You can keep walking with God while trauma still hurts, and you do not have to wait until the pain makes sense to do it. Scripture gives a way to stay in God’s presence before you feel better. It is called lament: telling God the truth about what hurts, including pain that began before you were born, and doing it in his hearing rather than away from him. This guide is built around that one practice, with a week of guided steps to try it.
The guide does not argue that peace is possible. Its companion article does that. This is for the person already carrying the weight. You can use it alone with a notebook, or with a small group that has agreed to go slowly. Nothing here requires you to share what you write. Every prompt can stay private, and every group question can be passed.
One word of care first. If what you carry has become thoughts of ending your life or harming yourself, set this guide down and talk to a real person today. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at any hour. Jude 3 Project teaches that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians. Lament is a way to pray. It does not replace a doctor or a counselor.
Start with what you were taught about grief
Before opening the Bible, take stock of the rules you already live by. Most people absorbed them without anyone saying them out loud. Some learned that crying in front of others was weakness. Some learned that strong faith meant not complaining to God. Some learned that a loss should be finished within a few months.
Dr. Jacqueline Dyer, a social work scholar, counselor and Baptist minister, describes how a whole people can learn to manage grief this way. Under oppression, she explains, naming a wrong in front of the one committing it could bring more harm. The habit that formed was restraint, not denial. In her words, “We don’t necessarily hide it, but we don’t always acknowledge that it’s there, and we don’t give room for it to be fully expressed.” Vince Tu, who hosted the conversation, put the inherited pressure even more bluntly: “we’re not even allowed to grieve, and we’re certainly not allowed to feel those intense emotions.”
Dyer also says something that keeps this from becoming a story about weakness: “Now we grieve communally.” Families comfort one another. The restraint is real, and so is the care people have given each other inside it.
On the page: Write down two or three unspoken rules about grief from the family, church or community that raised you. Beside each one, note whether it protected someone, hurt someone, or did both. You are not grading your family. You are noticing what you inherited.
A psalm that argues with itself
Read Psalm 42 aloud, all eleven verses, slowly. It is poetry, so read it as a voice and not as a set of instructions.
Start with Psalm 42:3: “My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?” The writer is not eating well. Grief has become his food. People around him are asking the question that hurts most. Notice that the psalm does not answer them right away.
Then the refrain arrives in Psalm 42:5: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.” The older English needs a little unpacking. Cast down means bowed low, depressed. Disquieted means stirred up, agitated, unable to settle. The psalmist talks to his own soul. He asks it a real question, and then he tells it where to look.
Watch what happens next. The hope in verse 5 does not end the pain. By Psalm 42:7 the writer is going under again: “Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.” Then the refrain comes back almost word for word in verse 11. One statement of hope was not enough. He has to say it twice, and the psalm sits with the grief in between.
That repetition matters for anyone carrying long pain. The Bible does not show a person who hoped once and was fixed. It shows a person who keeps returning to hope because the waves keep coming. Dyer reads this kind of psalm as movement, and she is careful about where it starts: “what I want people to notice is that you can start in the very depths of despair.” She is just as careful about where God means it to lead: “You can start, you can be in those places, but the body, the mind, the spirit is not designed by God to live in those places.”
Observe before you apply: Underline every question in Psalm 42. Circle every line addressed to God and box every line addressed to the soul. Which voice speaks more? What does the balance tell you about what prayer is allowed to contain?
Pain that has a history
Some of what you carry may have started with you. Some of it may have started long before you, in what was done to your parents, grandparents or people. That kind of pain can feel confusing. You may not be able to point to one event that explains it.
Dyer’s counsel here is simple. She begins with history, she says, “not creating something that wasn’t there, but rather acknowledging what is.” When a person sees that present pain has roots, something shifts. She describes the recognition this way: “It doesn’t come out of thin air.”
This needs careful handling. Dyer says the pain of that history sometimes shows up in people’s bodies. In this conversation she offers that as a practitioner’s observation, without citing a study, so treat it as her claim and not a settled finding. Also, naming a history is not the same as blaming every hard thing on it. A wise use of this insight sounds like some of this has a source larger than me, not none of this is mine to tend.
Scripture has room for grief with a family line. In 1 Kings 19:4 Elijah sits under a juniper tree and asks to die, and his complaint reaches back a generation: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.” God’s first answer, in the verses that follow, is not a correction. An angel wakes him to eat and drink, and then lets him sleep again. Read verses 4-8 and notice the order. His body is tended before his despair is addressed.
When you have no words at all
Some days the true sentence will not come. That is not failure. Romans 8:26 reads: “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.”
Paul’s point in context is that believers, waiting with all creation for redemption, are weak even in prayer, and that God himself supplies what they lack. Dyer applies that to the person who says, “All I can do is moan or rock or groan.” Her conclusion is worth reading slowly: “Imagine that even our silence, where the pain comes out in inexpressible ways, even that there is room for and description of in the Bible.”
She also notes that emotional tears release stress hormones, which she presents as her summary of research. Her theological point does not depend on the chemistry: “So God has designed us so that there is healing in our tears.” John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the KJV: “Jesus wept.” He did that standing at a grave he was about to open.
What lament is not
Lament can be misunderstood in two directions, and both are worth testing.
The first misunderstanding is that lament means you are stuck. It can feel like going back over pain should be avoided. Dyer argues the reverse. Held-in grief is what keeps a person stuck. “And as you get rid of the weights and the burdens and release and give yourself permission to feel and to express, that begins to get released.” She does not promise speed. “Now, I wanna be very clear, it’s a process. It’s not going to happen overnight.” This guide cannot promise you a date when the pain will lift, and Scripture does not promise one either.
The second misunderstanding is that lament is enough for everything. Dyer refuses that too. She names clinical depression directly and says it can be helped with medication and with talk. She keeps a counseling practice alongside her spiritual direction practice, and she describes counseling as attending to, among other things, “the ways in which we can sometimes create stories that leave us trapped and we can’t find our ways out.” If grief has settled into something that will not move, prayer and qualified care belong together. Neither cancels the other.
The practice for this week: writing your own refrain
Psalm 42 gives a pattern you can borrow. It names the pain, asks a real question, and speaks a line of hope, even when the hope is said through tears. This practice takes about ten minutes a day.
- Day one. Read Psalm 42 aloud. Write out verse 5 by hand. You will come back to it.
- Days two through six. Each day, write three lines. First, one true sentence about what hurts today, said plainly. Second, one honest question for God, in your own words. Third, a hope line. You may copy the psalm’s refrain, or write your own. If you cannot mean it yet, write it anyway and add not yet beside it. The psalmist repeated himself, and you can too.
- On a day with no words, write only the date and sit for two minutes. Read Romans 8:26 once. That counts as a full day of the practice.
- Day seven. Read back through the week. Look for anything that moved, even slightly. Look also for anything that stayed heavy every single day. Bring that second list to a person: a trusted pastor, a friend who can hold confidence, or a counselor.
Add one concrete step of care sometime this week. Write down the name of a counselor, a Christian therapist or a pastor you could contact, and write down the day you will do it. If you already see someone, consider bringing your refrain pages to your next appointment.
Questions for the page or the group
- Psalm 42 lets the question “Where is thy God?” hang in the air for several verses. What is it like to read a prayer that does not resolve quickly? Does it unsettle you, comfort you, or both?
- Dyer describes a people learning restraint because grief could invite more harm. Where do you see that pattern, if anywhere, in how your family or church handles loss? Where do you see something different?
- What would change in how you treat your own pain if you saw part of it as having a history larger than you? What would you need to be careful not to excuse?
- Elijah was fed and allowed to sleep before anyone addressed his despair. What are the bodily needs in your life that may need tending before deeper conversations can happen?
- Dyer holds lament, counseling and medical care together. Have you ever felt pushed to choose between faith and professional help? What made that choice feel necessary?
- Which line of your own refrain was hardest to write this week, and why do you think it was hard?
If you are leading others through this
A group can do this well if it moves slowly. Say at the start that anyone may pass on any question, and mean it. Ask people not to share someone else’s story, only their own. Do not promise confidentiality you cannot guarantee, and do not try to counsel anyone in the room.
Have the 988 number and the name of a local counselor written down before you begin. If someone signals they may harm themselves, take it seriously, stay with them, and help them reach 988 or a professional that same day.
When silence falls, let it. Resist the urge to answer pain with a verse right away. Psalm 42 itself waits. End on time, and leave people with the practice rather than with a demand to feel better before they go.
The unwrapping takes others
Dyer hopes readers will give themselves biblical permission to grieve, “So that they can express what they need to express and come out from under and remove the grave clothes and step into the light.” The picture comes from John 11:44: “And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.”
Notice who does the loosening. Jesus gives the life. Then he tells the people standing nearby to unwrap what death left behind. Lazarus could not do it alone, and he was not expected to.
So carry one question into the week ahead: who could stand near enough to help with your graveclothes, and what would you need to tell them first?