Faith, Feelings and My F-150
Episode 1: Yesterday’s Wounds and Today’s Pain
NARRATOR: Alex Zacharov stormed out of the hospital room and took the elevator to the parking level. He slammed the door shut on his F-150 and pulled out of the parking lot of North Memorial Medical Center.
Alex had hoped that on his deathbed, his father Viktor might be tenderhearted to his children. He was not. Decades of alcohol and violence had hardened his heart. He had no desire to apologize to Alex, his brother Nikolai, or his sister Alena for all the abuse they had suffered. He also had no apology for his wife Vera, who had always suffered the worse of his abuse.
As a Christian, it was important to Alex to keep calm and not blow up in anger. But when he couldn’t stand it any longer, he rushed to his truck where he wouldn’t have to pretend anymore.
Alex was a skilled building contractor. He loved his job, and enjoyed the benefits of being self-employed. Every week Alex spent hours driving across the Minneapolis metro area to various contract sites. That gave him ample time alone to decompress from issues he was facing.
Alex had been married to Natasha for five years, and they had two young children named Adrian and Lara. Alex credited his happy marriage to his Christian faith. His mom tried her best to raise her three children in the church. But having a violent alcoholic father didn’t help. Often their weekends were spent at home in anxious silence, doing their best to not make their father angry.
That abusive background left scars on all three kids. It hurt Nikolai and Alena the most. They walked away from the church as young adults. Nikolai was divorced, had a series of failed relationships, and struggled with drug addiction. Alena held down a good job and was a responsible mom. But she had been divorced twice, and was cynical about marriage and people in general.
Alex was the bright light of their family. He was a committed Christian, active in his church, and devoted to Natasha and their kids. But the emotional wounds of his father’s abuse lingered in his heart. There were many times in worship when Alex found his celebration mixed with anger towards his dad.
Natasha was well aware of his family dynamics. His father was addicted to alcohol as a young man in Russia. His mom tried everything she could to convince him to sober up, but nothing worked. When they moved to America where their three kids were born, nothing changed. Natasha empathized with Alex. She tried her best to listen and be supportive. But she figured there wasn’t much else she could do.
One day a friend gave her a copy of Lauren Wells’ book "What Made That Feel So Hard?" Natasha was intrigued. Lauren was an American who grew up as a missionary kid in Tanzania. She faced a lot of trauma growing up. She saw a thief doused in gasoline and burned to death in front of her eyes. There was a constant turnover of classmates and friends at her international school. When she returned to the US for college, she didn’t fit in because she didn’t know how to act like an American.
Lauren held it all together until a miscarriage pushed her to the breaking point. She lost it. She knew she needed help. The help she got over the next months led to a lot of healing, which was the basis for her book.
As Natasha read Lauren’s book, it used simple, everyday language to describe how loss affects us, and what we can do about it. She thought it might be really helpful to Alex, and asked him to read it.
Alex objected. He was never much of a reader. Natasha knew he was smart enough, but he learned by doing, not reading. Alex was more comfortable holding a power drill or nail gun than a textbook. So Natasha bought a copy of the audiobook. Alex spent a lot of time in his truck, and had plenty of time to listen.
Now that he was out of excuses, Alex finally agreed to listen. He didn’t particularly like that the audiobook was created with an AI voice instead of a human voice, but he could put up with it. He didn’t have high expectations as he began to listen. But he would be quite surprised.
LAUREN WELLS' AUDIOBOOK: Because of the inner work and outward teaching I’ve been doing over the past decade, this season of grief has been navigated in ways my younger self wouldn’t even recognize. Having tools hasn’t made it hurt less, but it has given me a map. It has given me tools to unstack this gut-wrenching grief by:
• Knowing what normal looks like, so that when I am suddenly overwhelmed by sadness, when I’m physically exhausted, when I’m crankier than normal, when I’m wondering what’s wrong with me, I can continually tell myself, “This is what grief looks like. I’m not crazy.”
• Knowing what healthy coping looks like and recognizing when I’m slipping into unhealthy habits like sleeping or being overly busy to avoid feeling.
• Understanding that strength is not stuffing down the emotions and pushing through without a tear, like my younger self thought. Remembering that there is great strength in admitting that this is painful and letting myself experience the difficult emotions that I’d rather not.
• Knowing how to walk my kids through this grief in a way that allows them to name, feel, and recognize the sadness, anger, and pain that comes with such a loss.
• Having tools to unstack this Grief Tower block by giving time and space to process the reasons why this feels so hard....
I think back to myself as a teenage girl with a fast-stacking Grief Tower. I remember being a young woman sobbing on the bathroom floor of the law office after a second miscarriage. I grieve for her and all that she had to go through. And if I could sit with her in those moments, I would hold her and tell her gently, “Don’t lose hope. There will be meaning in all of this.”
The only reason I can sit here writing this book, the reason I have built companies that provide emotional health and grief processing resources that have helped thousands, the only reason I am who I am is because my life wasn’t easy. If it had been, I wouldn’t be living the life I’m living now. There were years when the grieving outweighed the meaning and I thought my Grief Tower would swallow me up. But the work of processing my tower strengthened the meaning behind it and was a catalyst in healing from it.
We don’t become resilient by never going through hard things. We become resilient by pushing through the hard and coming out the other side. The fact that you have lived through the blocks on your Grief Tower is a testament to your strength, tenacity, and perseverance.
Post Traumatic Growth (PTG) is a research-based theory that explains transformative growth after trauma. Researchers have found that people who experience PTG “develop new understandings of themselves, the world they live in, how to relate to other people, the kind of future they might have and a better understanding of how to live life.”
NARRATOR: This was a new way of thinking for Alex. He’d rather not think about all the bad things that happened to him. He thought that Lauren would rather not think about her miscarriage. But she said that deliberately dealing with that pain made her stronger.
Lauren went on to explain why it’s so important to deal with pain from our past.
LAUREN WELLS' AUDIOBOOK: To put it simply, your Grief Tower consists of anything that has happened during your life that felt particularly difficult. For the purpose of the unstacking process that you’ll walk through in this book, you’ll focus only on the Grief Tower blocks from your developmental years (birth to around 25 years old).
The reason we focus on the developmental years is because it is in those years that we are developing narratives about ourselves, others, the world, and spirituality. It is also during those years that the increase of the stress hormone, cortisol, wreaks the most havoc on our growing brain. While difficult things certainly happen after age 25, those later blocks tend to confirm the narratives that were already there from the developmental years. However, there is no limit to processing. If there is something significant that happened later in life that you’d like to add to your Grief Tower for processing, you are welcome to do so.
NARRATOR: That made sense to Alex. It was during his childhood years he felt the most fear and anger. Everything seemed to rotate around dad’s drunken fits of rage, doing everything possible to keep him calm.
Lauren went on to express her hope for each reader.
LAUREN WELLS' AUDIOBOOK: My Hope For You. I hope that your eyes are open to noticing when unhelpful narratives start to show themselves. I hope that you’re quicker to recognize their unhelpfulness and to pull out a combating narrative to actively replace the harmful one.
I hope that you’ll continue processing each block on your Grief Tower Timeline, giving yourself the time and space to feel the emotions deep within each of the blocks. I hope you’ll explore new avenues for processing that you haven’t tried before.
I hope that you’ll take what you’ve learned to the people in your life. To love them well. To support them in hard times. To give them language if they’re in the middle of a Grief Tower block experience and don’t understand why it feels so hard.
I hope you’ll lead the children in your life to unstack their tower along the way by asking good questions and giving them space to feel emotion.
I pray that your life will be freer. That your relationships will be deeper. That your spiritual life will be richer. I pray that as you continue to unstack your Grief Tower, you’ll feel lighter, fuller, and braver – knowing that your resilience has increased and the boulders you’ve been carrying have been gently set down, one by one. I pray that you’ll unstack the hard things as they come and that you’ll thrive because you’re no longer walking through life with a tall Grief Tower.
NARRATOR That was just what Alex needed to hear. He knew that Lauren wasn’t just a secular counselor with the latest degrees and fancy techniques. She was a committed Christian who truly loved her readers. It was especially touching to Alex that she expressed wishes not just for her readers but their children. She wanted those children to grow up in loving homes that knew how to deal with loss. While Alex was hesitant opening up about his own pain, he knew he wanted to build a healthy home for his kids to grow up in.
Alex was on board. He was ready to listen to the whole audiobook. Over the next four months, his F-150 became a sacred place where he listened, prayed, and came to peace with his past.
