When The Reaction Is Bigger Than The Situation

Hey friends,

Okay, so something happened to me recently and I have to tell you about it.

It was minor. Like, objectively, truly, not a big deal at all. And yet my reaction was... not minor. I cried. I wanted to scream. There was this roar inside of me that I genuinely could not have contained any more than I could have stopped myself from getting sick. It just came up and out and there was nothing I could do about it.

My mom has this quote she shares all the time. I think it’s from Boundaries by Henry Cloud, but don’t quote me on that. It goes something like this:

When the reaction is stronger than the stimulus, it’s tapping into something deeper.

Yeah. That’s exactly what happened.

Because what that minor situation did was hit a nerve. A raw spot from an old wound that is apparently still surprisingly tender. And I sat with that for a while. The strange embarrassment of realizing that all these years later, this thing still really, really hurts.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about since.

I’ve been lucky enough over the years, through deep friendships and through coaching hundreds of women, to get genuinely close to a lot of people. And what I can tell you with a lot of confidence is this:

Most people I know are really struggling right now.

Even the ones who seem fine. Even the ones who would say they’re good if you asked. There is a level of quiet trauma sitting on the human soul that just comes with the territory of living in this particular moment in history.

And here’s the thing about trauma. About grief. About hurt. We live in a world that is genuinely not friendly to any of it.

There is no allotted time for mourning anymore. We don’t wear black. We have a funeral and a potluck, maybe, and then we’re back at work by three in the afternoon. We get laid off and we’re supposed to just power through and show up at the soccer games anyway. We lived through a global pandemic, a collective trauma unlike anything most of us had ever experienced, and then we were all just expected to log back on and act like it didn’t happen.

And underneath all of that, we scroll through the internet every day and watch people be absolutely horrible to each other. And we’re supposed to just absorb that and keep going.

Friend, no wonder we’re tired.

No wonder our reactions are bigger than our situations sometimes. No wonder old wounds are still tender. No wonder it feels like the weight of it is just going to crush us some days.

When I was working on The Garden of Exile, one of the things I wrestled with most was the subtitle. What I landed on was how to flourish in a world that’s not your home and it came directly from this tension. Because that is the question, isn’t it? Not how do we fix it or how do we escape it. How on earth are we supposed to flourish in the middle of it?

I hate “bloom where you’re planted” as an answer, by the way. It makes me want to throw my phone. It sounds like something on a throw pillow, not an actual theology.

But I do think there’s something real underneath the question.

And I think the answer, at least the beginning of the answer, is just this:

We start by acknowledging it.

Not performing okayness. Not rushing past the hard thing to get to the lesson. Just sitting down in prayer and saying honestly: God, my soul hurts. This world is too heavy for me right now. I need you to meet me here.

There’s a verse that keeps coming back to me lately. We are outwardly wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. I find that strangely comforting. Not because it makes the wasting away feel better, but because it names it. It doesn’t skip past it. It says yes, this is hard, and something else is also happening underneath.

One day all of this will be made right. Every wound acknowledged. Every tear collected. Every why finally answered.

But in the meantime we cannot grow weary in doing good. We take breaks. We pull back. We sit with Jesus and let Him pour into us. We stop pretending we’re fine when we’re not.

And we just hang in there.

You’re not alone in the roar. I promise.