Think the unthinkable

Some things are unthinkable. We just can’t conceive of them happening. And sometimes that’s a problem.

As, for instance, in situations too awful for us to bear. This is what happens in trauma when someone experiences something unspeakably terrible. And because they have no words for it, it isn’t integrated into their lives. Unlike a normal memory that is processed and understood, a traumatic experience remains unprocessed – raw and disturbing. I recently heard it vividly described as being like ‘a foreign body in the psyche’.

Finding something unthinkable can also create problems in relation to sin. For when we can’t bring ourselves to believe someone could possibly have behaved so badly, we end up deaf to the cries of those who have been sinned against.