in a group or with a trusted friend or guide, all the way down to a coffee shop visit. In these situations, I'm moving toward hard things. I'm playing around with them, I'm saying them, I'm getting really close. But at the end, whether it's after some really good interaction or not, I'm going to try to put a spin on it that makes me feel safer and feel like I'm still okay.
SPEAKER_00I think you're describing a silver lining or a Christianese language would be a redemption. We watched a horrific storm develop that was damaging, yet we saw the beautiful edge of it and we saw the silver lining. How do we hold both without letting it rob the person of the heartache that needs to be felt?
SPEAKER_01Yes. One of the ways we add the bow is it bypasses it. Now, to use the metaphor, that might mean the gift isn't great. Uh uh, we're re-gifting something. It's not a thing you probably care about. But I'm gonna put it in the most beautiful sack with the most beautiful bow. So at least you feel excited to get it. You know what I mean? That's the bypass, right? That's the this is all awful, but there's a silver lining, or but all things work together, or these are the ways we Yeah, but you end up kind of feeling empty because you're not it was like that that almost deceived me.
SPEAKER_00Like I was gonna get something really special. Yes.
SPEAKER_01But the one I think that we see that's the most cunning is to give an illustration, and it's a J.I. Packer illustration. In his book, Knowing God, he has a chapter on wisdom, and he explains one of the mistakes we make when reading wisdom literature or just trying to know God is when we try to infer what everything's gonna mean. And he said he grew up as an avid train enthusiast, and he grew up in London. And so he describes going to the London train yard, a presumably large, busy cosmopolitan train yard, and he as a boy, and he'd watch these trains coming and going, switching tracks, whatever they do. And he said he would try to predict there's a oh, there's a number eight coming in, and he would try to kind of in his mind assume where it's gonna go and it's oh, it's gonna probably do that, and it wouldn't. And he would realize that really no matter how long he stood there, because of the complexity of the train track of that station, the only way he could ever make sense is if he went into the central motherboard of that station, which showed back then on lit dots where the trains were going. In other words, unless you are in the mind of God, you can't fully know the why. And that drives us crazy as people because made in his image, we want to know the story, we want to know the why, we want to have certainty, we want to feel safe, and yet that commitment, if it's not his will, if that's not if we're not meant to know, there's this perfect line.
SPEAKER_00The Chris Stapleton song. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I've been thinking about that when I as we approach this episode. Because of that J.I. Packer chapter, hearing Chris Stapleton sing this, it's not really a particularly great Christian song, but Broken Haloes. But there's the line: don't go looking for the reasons, don't go asking Jesus why. We're not meant to know the answers. They belong to the buy and buy. And again, and you go, Oh, it's not right, but it is right. We're not meant to know all of the reasons for everything.
SPEAKER_00Sure. Psalm 131. I do not think on things too great or marvelous or things too difficult. You know, there's a soothing in your soul that says, I cannot understand fully.
SPEAKER_01And not to stay in theology too long, there are certain doctrines that you can't fully grasp. We'll never understand the Trinity, we'll never understand the natures of Christ. Here's the thing, but we can know boundaries around them, right? We know we can know where someone's gone too wrong, you know what I mean? If someone says, I think Jesus was a little bit of both, a little bit of man, a little bit of God. That's a heresy, right? Historically. And in the same way, the point is we don't not study those. If you're someone who loves scripture, you're a Christian, you want to know the truth, we still study and ask and learn. And in the same way, we still look at our stories, we still seek the truth. We're looking deeper, but we're doing so with an understanding that we may not ever cognitively grasp all the reasons for the harm for the situations, but we still want to actually move into the stories for healing. And what actually keeps us away from that is when we insist on knowing reasons, i.e., when we insist on using a bow.
SPEAKER_00What's coming up for me is that we say things like, God never wastes our pain with Romans 8. He works all things for our good. And those two things have to be held with the truth of what you just said, in that we might not ever know the reasons for why abuse or why abandonment or why things happen in people's stories. How does our fixation on understanding the why tied in with our pardon the pun bow tying conversation? Like, how does that connect?
SPEAKER_01Because we would say it hinders. Almost everyone who listens to this podcast will know the concept of a left brain and a right brain. And there's some deeper neuroscience on that. But what's known is there's a part of our brain, the left hemisphere, that really wants to make meaning, to have conclusions, to have efficiency. The left brain doesn't need to bother. It's that's where jargon kind of comes from. Every time you say a word, you don't need to say the whole. So let's narrow it down, right? We need that to live. We need our left brain is critical, but then the right brain is more interested in spatial and beauty and wonder and transcendence and many other things. One of the reasons why we write stories is it engages both very well. And predominantly in some ways, the right brain, because we're just seeking out what happened. But if the whole time we're trying to tie it up, it's if you're a parent and your child comes to you with a problem, school, teacher, a bully, whatever, it's very hard to listen with curiosity and compassion because that parent side of you is like, we're gonna fix this, we're gonna get to the root of this, we're gonna help, which is beautiful in that scenario in a way, but there's also that need to, is that child feeling felt? Can we come off of our own hypervigilance to listen well? And in the same way, if we're trying to engage our own story or even a situation from earlier in the day, but we're doing so under this kind of false impression that it has to make sense. We have to get to the conclusion of it, what was the reason for it? We're gonna actually block ourselves from exploring the places we need to in order to fully understand what occurred.
Rigid Reasons That Shut Down Grief
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that makes sense. As you were talking, I thought about a boy I knew in high school that had a bad car accident, and he came to youth group soon after that car accident and said, God save my life for this reason, and had a specific kind of uh, I don't remember what it was, but it was a very specific, I'm supposed to be a doctor. It was something like that. And so I know he kept me alive so that I could do this, like this mission. And I remember thinking even then, well, what if you change your mind? What if he just kept you alive because it wasn't your time to die? Like, couldn't be a broader purpose? And so I think with him trying to make meaning the constraint of that, I don't know if it how it affected him because I didn't stay in touch. But is that kind of I love that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a great example because what you're getting at is okay, I have a view of God that would I'm saying this is maybe what was going on in a person like that's mind. I have a view of God that would never let something like this happen to me unless it was for me to become a doctor or something like I have to make meaning. Now, again, we do believe that all things work together for the good for those who are in Christ Jesus, but it doesn't always look good. Peter ended up being himself crucified, right? So it's like sometimes what we think is the purpose, it may be what we need to make God good again in our brain and keep him being on the category of he's good, because I don't want this idea of harm in a car accident or a deformity or abusive parent or abuse. I need to make that make sense. And so, you know, what it's gonna do is it's gonna cause me to become a a speaker. I've decided that's why this happened. I'm gonna go speak and write, which are great things. But the problem is that can keep us from really grasping the wound and even grieving it well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it sounds like a rigidity. I have found the reason I had to go through that certain suffering. Now that I have that reason, I can tie the bow on that particular suffering in my life. And so I don't have to revisit it. I know why it happened. So I think when if that's kind of what we're saying, which I think that does make sense and it feels good to tie things up and kind of be done. Like chapter ended, let's move that book over. I think the concern I have is what if you feel something from that particular suffering that you have decided how to reason, but maybe a year later you feel really activated or you feel like there's a lot of grief around that, do you just go to that answer like, well, but that's how I met my husband because I had lost that job? But what if we've closed off a portion of that story and we're not allowing ourselves to explore more about what could be there's other things going on besides that one silver lining?
Loyalty Frameworks And Naming Harm
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. If I can't name my father or my mother or a sibling as an abuser in a story, and by abuser, I just mean the one who caused the harm. Obviously, it can be all the way to the nth degree, but it may be subtle. But if I can't name that, or I can't name an organization that I love having put me in a vulnerable position that pushed me into places I would have not naturally gone, if I can't name those things as even potential, I can't even explore them because of loyalty structures once again. Like that's a common theme in so many of our stories is I'm loyal to a framework. Yes, I can be loyal to people, parents, organization, but I'm really loyal to maybe a framework, like like a methodology. A methodology. And I and I'm not touching the methodology here.
SPEAKER_00So that can't be the problem.
SPEAKER_01So that can't be the problem. What it has to be is I lacked gifting or tact or whatever. And the reality is we have to then shape shift the story to fit that methodology. And that's one type of tying a false bow. It's like I'm putting this kind of I'm wrapping, okay, so a bow can be beautiful, but maybe we could broaden out the concept, like the ribbon holds the package. Its ideal purpose is to hold the thing together, right? We need this package to stay safe and tight. If I'm so committed to that, then I can't really explore the actual truth of what happened. And I'm going to have callous and carted off areas of my soul that are untouchable because I'm just not going to go there. I'm not going to even question whether or not that was right or wrong or this was harmful. So with those not being touchable, often shame runs deep and self-contempt underneath the surface, and there's a subtle sense of self-hate.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, or others hate.
SPEAKER_01If you blame the organization, yes, or resentments can rise up. All the things that are so problematic are often happening because we're not really going to the wound.
Writing Reveals What You Missed
SPEAKER_00So all of us have drawn conclusions on stories of our lives. I think that's what we all do. We're all meaning makers. We all draw conclusions because we want to get it behind us. And so something painful that happens, I think it to make sense of it, we do tie a bow on it and we call it something and we push it to the side. It's done. And that is a version of lacking curiosity. Yes.
SPEAKER_01For those of you that like writing, and even if you don't, I think I can make this make sense. But if you study it all how writers write, you've talked about Anne Lamont's Bird by Bird, books like that. Stephen King has a book on writing. There's a lot of them. Often you'll come across very similar stuff. And one of the often used refrains is something like, you don't know what you think until you see what you say. That's a very famous line.
SPEAKER_00I love that. You've said it before, and it just it's so good. I think it's you don't know what you think until you say what you say it again.
SPEAKER_01How can I know what I think until I see what I say? Until I've put it into words and read it. That's a verbal process. Yeah, it's similar to verbal processing, but on the on page. And the point within the world of fiction, there's this ongoing debate between pantsing and outlining, right? The pants just sits down and starts writing.
SPEAKER_00Okay. I thought you meant like depansing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I think it's right by the seat of your pants. I'm just going to sit down and do it.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01And then the outliner is like, no, no, I've got the whole thing mapped out. It's perfect. It's amazing. And those are two extremes. The point is this what we're often trying to do is avoid uncertainty. And when you sit down to write something that you have a general idea, I'm talking now still about fiction, I kind of know what's going to happen. I kind of know where I want it to go, or maybe a poem. I know how I feel and I know some of the things I want to interact with, but it's the act of putting words on paper that if you're willing to tell the truth and move toward the complexities of the thought, the idea, the story, the character, new things can show up that you're like, oh my goodness, I would have never just had this on the front end. And the reason I say that is I have found a lot of people and listener, this may be you, who think I don't really need to write a story because I kind of know my story. I've lived my story. I don't need to write that down. And I was there for years. I read Healing Path by Dan Alander, then Wounded Heart, and then To Be Told. I mean, I bought it and I read it and I underlined it, how your own story, write your story. And I never wrote my story. I knew my story. I knew it well. And then one day, someday I ended up in a story workshop where I had to actually put words on paper. And it's not that my story changed the contours, but what I found was the complexities and the actual places of harm and the areas that were shaping me and my vows and my agreements and my loyalty. All that stuff was not exactly at all where I thought it would be. And it's because I took that step to write. And even now, the temptation can be, and I've done it. I've written four stories or 10 stories. I know that. And it's no, like we're never done looking at our past. We're never done trying to understand the complexities of our own past and the ways things have happened. And if we put it into the package and then put the bow on it and put it on a shelf, three negative things, we're essentially communicating to our own soul, this is over. We now have a it's more of a poster we can share or a it's like a testimony.
SPEAKER_00I think it would be similar to saying, I read the old testament once, I understand the history, and now I never go back. I don't need to. Like, why look at the past? But then you have to go, oh, wait, why did God ask his people to celebrate the Passover every single year? Because he wanted them to remember something very important in their past, in their family past and history. And I think as you were talking about how we think we know our story, we've lived it. And maybe we have written it. A lot of people have written a testimony or an overview of their life because they've had to give a speech or they've been in an organization that has said this is really important. Write out your testimony. I think for me, those are the harder situations to do story work because I think there's like I said earlier, the lack of curiosity is I've already written my story and I've tied the bow on it. Here's the beginning, here's the conflict, here's the resolution, and it's over the end. And it reminds me a little bit of how we felt years ago. We lived in Japan, we lived in big cities. And remember thinking back to our roots in Oklahoma, we would sometimes jokingly call it the land of the Pharisees because everybody says they're a Christian in Oklahoma, it's so it seems. And there's some benefits to that in terms of just, I don't know, Christian culture, but there's also a huge barrier to sharing the gospel with people because I already know it. I already know Jesus. It's so different in Colorado and in Japan. People just don't culturally say, I'm Christian.
SPEAKER_01And it's super refreshing.
SPEAKER_00It's so refreshing because you're not having to, first of all, do the apologetic of you don't really know the true Jesus.
SPEAKER_01We're not sitting here and telling anyone who's a Christian or who's not a Christian, but it would be very easy to grow up culturally Christian and use the nomenclature and the statements, even the songs, to hide behind the fact that I don't want anyone to come close. I don't want to be seen. Not that in the other two locations people were super excited about it, but at least they weren't hiding behind, hey, I already know this stuff. And what we're talking about now with the story is similar. It's oh, I've already written my story. I already know my story.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's a version of being closed off, I think is what I was trying to get at. The tying a bow on something, if it's not the pretty version and it's just the yarn and it's just to keep it tight and we're all done with this, is tied up. It's a it's another way of saying that is I'm a closed book. This is a done deal, and there's nothing else to discuss, there's nothing else here. And so I think that's what I was referring to with the cultural Christian environment of Oklahoma as I've heard it. Yeah. Jesus died on the cross, rose from the dead, yada yada, we're all good. And then you go, oh, okay. So did it change your life? What how is that affecting you? Tell me more. And it's that's it. What else is there to say? And I think that's kind of what I come up against when people are like, Yeah, I've written my story. What else is there to say? I don't want to there's no reason to keep digging in my past. Okay, accept that I love, love, love how Brene Brown says that she wants her children to be like have a knowledge of history so that they can read the patterns of human nature going forward.
SPEAKER_01What comes up in my mind is we think we are the masters of our story. So often if there's a bow involved, it's I know what's in the package, I know my story. I'm glad for you to interact with me and I'll share with you what I will. But there's not much room to add, right? And again, this is different. There are different versions, right? There's people that are curious and they're open to anything, and I really want to learn and know. But I'm I I also at the end still want it to all make total sense now. That's the bow. But the version we're moving into now is like, I'll tell you what happened to me and I'll tell you my story. And then your job is to listen. It's like a testimony. But the problem is even with the triune and God, we talk about there's three. We're never alone. And anytime we just want to be isolated and alone and lacking the humility of like, maybe just tell me what you see. Here's what happened. And then you ask me a hard question and it forces me out of my comfort zone. I have to think about it. Oh no, you you just don't understand my dad. Yeah, his dad was really awful. So that's a good question, though. What am I doing? I'm deflecting because I have my package wrapped up. I don't, I don't want that part to be messed up. That's my organization, that's my family of origin, whatever that is.
SPEAKER_00You're not invited in. This is not a work in progress. This is not open editing.
SPEAKER_01That's a really great point. It's either none of it's a work in progress or it is if you only will deal with these two areas. I didn't want you to go over. Yeah, there's off limits. That door's locked, so move on.
SPEAKER_00Well, the danger for any of us, I think, is if we think we've done a pretty good job at engaging a particular part of our life and we've written out the testimony and we see some good things that came from it, we even have said, I don't want to tie a bow on this, I want to really engage it well. I think we still resist keeping it open because we don't want to continually feel the grief or the anger or any of the emotions from that particular story. And yet the reality is we will. So the danger is if we think that's a closed chapter, then when we feel something a year later, or we feel something 10 years later, we see a photo or we hear a person's voice and we or we have an interaction about even that story, and our body reacts, we think something's wrong with us because I closed that chapter. Why am I feeling this again? I think it closes off Jesus' access to to come in close and heal and soothe and enlighten us continually. Our stories just aren't over.
SPEAKER_01I want to close with a challenge.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01I would like to encourage listeners. Here's it's a challenge and it's a contest or something. I don't know. I've been thinking about this, I haven't told you. But I would love if you're listening to this and you've gotten this far and And you've you've yet to either write your story, and by your story, I just mean a single event, one particular story, a birthday party when you're seven or whatever. One event. You've either not written it down or you have, but you've never shared it. We would love for you. We're gonna offer the first 10 people, listeners who do this, who've not yet worked it with another person or with us. If you're one of our clients or ex-clients, it doesn't count. But if you're someone who's never done that, email us and we will offer a chance to read it with you and go over it with you for free. Because we really are passionate about doing this. And I think one of my favorite people to sit with is a person who's I've written a story. And I want to, I'm scared, but I want to jump into this. So anyway, if that's you.
SPEAKER_00All right, but we got to give a little bit of the qualifications like we do anyone that we sit down with in a consult. Find a story between the ages of four and eighteen that had anything to do with harm, loss, trauma, death, sadness, sadness, anything like that. Write the story, 600 to 800 words. That's about two pages. You can write it by hand or you can type it and use all five senses. So drop us into the story. Don't worry about characters and explaining who they are. Don't give us a history. Just what were you wearing that day? What was the weather like? Did you smell anything? Was there food you all were eating? What was the radio playing? Drop yourself into that story. And the containment of 800 words maximum is gonna mean that you might have to write it and edit it and take out things. And it doesn't matter if you're a good writer or not. Write it from your heart, let your body slow down and remember details. Or if you can't remember all the details to that story, but there's another maybe event that fits in, like a vignette that's a similar theme, write two vignettes.
Untie The Bow And Send It
SPEAKER_01One thing I tell clients is because we do inevitably have things we can't remember. And the goal is to write a fluid story, A to B to C to D, right? And so often what will happen is I really can't remember, and that's okay. No big deal. There's no grading here. But it is fun to play around with memory and creativity. And so I've offered the thought of let's imagine someone says, I'm gonna make a video of this. I'm gonna put get go hire actors and set up a scene. I'm gonna direct this. But your job is to just give me some direction, even if you don't remember. Should I do a are we inside or are we outside? You know what I mean? Are we wearing a suit or are we wearing shorts? Just real basic. I don't know, maybe with shorts. Okay, let's go with shorts. That's fine. There can be a little bit of that because we're just trying to connect the material to get to the places you do remember. And again, this is just something we would love to offer for the first 10 that respond.
SPEAKER_00I love this. And I would say this because we're making this the wrap-up to our season four, we're gonna take a summer break from podcasting, or at least a portion of the summer. Listeners, find a story in your life that you think you have tied a bow on. And this is your invitation to untie the bow and write it. Open the package, yeah, write the story. And so we're wrapping up our season, but we're saying, let's not put a bow on this.
SPEAKER_01And even if you open the package and you write it and you're like, I think this is it, bring it. We would love to.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, let us be the fresh eyes.
SPEAKER_01Yes, fresh eyes of another person who will tend to you and not ask you to then listen to their story. There's something about sitting with someone whose desire it is to just listen and care and have empathy for your story. We look forward to your entries.
SPEAKER_00And just as a reminder, you can find us at Emily at Storymatters Initiative dot com or Ryan at Storymatters Initiative dot com.