lessons i learned in cpe: #3. it's okay to acknowledge pain

       My CPE (i.e., chaplaincy) unit at St. Mark’s Hospital ended a month ago.  It’s amazing how much time has already flown by.  That said, I’m pretty sure these “lessons” I learned in the process will stay with me for the rest of my life.  Some of them are harder than others, and they may resonate with you or not—it’s okay either way. 
 
For previous posts, please see:

Lessons I Learned in CPE:  #1. Everyone Has a Story 

Lessons I Learned in CPE:  #2. Everyone Deserves to Tell Their Story

 
Here is my lesson #3…
 
It’s okay to acknowledge pain.
 
Physical pain.  Emotional pain.  Psychological and relational and spiritual pain.  Even cultural and historical pain.  They exist and they matter.
 
If I pricked you with a needle, you’d feel it—and it wouldn’t be pleasant.  That’s because you’re a human being in a surprisingly resilient, but also squishy and mortal body.  And you can’t always control what happens to that body. 
 
The same is true with your mind and emotions.  Sure, you have the power to respond to the thoughts and feelings that crop up in day-to-day life, but you can’t always control when and how those thoughts and feelings arise in the first place.  They just do.  And many of life’s experiences are painful.  Some of them are even traumatic. 
 
“Trauma” is the Greek word for “wound.”  It refers to physical injury to the body, but can also be used to describe other types of woundedness.  For example, verbal abuse from a parent can cause psychological trauma to a child.  Or rejection by one’s religious community can amount to spiritual trauma for a person of faith.  We may think of “trauma” as a too strong a word for most circumstances (I certainly did before this experience), but it happens to apply to a lot of situations, and rightly so.  Traumatic experiences, big or small, have the ability to embed themselves in our lives in ways that can affect us years down the road.  If you can remember a painful comment someone said about you fifteen years ago, that remark was traumatic.  It stayed with you.  And it deserves to be acknowledged and healed.

Let me be clear:  if I could flip a magic “off” switch and never again experience pain, I would.  Who wouldn’t?  But we can’t.  We might try—and, in fact, I think most of the time we do try—but I don’t think it’s helpful in the long run.  In fact, I’m convinced that denying our pain and pretending everything is fine is inevitably damaging, for at least three reasons:
 
First, it doesn’t actually reflect true human experience.  Everyone feels pain, period.  Denying it robs us of the opportunity to connect with this facet of our shared humanity.  Our particular pain is unique, but the experience of pain is universal… and it may as well be something that brings us together.
 
Second, we often use coping mechanisms to numb our pain, and the effects of those strategies eventually wear off.  You finish all seven seasons of the show you’ve been binge-watching.  You hit the bottom of the ice-cream container.  You can only give 110 percent at work for so long before you run out of steam.  Even the “good” distractions (like compulsive exercise or volunteering) have their limits, and the more sinister ones can lead to serious addiction and behavioral health struggles.  I became even more aware in CPE that my strongest coping mechanisms have historically been self-criticism and perfectionism.  Like I said: it’s a universal struggle and we all have our weaknesses.  But they’re no real substitute for addressing pain head on.
 
Third, as Franciscan priest and author Richard Rohr has masterfully observed, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us.” [1]  This can be a hard truth to swallow.  We like to think of pain as something we can conquer or deal with by ourselves without having it affect others… but unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.  
 
We wouldn’t tell someone with cancer to ignore the doctors, avoid chemo, and figure out how to resolve it on their own.  It would only get worse.  An illness needs to be diagnosed and treated for healing to happen.  The same is true for other forms of pain: if they aren’t acknowledged and transformed, they can fester.  Suppressed pain has the potential to lead to fear, mistrust, exhaustion, isolation, and aggression.  Despite our best intentions (including “not wanting to burden” other people), these are not a recipe for healthy relationships.  Instead, we end up unintentionally transferring that pain to the people around us—including our spouses and family members, our co-workers and neighbors, our friends, and our children. 
 
Even grief over loved ones is not something we just “get over.”  I visited with patients who shed tears talking about family members who passed away decades ago.  It isn’t because they were weak; it’s because those losses were traumatic, and they didn’t often feel permission to talk about them.   
 
I’m not suggesting that acknowledging pain makes it go away.  But hiding it will make it linger, and can even let it grow.  Alternatively, bringing it out of the shadows can invite our pain into a space of compassion and restoration.  We don’t have to “go it alone” or “sweep it under the rug.” (We all know those were never great solutions to start.) 
 
This lesson left me with two lingering questions:  Can I see whatever pain I might be holding on to?  And what would it take for me to bring it to light?  

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[1] Transforming Pain — A Daily Meditation by Fr. Richard Rohr (cac.org) 

lessons i learned in cpe: #2. everyone deserves to tell their story

This is the second “installment” in a series of reflections, or lessons, from my experience in hospital chaplaincy.  For the intro post, please see Lessons I Learned In CPE:  #1. Everyone Has a Story, which leads to lesson #2…
 
Everyone deserves to tell their story.
 
Before CPE even started, two of the long-essay questions on the application had me reflecting on my own story—both spiritually and in life in general.  In keeping with Lesson #1, it’s amazing how much there is to tell when you begin sharing about your life.  The sad part is that most people rarely get that opportunity (at least not in a very real and vulnerable way). 
 
In a time of social media showcasing, we often like to put on our happiest and most successful faces, both online and in person.  When’s the last time someone asked, “How’s it going?” and you felt the courage (or the gnawing compulsion) to admit, “This week’s been really shitty.”?  For many of us, it doesn’t happen all that often. 
 
It’s easier, and far less threatening, to pretend to have everything together and stick to surface-level conversations.  But not everything is flowers and rainbows, and it likely hasn’t been in the past either.  Even if you’ve mustered the strength to look at and work through some of the hard parts of your story, we’re all still shaped—for better or worse—by what’s happened to us and the choices we’ve made.  Context always matters. 
 
The truth is, though, that being able to tell someone about how you’re really feeling, or open up about the tough parts of your past, or process through something that you’ve been struggling with is incredibly healing.  A former mentor once said, “it’s like taking out the trash”—you get to physically release it from your body.  And even if the problem isn’t solved, you often feel better after. 
 
The caveat to this is that people aren’t always kind in response.  Not everyone will be trustworthy with your vulnerability.  Most people still need to earn the right to hear your story.  I was amazed at what people were willing to tell me (a complete stranger) as I sat with them in a hospital room.  Maybe it was because I wasn’t in a position to judge or try to “fix” them, just to hold space for their stories as they told them (case in point:  I once had a woman share with me for an hour and a half, and I hardly had to say a word).  Or maybe they had a lack of others willing to listen compassionately in their actual lives (not that people didn’t care, but perhaps they assumed they already knew, or didn’t have the time, or had trouble hearing without judgment).  There’s no way to know for sure, but still… food for thought.
 
In any case, my point of encouragement to you:  consider your own story and how it’s shaped you, practice sharing it with others (it is truly a gift), and learn to love yourself as the protagonist.  No interesting hero is perfect, and neither will you be, but it’s still your story and you deserve to tell it. 
 
And also:  be the type of person who is willing to listen to someone else’s story.  You don’t have to judge or fix… just listen.  The depth of their experience could astound you, and more importantly, you have no idea what it could mean to them.

lessons i learned in cpe: #1. everyone has a story

“Clinical Pastoral Education” (i.e., “CPE”) is a fancy name for a formal internship as a hospital chaplain.  It involves 100 hours of educational training—including group learning, written reflections, and one-on-one supervision—and 300 hours of clinical training on-site at a hospital with patients and staff. 
 
In my PC(USA) denomination, it’s a required program for any pastor hoping to be ordained as a Minister of the Word and Sacrament.  Why?  Because part of a pastor’s job is to offer spiritual care and support to church members who are experiencing crisis, whether that’s illness, the passing of a loved one, marital difficulties, job stress, loss of a home, parenting struggles, spiritual turmoil—you name it.  And that kind of care is hard.  Harder than you might think. 

St. Mark's Hospital (photo credit here)

I started my CPE program in January and finished at the end of April.  Most of my clinical hours involved either knocking on patients’ doors and offering to visit, or responding to traumas and hospital deaths in my overnight on-call shifts.  In those four short months, I encountered so much pain, suffering, and grief, and many resilient human beings.  And alongside all of that came an incredible amount of personal growth. 

 
In the spirit of reflection (which we newbie interns so often practiced in our small group), I thought I’d share some of the lessons I learned in this CPE process.  And because this could turn into a massively long post all-in-one, I decided to split them up over the next couple of weeks.  I hope that whether you’re in pain yourself, or in a position to support someone who is, you find some of these lessons as meaningful as I did, starting with…
 
Everyone has a story.
 
People enter the hospital from all walks of life:
Behind door #1 could be a white, middle-age, upper-class, Latter Day Saint woman who was just diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. 
Behind door #2 could be a Polynesian, evangelical, 40-year-old man with pneumonia. 
Behind door #3 could be a mixed-race, gay, 20-something who’s “spiritual, but not religious,” and is detoxing from a heroin overdose… or a teenage girl who just tried to commit suicide… or a 63-year-old former vet who’s experiencing homelessness… or a mom of three with terminal cancer.
 
Some of these people have supportive families, and some don’t.  Some have great medical insurance, and some don’t.  Some grew up in abusive families.  Some have lost their kids or grandkids, or a spouse, or a sister, or a parent.  Some pray to Jesus, and some pray to Allah.  Some are conservative, some are liberal, and some are sick of politics altogether.  Some have traveled the world, and some had just enough money to buy a bus ticket from Alabama looking for work in a pandemic.
 
Before you walk in a room, you just don’t know.  And if I saw these same people on the street, I wouldn’t have a clue.  But if there’s one thing I learned from CPE, it’s that everyone has a story.  Every random person you see in your daily life—from your next-door-neighbor to the woman bagging your groceries—has had some unbelievable things happen to them, and they still had the courage to get out of bed in the morning. 

This applies to you, too.  You are more complex than anyone else knows.  There are moments in your life that have been wonderful, and others that have sucked abysmally.  Congratulate yourself (and someone else) every so often.  The paths that wander through life are hard, and each of us is walking our own as best we can, one step at a time.