“For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source…”
~Hebrews 2:11~

I’m really enjoying having Alexis at the Contact site this semester. It’s one of those things where “she was a godsend” feels like an appropriate statement. It just makes it more fun when we can both arrive around the same time, catch up in the side room, go over each other’s plan for the evening, talk about class or whatever else. Then in between sessions we catch up again and talk about how things went.

Sometimes I think I’m resilient enough for counseling work. I don’t feel like the work come home with me or that I spend large amounts of time thinking about what happened in session. But sometimes different sessions get to me where afterward I get strangely emotional. One time I bawled the whole way home. All I could think was that for one inkling of a microsecond I felt the love that God feels for a person.

I haven’t had exactly the same experiences at Thrive. I’ve felt more disappointment there, either from not getting clients or feeling disappointed with myself for not opening up more in group. I finally prayed and asked God recently to help me open up in love, to come out of my shell. He says it’s just a matter of jumping in. That’s easy to say when you’re the one used to talking with everyone already listening.

I don’t know where the shyness comes from. There was a guy in group who said he didn’t have any trauma. We had just watched a video of Peter Levine and Gabor Mate.’ I used to watch their YouTube videos in bed. He said it’s a block for him, the whole talking about trauma. I told him those blocks are often the places that hold the keys to our deepest healing, and that we cannot heal what we don’t acknowledge.

There were a few other things I tried to say as my voice became weaker and the lump in my throat grew. So I counted that as hours because I actually talked to a person. And now I’m crying thinking about him because over the past several months of being together in that room we’d looked at each other enough little times. I’d heard enough about him and knew this was the time so in that moment I loved him.