Stories give form and meaning to our lives and even create the way we understand ourselves. We make sense of our lives, the world, and ourselves through stories. Developing a coherent life story is necessary for making sense of trauma. Our story needs to flow through a beginning, a middle, and an end as a whole; however, trauma memories are not stored as part of our life story, which fragments our story. We begin to see the trauma as its own story, and this story begins to define our lives.
The redemption of our story is a process of integrating the trauma fragments into sequential, connected episodes, identifying the different characters and their roles in these episodes, connecting to our feelings in the trauma narrative, reintegrating the trauma narrative into our overarching story, realizing the trauma is one aspect of a whole story that does not define who we are, reconnecting to our true identity, and finding meaning in the trauma experience. Faith can be powerful in helping us find meaning in the trauma experience and producing personal growth from the trauma.
