II. IDENTIFYING THE STONES & LAYERS
Pain can isolate us or draw us into connection.
Troy Terpstra @troythepainter
“If we don’t learn to embrace our own wounds, we will be tempted to despise the wounded.”
— Father Greg Boyle
We cover our wounds. And we all have them.
The destructive coping behavior that leads to someone’s arrest is almost always an extreme form of numbing, running from, or expressing incredible past trauma. While the justice system creates separation and punishment to try and deter such behavior, the wounds in our community go unhealed. The most wounded become the most disposed-of.
This month we offer you three short videos (total around 50 min) that explore the hidden abuse inside the exterior problems of prions, the wounds beneath gangs. And they point to the healing our relationships of new trust and tenderness can create.
Hopefully these first two videos will open up more curiosity and compassion inside you and your group for your incarcerated friend. Curiosity about what suffering they’ve survived in their early as well as adult and incarcerated lives, rather than confusion at the survival behavior that has landed them in prison. And compassion for their unseen and uncared-for trauma. Only in a context of compassion can we truly remove our protective layers—the street kind, and the church kind—face our wounds together, and begin to heal.
SURIVING PRISON
(Part 2 of a series we began the first module.)
HEALING
Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles has been a guiding inspiration for our work at Underground Ministries, since our founding. Through decades of work with men and women leaving lives in gangs and prisons, they know clinical therapy and case management is crucial—but that the deepest healing is only possible in “communities of kinship and tenderness.” What your team is creating together.
Enjoy:
TEARS
The early saints often wrote about the “gift of tears,” a sign of the Holy Spirit, that prayer is opening what God wants to open within. This isn’t about forcing tears, but welcoming them. In prison, on the streets, in abusive homes, tears aren’t allowed. They are a sign of “weakness,” that you can be humiliated or written off or targeted.
We want to create a new environment where our incarcerated friend’s tears and our own are welcomed as signs of healing, old pain now free to be released. Cole Arthur Riley, of BlackLiturgies, below, often suggests there’s a connection with how we imprison people and we imprison our emotions, wounds, and tears.
We are breaking the gates of hades, the prison walls in society, between us, and within us.
GOOD RELATIONSHIPS HEAL TRAUMA
We don’t have to be a therapist, or part of Homeboy Industries, to be part of this healing. The video below argues that simply good relationships are the key to healing the abandonment and lack of safety in all trauma.
Good relationships are stable, over time. They don’t shame you or throw you away. They communicate openly—what I need, what I’m going through. It’s when we are willing to name how you enrich me, and how you have hurt me.
Whether your incarcerated friend succeeds or fails, relapses to pain-numbing patterns, breaks your trust or not, we seek this compassion, curiosity, and consistency.
“The link between us all is tragedy.”
— Reginald Dwayne Betts, from the poetry collection "Felon"
Churches are full of wounded people—we’re just better at hiding the pain, and maintaining a more functional life. So the gift of this relationship is that stories of those in prison often times open up conversations we’ve needed for ourselves. Like violence in the home. Those who are survivors of abuse.
Churches aren’t always the safest places to expose what secrets, family messes, and shame we manage. We hope this months’ material begins to open deeper conversation not only with your incarcerated friend, but between one another in your group.
What traumas in your or your family life have you avoided tending to?
How do we ask each other questions that invite the other to share their story?
What level of trust do we need to build together . . . so that our hearts and histories can open to one another?
Hurt people hurt people.
Healed people heal people.
Take time to sit with this prayerfully: God, what do you want me to show me, or heal in me? How might that inform how I connect with our person this month?
We bless you, your incarcerated friend, and your group, with the radical tenderness and healing we so need today.
ACTION STEPS
In your next letter—or call, or visit—tell your incarcerated friend about one of these videos. What did it make you curious about in their experience? Share something from your life that resonated with something in the videos: living in an abusive home, a controlling environment, or how relationships have helped heal that harm.
CONGREGATIONAL CONNECTION: A trusted friend at church (or pastor or even the congregation during prayers potentially) can be approached to share about the ways trauma has shaped your life and the ways you have (or haven’t) healed. This is something incredibly vulnerable and should be done with people you trust to hold that tenderness well. It is hoped that by bringing it out into the light, it can help heal and even make space for others to heal as well.
FOR TEAM DISCUSSION
What did the Homeboy video show you about trauma? What did you learn about how trauma affects our brains, our behaviors, our relationships?
What have we learned already from our incarcerated brother/sister—about what trauma they might have experienced in their childhood? In their adulthood? How might their trauma survival symptoms make sense of their destructive behaviors?
Does any of this shed light on our own trauma or in our family? Our church? Could this open new ways of thinking about any reservations, fears inside you at this point? Is it possible your incarcerated friend is dealing with similar fears toward connecting with you all?
According to the Ted Talk, what is a key ingredient of healing these trauma experiences require later in life? How can we be part of that healing?
Your releasing brother/sister may express fears about danger awaiting them on the streets. We can’t make any assurances if those fears are founded or not. But the best question is to ask, “What would help you feel more safe?” They will know, and this question guides new thinking. So the same with you: If team members have fears upon hearing this, ask that member, “What would help you feel more safe?” We build plans together.
