A Good Book is Hard to Read
According to Mortimer Adler’s classic How to Read a Book, when a book is hard to understand (or hard to read), that might mean it’s a good book. For me, it’s definitely a good book if a) it’s hard to read, b) I want to stop or even do stop, and then c) I still manage to come back and finish it. All three of those were true for me in reading Healing Whats Within by
I desire healing, but I’m terrified of it. Not because I don’t want to admit my need, necessarily, but because I don’t want to do what’s needed. Because what’s needed is scary. In a word, connection.
I’m a counselor, and (not that it’s profound knowledge), I know that someone like myself with three experiences of spiritual abuse and institutional betrayal in the last four years can’t heal alone. I say that to people for a living, and try to help them not be alone in their pain. Because, writes DeGroat, “what wounds the soul to its depths…is solitary suffering” (36). Knowing this, and saying it to clients many times a week, it’s tempting to read this kind of book with clients in mind, rather than myself. But I couldn’t keep that professional distance when I read chapter two on Suffering Alone. It added fuel to the fire of my longing for belonging that has almost died out in this wilderness.
I read DeGroat’s words, that “Connection is our relational home and the biggest hint of our spiritual inheritance. But suffering is inevitable. And suffering alone is what leaves an incalculable wound.” The next sentence is a quote from Bonnie Badenoch that I’ve used countless times with clients and on this Substack: “the essence of trauma isn’t events, but aloneness within them” (37). After reading these words again, I found courage to name my loneliness to my wife more directly than I have lately. It felt hard and painful, but good. Like the painful healing that comes from exercising injured muscles and tendons through physical therapy.
Then I read DeGroat’s application at the end of ch. 2 regarding companionship: “Practice asking for care. Practice being known. When we struggle alone, we’re more prone to becoming overwhelmed, even traumatized. Is there someone you can invite into this reading and reflection with you? Perhaps someone you can find a one-hour slot each week to process with?”
That’s when I stopped reading.
The physical therapist pushed on my injured joint harder than I expected, and I found plausible excuses to miss the next few PT sessions, half-aware of the resistance that DeGroat names: “[W]hen you choose to turn from what happened to you to what’s happening within you, it’s likely you’ll experience some inner resistance” (26-27).
And I felt shame. I had signed up to be a part of the launch group for this book, and, though part of me knew I wouldn’t be judged, I heard my inner-critic: “What’s wrong with you that you avoid reading this book? You know what you’re doing. You know you’re afraid of longing for connection; you know how to help people overcome that; you know they need to ask for help, and that you need to ask for help; and here you are, leaving this book untouched, not asking for help, and not following through on your commitment to help this author who offered his own time and energy when you needed it in the past.”
I spent about a week of low-grade depression, dorsal Fog as DeGroat puts it, not having the energy to join in the second live Q&A with DeGroat, even though the first was so rewarding. But the Fog wasn’t merely produced by the book’s material about naming our pain and reconnecting to our story (the first of three core questions from Genesis 3, “Where are you?”). It’s because I actually answered the question, and, while on a date with my wife, told her about my loneliness, and my hopelessness for curing that. Not that saying that was anything new. I’ve said it quite a few times in the past two years. What was new was opening up to desire for connection. And that felt way too scary.
And I put the book down. (Well, closed out the Kindle app I was using to read it, which I otherwise leave open when I’m working through an e-book, and always see it whenever I switch between apps on my iPad; this way, I didn’t have to keep seeing the book waiting for me in the background).
However, naming that pain and that desire did have a positive effect; it was just delayed. Eventually, and surprisingly, I did two things: 1) I set up a coffee meeting with a counselor colleague and potential friend who, for multiple reasons but largely due to my social resistance, I’d tried and failed to meet for over a year. And 2) I set up a meeting with a local pastor at a church we considered visiting.
Those meetings were monumental accomplishments. First, I am off the charts introverted. Second, I’m still very much recovering from multiple instances of religious trauma. Yet seeing that I was able to both schedule and follow through on those meetings was remarkably encouraging. That gave me desire to return to DeGroat’s book. And I felt able to do so because, while I still felt (and feel) resistance, I found DeGroat to be an incredibly compassionate guide. That is what I mean when I say a good book is a hard book that you have to put down and then are able to pick up again.
There’s lots more I could say and want to say about Healing Whats Within. Like how I appreciate DeGroat leading the way with vulnerability and honesty, revealing his own real struggles (pp. 196-97 is my favorite, but I won’t spoil it) and his real healing. Or how the book has excellent reflection questions and embodied practices. Or the fact that readers of all different walks of life will find this helpful, whatever particular story draws them to the book, whether that’s spiritual abuse, mental illness, chronic pain, childhood trauma, and others.
But DeGroat inspired me to be more honest with this review. There are plenty of healing and soul care books I have started and not finished because they touched a too-tender wound, pushed on a torn ligament too painful to move, and (though not necessarily the author’s fault) I couldn’t trust the book to help me with my resistance. Healing Whats Within is different. Like a good physical therapist who knows personally what it’s like to be injured and healed, DeGroat invites readers into the optimal level of difficulty. Not too easy, and not too hard. Just the right amount of pain. Just the right amount of dark. And a whole lotta light, curiosity, compassion, guidance, desire, longing and hope.
Quote from Chuck DeGroat
“If trauma is, indeed, not what happened to us but what happens within in the absence of a compassionate witness, if trauma is our aloneness with our pain, then it’s risky, indeed, to consider abandoning our ways of self-medicating and waiting in the dark…When the lights go out, we’re powerless. We may face parts of ourselves we’ve long forgotten, exiled away even in our youngest years. But here we also wait in expectation for the one who longs to “restore you to health and heal your wounds” (Jeremiah 30:17). But perhaps God is calling you, too, to face the shadows. To stop, slow down, and sit in the dark. Maybe there your eyes will adjust to a dim light on the horizon, signaling the smile of the one who will never ever leave you or forsake you (Deuteronomy 31:8).” (p. 189)
Question
Are you searching for a guide on your healing journey? Are you looking for someone to help shine God’s light on the path through your pain? Healing Whats Within might just be what you’re looking for.