Stuck in a Scab-Picking Loop

Rumination, Institutional Failure, and the Difficulty of Moving Forward

Rumination is scab picking. It is the mind returning again and again to the same wound, not to heal it, but because the loop has become an obsession. It happens when grief, or intense discouragement, has no way forward and diagnosis becomes a way of life.

I have gotten stuck in a rumination loop several times. It took a long time to get over the death of my daughter, brother, and mother. Longer than it should have. People resist the idea that you can grieve too long. They are wrong. You can. The problem is not the grieving. It’s the intensity. The problem is the looping back that keeps it fresh as if it just happened. You can remember someone, feel the sadness their loss brings to mind, and still not remain stuck there.

Our therapeutic culture, along with plain old self-centeredness, has primed people to keep picking scabs after both imagined and real tragedies and disappointments.

Something like this happened to a generation shaped by the New Calvinist movement of the 2000s and 2010s. It wasn’t the death of a loved one but of a movement. The conferences, publishing houses, and celebrated voices promised a group of theologically serious and culturally engaged Christians that the church could think and act with integrity. When that institutional world failed to oppose the social and theological currents of the late 2010s, especially wokeism, the betrayal felt very personal. These were people who had invested deeply, and the institutions they trusted either drifted or went silent when it mattered most.

For many, the result has been a rumination loop. The same failures get catalogued. The same institutional decisions get relitigated. Most of the energy is diagnostic. People name what went wrong, track who capitulated, and document the pattern. There is little forward motion. There is only scab picking.

There is always an audience for people stuck in a rumination loop. They want to keep reliving what happened to them. Anyone who tries to move them forward risks being treated as part of the problem. They are someone who just does not get it. Because this audience is faithful and hungry for validation, there will always be content producers willing to feed them.

The loop is harder to break because the critique is not wrong. The failures were real. The “third way” posture was, in many cases, bad faith. So when someone now argues for real nuance or principled complexity rather than political cover, they get pattern matched to the old betrayal. The vocabulary was poisoned. Anyone who pumps the brakes sounds like the people who looked away. Moderation itself became suspect. The result is an overcorrection that reinforces itself. The only legible moves are full commitment or full betrayal. Those who push back on the reaction get accused of going soft.

Here is the irony. The original bad actors won twice. They won first when institutions failed to act. They won again when that failure poisoned the well for any good faith complexity afterward. The rejected thing still sets the terms, because it remains the reference point for everything that follows.

Reactive building is not the same as generative building. One is defined by what it opposes. The other is defined by what it loves. We need both denial and affirmation. But the real question is whether there are communities and leaders doing the second kind of work. Are they simply reacting to what failed, or are they pursuing a positive vision strong enough to stand on its own?

That work is harder. It is slower. It requires turning away from something that already happened toward something that does not yet exist. It does not mean forgetting the past. It means refusing to obsess over it. You have to start building something new. One of the great ironies of men who swear they will never be like their fathers is that they often become them. Why? Because you become what you obsess over.

So where is that work happening? Who has moved on to building instead of simply diagnosing? Those are the questions worth asking and answering. Before looking far off, I always recommend starting in your own home, church, and community.

It is very difficult to help people escape rumination loops. They rarely respond well to direct challenge. In my experience, most people must reach a point where they are simply tired of being stuck. They have to find their bottom. If you are living out an example of a better way forward and you have been kind, some will eventually reach out and ask for help. If you confront them head on, you will likely exhaust yourself and turn potential friends into enemies.

This reflection is not meant to wake anyone up. It is meant to encourage those who have already broken free. Keep moving forward. Keep building.