I remember sitting in a session with my therapist where he said to me something to the effect of,
“If life is good right now, don’t worry, it will get bad at some point. But when it’s bad, don’t worry, it will get good at some point.”
His point was that life moves in seasons and he was echoing that famous passage in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes where the writer says “To every thing there is a season…” (Ecclesiastes 3:1a).
He wanted to remind me that life shifts and we are not always where we find ourselves.
As we are in the month of May which is Mental Health Awareness Month, I find myself thinking about a theological reframe that I find helpful in navigating the ups and downs of life, and whatever struggles with mental health come our way.
It comes from the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann and his book The Message of the Psalms.
In looking at the Psalms Brueggemann asserts that there are 3 types of Psalms:
Psalms of orientation
Psalms of disorientation
Psalms of new orientation
In orientation we find life making sense. Things are good. Life is as it should be.
In disorientation we find life upside down essentially. We are not in a good place and we are faced with struggles and calamity.
In new orientation we find life restored out of the place of struggle. Often we have a new awareness and sense of gratitude for what we have been through and learned from it.
In the midst of my own struggle with mental health I have found it simply helpful to use this framework to help me a) just identify where I am in life, b) to have language to communicate where I find myself, c) to identify the resources, tools and practices that can equip me to navigate the terrain of my mental health.
And over the years as I have introduced this framework in therapy with clients there is a sense of relief I see come over them that communicates verbally and non-verbally, “oh, you mean I am not alone…people have been through this before…I too will be able to move through this season.”
It reminds me of the arc of the hero’s journey where someone moves from life being known, then crisis hits and they move into uncertainty, but eventually conquer their fears or enemies, and return a new person (this is a very rough sketch — for more reading on this check out Joseph Campbell’s work such as The Hero with a Thousand Faces).
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