Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish Knight (1491-1556) was with his unit in the town of Pamplona where they were under siege by a much larger French force. His peers wanted to surrender, but he wanted to at least get some glory out of it, so he convinced his commander to fight. In the ensuing battle, a cannonball explosion shattered the bones in one of his legs. After the surrender, he was taken to his brother’s house for what turned out to be a very long convalescence.
He used to like to read adventure books about knights fighting glorious battles and winning the hand a beautiful maiden, so he asked his sister-in-law if she had any books of that genre. She did not. The only two books she had available for him were The Life of Christ and The Life of The Saints. Since he was very bored and had nothing else to do for days on end, he read them. For the first time in his life he considered that he might do noble and heroic things for God instead of for the King of Spain.
Yet he still had much time on his hands. Lacking a smartphone, he spent a lot of time fantasizing. He would alternate between two equally enjoyable fantasies. In one fantasy, he would make up stories of doing heroic things as a knight at the Spanish King’s court. In the other fantasy, he would imagine himself doing heroic things for God.
One day he noticed something for the first time. He noticed that both fantasies were fun to engage in, and he felt good during the experience. Afterwards however, when he fantasized about doing heroic things for God he still felt good. But after fantasizing about doing heroic things as a knight he felt bad. This was a moment of powerful revelation for him. He realized this was God speaking to him.
As he later began to teach his followers how to pray, he incorporated the lessons he learned from this initial experience. Ignatius taught his followers to label all experiences as desolation or consolation. Consolation is an experience that brings us closer to Christ and desolation is an experience of being drawn away from him.
Consolations are experiences that lead to a sense of rightness, peace and joy. They are experiences of being attracted towards God and the things of God. Any increase in faith, hope, love, or peace fall into this category.
On the other hand, desolations are experiences that lead to an increase in agitation, unhappiness, restlessness, inner turmoil, lukewarmness, a decrease in faith, hope, love, and a move towards earthly things and temptations.
Two things are important to note here, the first is that this is not about our emotional highs and lows. We can be experiencing hardships and still feel close to God. That would be a hard consolation, not a desolation. Similarly we can be experiencing a positive emotion and still feel far from God, that would be a desolation. The second thing to note is that desolation does not always correspond to sinfulness. It may frequently involve sin, but it can be the sin of others against us for example. It may also not involve sin at all.
Ignatius developed and taught a prayer of Examen that he encouraged his followers to pray twice a day. This prayer involves reviewing with God daily what our consolations and desolations have been since the last Examen.
One can easily see the immediate power of such a prayer in helping us to live intentionally into Jesus’ greatest commandment of loving God and others. But there is a second very important benefit that is often missed. Most Christians only practice prayers of discernment when it comes to difficult decisions which only come up once in a long while. However, for those who pray the examen daily, they are practicing discernment on a daily basis. As a result they grow significantly in being able to discern the movement of God in their lives. By the time they come a major decision, it is much easier for them to discern clearly in prayer. They have been training daily.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a widely used form of psychotherapy, sometimes has a client use a thought or emotion log to keep track of thoughts and emotions (follow the links below for examples). These have some of the same benefits as the Examen in increasing self-awareness, in particular awareness of how we respond to certain situations. This in turn creates space to respond differently in the future.
One of the areas in therapy that is difficult to address are perceptions of reality (schemas) that are formed by trauma. Approaches to healing trauma are able to address these faulty perceptions of reality but the success rate is much higher if the trauma is limited to a small number of episodes. Trauma that is repeated often however, creates faulty schemas that are more resistant.
For example, a child who experiences hunger on a canoeing trip where all the food spoils, may have an aversion to canoes and stuffs her pockets with granola bars every time her family goes canoeing again. Her faulty schema is that canoeing has inherent hunger risks. On the other hand a child who grows up in an orphanage with ongoing food insecurity, and is later adopted by a financially secure family, will continually be hiding food around the house. His faulty schema is that his old circumstances of food scarcity still apply. The former example is much easier to address than the latter.
I posed a question to my therapy colleagues at our staff meeting once and asked what their decades of experience had taught them about the most effective ways to deal with deeply ingrained faulty schemas. Many said that reviewing with the client multiple memories of triggering situations was the way to go. One of my colleagues however, suggested that the prayer of Examen could be helpful here. This stuck with me, and I tried it.
I have personally found that if I take my examen deeper, and look at thoughts and emotions in some greater detail, it does help to begin to change the schemas. However this only happened when I began to write notes about thoughts and feelings on an index card throughout the day because otherwise thoughts and feelings were too fleeting and easy to forget. This is especially true because I am so used to the faulty schemas I don’t even notice them let alone remember them eight hours later.
One final note about practicing the examen. Some people can effectively do it at night. I can’t. It requires more intentionality in prayer than I can give at the end of the day. Some practice a form of the examen with more formal steps, some with less. You can find the full spectrum with a quick internet search. I personally take a summarized approach where I talk with God about segments of my previous day’s experiences. I give thanks for the consolations, and I talk with him in greater detail about what went wrong with the desolations.
https://www.therapistaid.com/therapy-worksheet/emotion-log
https://www.therapistaid.com/therapy-worksheet/thought-log