Companion workbook
Six exercises for working through the NINEVEH framework — on your own, with a counselor, or with a group.
Before you start
You are about to work through a seven-part framework, and within about a chapter you will be able to see it operating in someone you know. That recognition is real, and it is also the most dangerous thing this book gives you.
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If you are afraid of someone in your household, the work in front of you is not this framework. It is safety. In the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-7233, and you can text START to 88788.
If you are having thoughts of ending your life, please reach out now rather than finishing this page. In the United States and Canada you can call or text 988. You do not have to be in crisis to use it.
This workbook is not therapy, and completing it is not treatment. If working through this material stirs up more than you can carry, that is a reason to bring it to a clinician, not a reason to push through alone.
Seven movements. They are not stages a family passes through in order, and most families do not have all seven. They are more like load-bearing walls: each one makes the next one easier to build.
Answer for the household or the church you are actually in, now. There are no right answers and nothing is scored against anyone.
“That's just how they are.”
We stopped asking whether this should be happening and started asking how to keep things calm when it does.
I can predict the incident before it happens, and I plan my week around it.
When I describe our normal to someone outside it, I hear myself softening it.
“We'll take care of it.”
In the last year I have paid, called, covered, or explained on this person's behalf more than once.
There are costs of their choices that have never once landed on them.
I am tired in a way I would have trouble explaining to someone who only sees us at Christmas.
“But you don't understand why.”
I have a true explanation for their behavior that I reach for before anything else.
The explanation is accurate, and it also ends the conversation.
Someone outside named the behavior plainly, and I found myself correcting them.
“If they aren't okay, nobody is okay.”
When one person here is not okay, no one is allowed to be okay.
I check their mood before I decide what I am going to say.
When one of us wants something different, it costs more than it should.
“If I feel hurt, you must have hurt me.”
Here, feeling hurt settles the question of who was wrong.
Naming what someone actually intended gets treated as denying someone's pain.
The word unsafe gets used for things that are uncomfortable rather than dangerous.
“Look what they made me do.”
The reason given always lives outside the person who acted.
Spiritual language gets used to move responsibility somewhere it cannot be examined.
I have accepted “you made me” as an account of what happened.
“Anyone who confronts us is the enemy.”
Someone who told the truth about us ended up treated as the problem.
Setting a limit here reads as betrayal.
We close ranks, and it feels like love while we are doing it.
Your wall
Answer the statements above and the courses currently carrying weight will fill in here.
Galatians 6 has two sentences three verses apart that look like a contradiction and are actually the whole answer. Carry each other's burdens in verse 2, and each one should carry their own load in verse 5. The Greek settles it: verse 2 is baros, a crushing weight, more than a person can carry alone. Verse 5 is phortion, the ordinary pack a traveler carries — the standard load, the thing that is properly yours.
List what you are currently carrying on someone else's behalf — money, phone calls, explanations, chores, silence, reputation, feelings. Then sort each one.
Crushing. More than they can carry alone. Refusing to help carry it is a failure of love.
The ordinary pack that is properly theirs. Carrying it for them is not love — it is interference.
The question is never whether the explanation is true. Some of them are entirely accurate, and that is what makes this movement so hard to interrupt — you are not arguing with lies. The question is what the explanation does.
A limit names what I will do. It does not name what you must become, and it is not a lever — if you are setting it in order to produce a change in someone else, it will not hold when they do not change.
The mature sentence is not nothing influenced me. It is: this influenced me greatly, and I remain responsible for how I responded.
Insulation is rarely dismantled by a decision to do something new. It is dismantled by stopping one specific thing, on purpose, and staying in the room afterwards.
To close
That sentence is the whole book, and it runs in both directions. It is what you may eventually have to say to someone. It is also what has to be true of you before you can say it to anyone.
GraceRoot courses are psychoeducational learning programs, not emergency care, legal advice, or a replacement for therapy. Certificates document GraceRoot completion. Court, employer, board, or continuing education acceptance should be confirmed before purchase unless a page states a specific approval.