Nobody Else Knows How Bad It Gets

At the last family gathering somebody said, he has been doing so much better.

And you said something agreeable and passed the potatoes, and you were the only person at that table who knew about the Tuesday. And the Thursday before it.

You have been curating what this family knows for about seven years. Not lying. Editing. You give them the version that is true as far as it goes, and you keep the rest, and you have got so good at it that you can do it mid sentence.

And the reason you started was decent. You wanted to protect him from how they would see him, and you wanted to protect them from a weight they could not do anything about, and both of those were kind.

And if what you are holding involves harm, if he is hurting or frightening you or anybody else, then keeping it is not protection and this article is not the first thing you need. Telling somebody qualified where you live comes before every word of it.

The cost of being the only one

Let me name what carrying it alone has actually done, because the damage is not where you think.

You expect the cost to be tiredness, and it is. But the deeper cost is a slow becoming unreachable inside your own family.

Every conversation with them now has a room in it they cannot enter. They ask how things are and the answer comes from outside the locked part, and they can feel that something is being held even if they could not say what. So they hold something back too, gently, in response.

Seven years of that and nobody in that family is quite in the room with anybody.

You have been standing in your own family behind a door you built for good reasons, and no protection has ever once been free to the person providing it. Psalm 142:2 says I poured out my complaint before him, I shewed before him my trouble, which is the written word describing a man refusing to hold it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can open a door without any of it becoming a scandal.

And he is a whole man in this. He is not the worst Tuesday and you know that better than anybody, which is exactly why you have been guarding the picture. He has his own reasons and he is right about at least one thing nobody has conceded.

Protecting how he is seen is a real love. It has simply been costing one person everything.

You are able to keep loving him accurately and stop being the only one who knows, and telling somebody has never once been the same as exposing anybody. The Spirit of God is what makes an honest sentence possible without a betrayal in it, and it is written in Psalm 142 that a man showed his trouble rather than swallowing it.

I poured out my complaint

I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble. (Psalm 142:2, King James Version)

The heading on that psalm says it was written in a cave, and that detail is not decoration.

David is hiding. He is at the lowest point of his life, hunted, with nobody he can safely tell, and the psalm opens with him doing the only thing available: he says the whole of it out loud to God, in a cave, where nobody can hear.

Poured out. Not summarized. Not a version. Poured.

You have somewhere to put the whole of it, and no part of what you are carrying has ever once been too disloyal to say out loud to God. It is written in Psalm 142:2 that he poured out his complaint and showed his trouble, which is the written word making an unedited account holy, and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives a sentence you would never say at a family table.

Notice what the psalm is not. It is not a plan. He does not ask for a strategy or a way to manage anybody. He shows his trouble, which is a phrase about visibility rather than about solutions.

And later in that same psalm he says: there was no man that would know me. That is the loneliness of being the only one who knows, said three thousand years ago, in the same breath.

You are known by the One who has been in the cave the entire time, and seven years of being the only one has never once meant being the only one who knows. The Spirit of God is the one who has held both versions of that man all along, and Psalm 142 puts the pouring out before anything else happens.

Telling one person

Here is the practical part, and I want to be careful because it can go wrong.

This is not about announcing anything. It does not mean telling the family. There is no conversation at a gathering where the real version comes out, and nobody here is suggesting one.

It is one person. One, chosen deliberately, and it does not have to be a relative.

You are permitted to say the real version to one human being, and one person knowing has never once been the same as the family finding out. The Holy Spirit is the one who provides the person and the moment, and it is written that he poured out his complaint before Him and showed Him his trouble.

The reason it has to be a person as well as God is not that God is insufficient. It is that a load carried by one body starts to distort what that body believes about itself. After enough years alone with it, you begin to think this is simply what you are for.

One other person who knows does not lighten the facts. It changes what you believe about your own position, which is the part that has quietly bent.

Choose somebody outside the arithmetic. A friend, a pastor, somebody at a distance from the family who has nothing to lose or gain by knowing.

You are able to hand the true version to one safe person, and being heard has never once required anybody in that family to be told. The Spirit of God is what makes the first sentence come out, and Psalm 142:2 has a man in a cave doing exactly this before anything in his situation changed.