My father is a therapist.

This has made for an (how should I say this?), ummm, interesting life. Yes, that’s it. The word I want here is interesting.

When my father wanted to provoke me growing up, he would say things like, “I’m sensing some hostility from you. Let’s explore that” or “Kelly, how does that make you FEEL? Let’s feel our feelings. How do you really FEEL?” and so on.

Fifteen or so years later, I’m an adult who’s been around the block a few times. I’ve made some dubious choices. I’ve been to more than one therapist. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours and hours analyzing my life with friends and family. I’ve spent hours and hours trying to think of just the right way to phrase something just the perfect blend of witty and self-revelatory on Facebook. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on books about the psyche, about forgiveness, about depression, about prayer, about healing.

These are pieces of my story.

One of my therapists believed that the goal of therapy was to reassure the watchdog pieces of yourself that you could handle hearing the story of the weaker pieces of yourself, the repressed ones, long enough to unburden them. She called those weaker pieces exiles.

For her, exiles were the wounded parts in all of us that had simply been shut down, the parts that carried all the deferred dreams of middle school and beyond, the parts that hoped (however irrationally) that we would become Homecoming Queen, Head Cheerleader, Class Favorite. We hide them with caustic irony, a sardonic sense of humor, whatever piecemeal suits of armor we can assiduously buckle together. We eat too much. Drink alone sometimes. Don’t turn the TV off even when we want to. Spend every day at the gym. Become rigid.

It’s the plot of every mediocre romantic comedy, as well as most of the great ones. The protagonist has undergone some kind of traumatic loss, and the extinction of all spontaneity and joy has ensued. Their lives have become safe and small. Enter Prince (or Princess) Charming to chip away at any chinks in the armor and to teach them to love again.

And the vehicle for all this self-transformation is usually the unburdening of the story of the exile. Strapped for time, most filmmakers choose to depict this exchange of stories using montage. Our protagonists talk for hours and hours and hours about everything and nothing. They tell all their sad stories. They cry. They laugh. They realize they both love tuna salad. That old light comes back into their eyes. They skip when they could walk. They laugh at the slightest provocation. They smile at rude old ladies. Happy endings are just one more brief misunderstanding away.

So it is we romanticize the lightening of our wounded hearts. We all want to have someone to talk to for hours and hours and hours. We all want someone to tell us it’s okay that we never got voted Homecoming Queen. We all want to discover that we both like tuna fish.

We assume that simply talking is always helpful. In old, clichéd images of Freudian psychoanalysis, the patient rambles on and on and on, completely unaided by the mute doctor sitting in the back taking notes. In new, clichéd images of teenagers and twenty-somethings adding another feed to Twitter or updating Facebook or posting a new blog or adding a new link, we find that somehow the whole world is expected to act like a lover—constantly interested, constantly affirming.

But telling the story, sending it out into the void, is not always sufficient, because the world is not always like a lover constantly interested, constantly affirming. And our constant talking sometimes only exacerbates the lostness we feel when our exiles carry burdens just too heavy to lift.

It matters that someone hears us. And beyond that, it matters that we tell the truth, to ourselves as well as to those listening.

A couple months ago, I participated in a panel sponsored by the Vox Dei Community in Kansas City. We discussed the importance of story, of the power we each have over the way we frame, repeat, and interpret our own stories. Next to me on the panel was a narrative therapist who helps people externalize and reexamine their conflicts and anxieties by knowing the right questions to ask, the right spaces to sit in silence, to help them see their running internal monologues in some kind of fresh light.

I loved what she had to say. It’s what the church has always known. It’s what the Psalmists all knew. Before absolution comes confession. It does matter that someone sits in the darkness with us, on the other side of the screen, waiting for true words to be spoken.