Stories From the Couch

Marissa Papula reflects on the stories she’s heard during her career while counseling students in Campus Ministry.

In a previous office,  in a previous city, in what now feels like a previous life, a colorful, dappled tapestry stretched behind my couch where students sat to tell me their stories. The sweeping expanse — featuring a 1916 painting of my hometown in New York’s Hudson Valley, Mount Beacon at Newburgh — reminded me that every student who made their way to my office came to me from elsewhere (just as I had), bearing within them memories beautiful and unbearable and banal, all at once. It hovered over me in my work, an august presence, as students entrusted me with the stories that had shaped them.

I ran a college retreat program during those years, and the retreat was composed of witness talks that mapped the spiritual and emotional movements of the weekend gathering. Nine talks, each built around a personal story and a distinct theme, offered fodder for group discussion and personal reflection. Over the course of 12 retreats a year, I heard each one, every time.

The talks followed a kind of spiritual arc. Early stories invited attentiveness: moments of being fully present, of noticing one’s life as it was. Later talks asked more of the speaker and the listener alike. How had your understanding of God been shaped or shaken? What did forgiveness cost you? When had love demanded more than you thought you had to give?

Drawing these stories out of students was holy work. I used to joke that the talks functioned as the retreat’s GPS navigation system: If the stories were clear and grounded, the whole weekend found its way. That clarity required care, and I had firm boundaries. Nothing someone was currently living through became a talk: Unprocessed emotion yields unprocessed narrative. No graphic trauma. Truth, yes, but without triggering. No claiming that everything happens for a reason. And I had some tips. If you’re having trouble getting going, try recording yourself sharing your story rather than writing it, and see what surfaces. Imagine you’re having coffee with a friend who asks you about a time in your life when you understood yourself anew, felt loved, felt joy, felt hope, made a mistake, wondered if you had faith at all. How would you respond? Start there. Can I swear? Of course. Can I talk about sex? If it’s relevant.

The students’ reflections were gorgeous, brutal, resilient, complicated, carnal, simple sometimes, occasionally funny, always sacred. I heard stories of beloved grandparents, troubled parents, deceased siblings; of high school heartbreak and study abroad snafus. I heard raw stories of confronting addiction, friends’ suicides, fatal diagnoses faced far too young. I heard sweet stories of the practice of remembering someone’s go-to coffee order, summer camp friendships, family pets. I heard students come out for the first time. I heard students share what it meant when someone came out to them for the first time. I heard a student liken his experience of the retreat’s impact to the surgery he had to correct scoliosis as an adolescent: You wouldn’t know anything was different from looking at him, but he could finally move through the world as he was always meant to. Another shared about the spiritual resonance of his signature Subway order.

Years out from that role, the stories are only just now beginning to muddy in my memory — so cherished were they that I committed them to an almost encyclopedic recall. But the awe I have for having been entrusted with the privilege of that holy work endures. Again and again, I witnessed students claim their own lives as sites of meaning, mapping the contours of their own graced histories.

“Grace under duress is the story of us,” wrote Brian Doyle. I believe this because I heard it hundreds of times. I spent some of the best working hours of my life swiveling quietly in my office chair across from a student on the couch, my eyes misting, my heart pounding, my palms turned upward in a gesture of receiving.

Together, we fingered the fabric of the textured tapestries of ourselves, searching for the gossamer threads of grace glimmering if only we turned them gently toward the light. My own tapestry — the literal one — enveloped our encounters, reminding me that every student who arrived with their stories came from elsewhere, carrying understandings of God, of belief, of the experience of being alive, that I could glimpse only when they invited me in. 

How holy that invitation. How everything turns on that glimpse.

Marissa Papula is a writer, spiritual director, and retreat facilitator whose work has appeared in America, The Christian Century, Catholic Women Preach, Jesuit Media Lab, and more. She is the former director of Campus Ministry at LMU.