"Compassionate, practical and profoundly reassuring when life falls apart...."

• ASIN: ‎ B0DJB9QR49
• Publisher: ‎ Lucid Books
• Accessibility: ‎ Learn more
• Publication date: ‎ October 15, 2024
• Language: ‎ English
• Print length: ‎217 pages 
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1632967060
• Genres:  Grief & Loss and Christian Counseling

The BookViral Review:

There is no shortage of books about suffering, but considerably fewer that understand the difference between explaining pain and accompanying someone through it. Barry Gridley’s You’ll Get Through This: A Father’s Letters About Suffering belongs firmly in the latter category: compassionate, deeply Christian and refreshingly practical, it approaches suffering not as an intellectual puzzle to be solved but as an experience through which a wounded person must somehow learn to move.

Gridley brings considerable authority to the subject. With a Master of Theology and a Doctor of Ministry in Marriage and Family Therapy, his perspective has been shaped by twenty years as a pastor and another twenty as a professional counsellor. But professional experience is only part of the story. Gridley is a cancer survivor; both his father and grandfather died by suicide; his wife suffered two miscarriages; and he has known financial hardship and the painful failure of friendships.

The book’s structure is simple but highly effective. Gridley presents his guidance through thirty-nine letters addressed to Bethany, a fictional daughter experiencing an unspecified personal upheaval. By deliberately leaving the precise nature of Bethany’s suffering undefined, he creates space for readers to bring their own experiences to the page. Across these letters he explores trauma, distorted thinking, grief, shame, hopelessness, anger and perseverance before moving towards forgiveness, rebuilding trust, boundaries and thankfulness.

It is an approach that gives You’ll Get Through This an unusual intimacy. Gridley writes as a father rather than a lecturer, making difficult psychological and theological ideas readily accessible without diminishing their importance.

Particularly effective is his ability to give memorable names to complex emotional processes. His “Emotional Good Zone” describes what counsellors commonly call the Window of Tolerance, while emotional dysregulation becomes a “Spin Cycle.” He explores the fight, flee, freeze or fold responses to distress and considers how damaging patterns of self-talk can intensify suffering.

More importantly, Gridley gives readers practical ways to respond. Butterfly tapping, belly breathing and visualising a calm place are among the techniques introduced, with Gridley revealing that he used a combination of these himself during nine months of cancer treatment. His exploration of trauma also considers nightmares and flashbacks, while recognising occasions when professional therapeutic intervention, including EMDR, may be appropriate.

Each letter concludes with a “My Heart Response to Suffering” section, inviting readers to examine their own thoughts, emotions and behaviours. This transforms the book from something merely read into something actively worked through.

Faith, however, remains its foundation. You’ll Get Through This is unequivocally Christian and makes no attempt to disguise that fact. Scripture, prayer, the character of God and the suffering of Christ are woven throughout. One of Gridley’s most memorable observations concerns where sufferers place their “gaze” and their “glance”: whether they gaze at their circumstances and merely glance at God, or reverse that perspective.

Yet Gridley avoids the easy reassurance that faith should somehow make pain disappear. His chapters on lament are particularly strong because they acknowledge anger, confusion and hurt as emotions that need expression. Equally valuable are his later thoughts on forgiveness, rebuilding trust and boundaries. Forgiveness is not presented as an obligation to repeatedly expose oneself to harm; healthy boundaries determine who can safely be allowed into our lives.

Perhaps the book’s most important message is that getting through suffering does not necessarily mean returning to the person you were before it happened. Gridley instead presents suffering as something through which perseverance, character, hope and ultimately a greater capacity for love can emerge. It is a distinction that gives his message considerably more substance than simple inspirational reassurance.

You’ll Get Through This will particularly appeal to Christian readers experiencing grief, trauma, betrayal, illness or profound personal upheaval, as well as pastors, counsellors, caregivers and those supporting someone through difficult circumstances. Warm, thoughtful and grounded in decades of pastoral, professional and personal experience, Gridley offers something more useful than promises of an easy recovery: a compassionate and practical roadmap for finding a way through when life no longer makes sense.

It is an unreservedly recommended Golden Quill Read.