Doing Life Together

Our leadership team has been discussing lately group dynamics in Transformations Community.  We have the curriculum and group time.  How do we combine learning the material with processing life together?

Many teachings are available online on many good topics.  Information is not a problem.  What is missing is relational connection.  I believe God created us as relational beings and the very formation of our brain, our identity and so many things are based on secure attachment in infancy and childhood. For many of us, this didn’t happen.  No blame to our parents who didn’t receive the skills themselves.  What we do get to do now is learn with True FAMILY (Father God, True Jesus and Holy Spirit) and in community how to be human. 

The left side of our brain is primarily focused on logic and facts while the right side of our brain is primarily intuitive flow, emotions, memories, relational connection and where trauma is stored.  For those of us who experienced trauma, the right and left sides of our brain did not fully form and learn how to work together as a cohesive unit as God designed. 

The ONLY way for this to be remedied is through relational connection and reparenting with True FAMILY AND community.  This is learning to live from the Tree of Life.  The problem is that most of us have cognitive understanding of this, but not experiential.  We live in self-protection mode – in survival.  This isn’t bad because it has helped us to survive!  However, the very things we use to cope with trauma keep us from living the fullness of life as God intended. 

The original design of growth was not a classroom.  Parents do life with their kids.  With multiple kids in the family you have different needs, personalities, learning styles, maturity levels, but together we work through these things.  That is the ideal.  In group settings, we have similar things, different issues, etc.  It can seem that separating out to different needs would be more efficient, but God’s model is learning THROUGH the challenges of different maturity levels and needs.   

This is how Transformations groups are unique.  The content of the course is important and gives a framework and language we can work with.  But the key dynamic is doing life together in community.  Learning through the challenges of doing life together.  It is not the same as living together as a family, but it is the best we can do to provide modeling of working through challenges together, learning emotional regulation, growing in relational skills and maturity.  Not everyone is ready to fully engage in this, and that is also okay.  We learn how to have grace for one another, get out of negative judgment mode and see each other through God’s eyes.  It’s messy and takes time and is not easy, but it can be life giving as we learn to thrive together with True FAMILY.