“I feel like I’ve been working on this book for fifteen years.”
As Chuck DeGroat and I were catching up on the phone, he related to me the manuscript he was working on (which wound up becoming Healing What’s Within). “I feel like this is the book I’ve been writing for the last decade and a half of my life.” And this book does indeed have the feel of a project that’s been given the necessary time to ripen and mature. DeGroat is a therapist, pastor, and seminary professor, and he draws on the wisdom of each of those discrete disciplines in this book on trauma, shame, healing, and grace.
Those readers looking for theologizing or theoretical saber-rattling on the operations of grace in the human soul, or the place of trauma and attachment theories in Christian faith and practice will likely not be satisfied by this book- that’s not what it aims to be. Instead, DeGroat’s work is a pastoral, practical guide that integrates Christian theology and spirituality with trauma theory and psychology to help the reader heal the deep wounds in her life. In this way, Healing What’s Within is like a two-hundred-page conversation with a sage spiritual director.
To find direction on the journey to transformation, DeGroat turns to the earliest wounds of them all, the “Fall narrative” in Genesis 3. He structures Healing What’s Within around the three divine questions in the primordial story of sin: “Where are you?”, “Who told you?”, and “Have you eaten?”.
In the first chapters of the book, DeGroat invites the reader to cultivate curiosity about their wounds, disconnection, and dislocation, and to begin to understand the effects of trauma on the human mind, body, and soul. Trauma, he unfolds, is not, in essence, things that happen to us but something that happens in us as we experience sin, shame, and pain. In so doing, DeGroat also gently invites the reader to experience God in a kinder fashion than Reformed types often invoke as we come to a text like Genesis 3.
In the second section of the book, “Who Told You?,” DeGroat helps the reader to listen for the fundamental stories, often imprinted in the psyche early in one’s life, that shape our later selves. Attending to one’s primal wounds and “re-storying” them through self-compassion, friendship, and connection with God, DeGroat says, re-situate our lives within the large, capacious story of God’s grace in Christ.
The final third of Healing What’s Within invites the reader to attend to their root hungers, and to understand the way in which we often seek to sate our deep desires in addiction and self-medication. The journey into a whole and holy life, DeGroat claims, consists in learning to refuse the superficial soothing these provide (even- especially!- when cloaked in religious or pious garb), and to find flourishing in a life that’s re-united, integrated with self and God.
There are several features that distinguish Healing What’s Within among the never-ending shelves of self-help, pop psychology, and trauma recovery offerings available. Its integrative nature, for one, makes it stand out: the reader will find Augustine, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross keeping company with Gabor Mate, Bessel VanderKolk, and Padraig O Tuama. Readers will also find this a uniquely practical book. DeGroat is conversant with theology, the Christian mystical tradition, and trauma and attachment theories, but he curates the various insights these fields offer in a deeply relatable way. The book includes both recommended resources for those who’d like to go deeper, as well as suggested bodily practices to integrate each chapter’s insights. One doesn’t need to have a counseling degree to benefit from what Healing What’s Within offers.
Finally, I was struck by the vulnerability of DeGroat’s writing. He draws extensively on the stories of those he’s served as a therapist and pastor, and discloses his own journey of pain and healing as well- getting fired from a beloved congregation, being laid up in a Mexican hospital, navigating parenting, professional anxiety, and more. The way in which DeGroat draws on the stuff of his own life doesn’t come off as navel-gazing or myopic, however- what he offers from his own life’s journey allows the reader to experience what Frederick Buechner observed in his memoir Now and Then: “My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours…”
Healing What’s Within invites those who read to find healing for life’s deep wounds in the embrace of the One who still is calling out, “Where are you?”
One Response
Do I dare take this journey and work through these questions? On my own?