Published by Baker Publishing Group, Baker Books on March 4, 2025
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
Looking back at painful stories from the past seems counterproductive, especially when it appears unrelated to our present lives. But what if exploring our past stories can help us make sense of where we are now and begin to imagine who we would like to become? Rather than ignoring, suppressing, or running from our past hurts, looking at our stories of heartache and how they have shaped us helps make sense of who we are now and points the way to freedom and meaningful change.
In Make Sense of Your Story, trauma therapist and Licensed Clinical Social Worker Adam Young helps you explore your personal story so you can understand how your experiences have shaped your brain--which, in turn, allows you to understand why your present day-to-day life looks and feels the way it does. He shows you how to confront and process the story of your family of origin, your sexual story, the story your body is telling you, your cultural story, your story with God, and more with kindness rather than judgment so that you can experience healing, self-acceptance, and release.
The secret to making sense of your present life is understanding your past experiences. And if you want to change the narrative, you have to engage your story.
The premise of this book deeply resonates with me. I agree that looking back at our pasts can help us make sense of our current difficulties, and that compassionate engagement with our most shameful, unpleasant memories can be a pathway towards healing. Sometimes, what we most want to suppress and ignore is what we must face in order to move forward. In this book, trauma therapist Adam Young explains why it’s important to explore our stories, and responds to common objections to this. Then he focuses different chapters on different types of stories we carry, such as our family of origin story, our sexual story, and the story of our relationship with God.
This book is full of insights that Adam Young has developed over the years on his podcast, The Place We Find Ourselves. According to some other reviewers, Make Sense of Your Story is basically the podcast in book form. As a result, this book is mainly for people who are new to Young’s work. Longtime followers won’t find new material here, but may appreciate the ease of reference that the book offers.
I appreciate how the author synthesizes his Christian worldview with mainstream therapy concepts. One thing I found particularly helpful is that he calls sin what it is, instead of trying to explain it away. For example, he validates that people do horrible things to each other on purpose, not just because they lack empathy or emotional skills. He says that even though therapists will often say, “Oh, that person probably didn’t realize how you felt,” there are lots of times where people know how you feel and deliberately choose to hurt you.
However, something that bothered me is that the author makes sweeping negative claims about how the evangelical church gets people to disconnect from their feelings, to the point of telling people that if their feelings conflict with the Bible, then they should submit their feelings to that apparent interpretation of the text. He criticizes this as a way to silence people’s intuition, and he writes about the dangers of people not trusting their feelings. I agree that we should take our feelings seriously, but that doesn’t mean that they always reflect truth.
Young’s take seems to enshrine someone’s feelings as a pure guiding light, but nobody’s intuition exists in a vacuum, and surrounding influences can shape someone’s gut feelings for better or worse. He acknowledges this later in other contexts, but never really explains anything to justify the inconsistency. Also, in the very intense screed about racial issues towards the end of the book, it’s clear that if you disagree with him on anything there, then he thinks your feelings and intuition are definitely wrong.
Also, even though the core idea of exploring your story applies to everyone, this book’s focus is surprisingly narrow. This is mainly for people who are healing from seriously dysfunctional parental relationships. A lot of this book has to do with core attachment issues, such as whether or not your parents were able to recognize your feelings and needs, respond compassionately to you, and repair ruptures after a conflict. There are lots of questions in this book about basic things like whether or not your parents were able to tell when you were sad, mad, and afraid, and if they responded in a supportive way or not. A significant portion of the book also focuses on ways that some parents sexualize their relationship with their child, with or without overt sexual abuse.
This book’s focus can be really helpful for people who grew up in abusive or neglectful homes, since it helps them identify and understand what was missing from their childhoods, or why aspects of their relationship with a parent seems weirdly sexual from an adult perspective. However, there are lots of people who have serious family wounds that don’t fit into these boxes. There are plenty of parents out there who haven’t ever treated their kids like surrogate spouses, and who have showed recognition and care for their children’s feelings and needs, but who have still hurt their children in other ways.
Also, there are so many forms of trauma that don’t involve parental relationships! It surprised me how much this book focused on family of origin issues. Even in the chapter about your sexual story, the predominant focus is on ways that parents harm their children through sexual abuse or triangulation. If someone’s deepest wounds come from sexual abuse from a non-parental figure, they may not find this chapter relevant or helpful at all. Also, there was almost nothing in the book about traumas from peer relationships.
There are a couple of brief references to bullying in example stories, but the book almost exclusively focuses on parental relationships, and on very particular types of family dysfunction that relate to the author’s experience. The author kept coming back to the same themes about how his mother sexualized her relationship with him, and he kept explaining this situation again in different chapters. Before I started reading this book, I felt like every time I opened it, I landed on a page with something about his mom. This emphasis is overly repetitive, and focuses so much on the author’s experience that it eclipses other types of family difficulties.
Make Sense of Your Story: Why Engaging Your Past with Kindness Changes Everything involves some core ideas and themes that apply to everyone, but the bulk of the book is about very specific family problems that flow from the author’s experience. Based on the success of the author’s podcast, it is clear that his content resonates with a lot of people, and I would recommend this book to people who relate to the author’s story. However, people who have experienced different forms of suffering or trauma in life should know that despite how general this book’s description sounds, it takes a very narrow focus. I expected this book to equip anyone to explore their story around some common life themes, but this focuses on a very particular type of story, to the exclusion of almost everything else.