Testimony

Hi, I'm Dr. Jameca Cooper. Make sure you subscribe to this channel. Today we're going to talk about testimony. I've talked about this before in other videos. When you look for videos on radical healing on my channel, we talk about my book, I Am My Sister's Keeper: The Brown Girl's Guide to Radical Healing. So in this book, I talk a lot about healing and what healing looks like. So part of healing is testimony. Testimony being what is your story. And I was just watching a Steve Harvey clip the other day, and he talked a lot to this one particular guy about testimony, what your testimony is. So your testimony is the narrative of your life and your story and what makes you who you are. But you cannot have a testimony without a test. So my question for you is, what is your test? There can be many different types of tests. I can tell you a little bit about myself. One of my tests, first test in life, was about my parents' divorce. My parents got divorced when I was about 8 years old, and 30 years ago divorce was not a normal thing. In other words, I was the only child in my elementary school that probably had divorced parents, so it was odd, it was different, and people really in the South looked down on it. So that was one of my first tests because I really had to overcome the adversity of living through the stigma of being a product of divorce. The next test, or one of the next tests for me, was my own divorce, which was some years ago after being married for 15 years, and what that feels like. So a test in this case is adversity, going through something quite difficult and trying and making it through it. So what— what did that make me do? What did that make me feel about myself? And when I came out on the other side, what was I like? That's the test. So you cannot have a really good and strong or compelling testimony without a test. So you have to have tests. So I want you to think about your own lives and think about what the tests are. So the test could maybe be a failure in a marriage. It could be a loss of someone that's been close to you. It could be struggles in school or work. It could be starting off in life with some adversities such as abuse, like physical, sexual abuse. It could be parental neglect. It could be parental abandonment. It could be having to live through foster homes. It could be lots of other things that you've lived through and you've made it through. What has that done to you? How's that made you better? How's that made you stronger? So in this book, again, I Am My Sister's Keeper, I talk about the benefit of testimony and how that builds your narrative for your life. What I found over doing therapy for almost 20 years is that every person has to be able to tell their story. You have to be able to tell what your story is and how that makes you, you. And part of why it's beneficial to do that is because you have to own your story. Don't be ashamed of it and don't be embarrassed by it, but you have to tell it stand firm in it, and then accept it and move past whatever that story is. So make sure you get the book I Am My Sister's Keeper: The Brown Girl's Guide to Radical Healing on Amazon to find out more about testimony. But I want to challenge everyone watching this video to find out what your own testimony is. Stand in it, acknowledge it, write it down, marinate on it every day, and really own it and think about how that can make you stronger or how the has make you stronger. So, um, thanks for watching. I'm Dr. Jameca Cooper Cooper. Make sure you subscribe to this channel.