Trauma and Theology (Part 1 of 2)
- Kyle Lincoln
- May 30, 2019
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 14, 2020
This blog post unpacks the notion of trauma, introduces some of its key concepts, and organizes the varied therapeutic approaches to trauma recovery. This is the first in a series of two posts on trauma and theology.
Meeting Trauma
In my job, I meet a lot of people in crisis.
I can recall one of the first times I met a victim of trauma. I don't think I'd ever met an adolescent so polite and articulate, a preteen advocating for herself about her worsening periods of black out, fatigue, and non-epileptic seizures. Then it happened while I was talking to her mom, like the flip of a switch. She passed out and, after sitting back up again, the young lady I had been talking to was gone. This person stood up and walked like a zombie to the door and speaking in a low-drone, a foghorn-like pitch, she said "let me go—pleeease." I backed my chair against the only exit to let the episode take its course.
"Sometimes, this can last up to two hours," explained her mom.
I had just witnessed someone enter into a catatonic state, where one appears to be in a daze or a stupor. As I came to learn, when catatonic symptoms are frequent they appear to be related to adverse childhood experiences, or more specifically to the trauma created by these same experiences.
What Is Trauma?
A trauma is a shock to the system, an uninvited blow, something that “overwhelms the system.” [1] In psychological terms, the bigger the shock, the bigger the impact, the bigger the recovery necessary. Abandonment, abuse, combat fatigue, betrayal, sexual assault. These experiences are commonly associated with traumatizing effects. Attachment insecurity, a manifestation of early onset relational trauma, is widespread, estimated to affect one-in-four people. [2]
So, why does trauma occur? Who does trauma effect? What exactly becomes broken? To what extent is recovery from trauma possible? And, more peculiarly, can theology be healing? These are big questions.
Photo by Christian Regg on Unsplash
Trauma appears to hit at a time when we do not feel the control, preparation, or competency needed to defend ourselves. Trauma, like a stone to ice, seems to cause a break of sorts. Conceivably thin ice is more easily shattered than thick ice. Big stones cause more damage.
In the event of this young girl, the experience of early childhood sexual abuse is believed to be one of the causes of her current fragmented consciousness. Her young age made for thin ice. The horror of such an event was a big stone. It's not a perfect analogy, but it works.
A Traumatized Brain?
Whether from an isolated incident or a repeated experience, traumatic experiences create “shocking,” wounding memories. And memories can haunt us with flashbacks and nightmares, cultivating fear; and in turn trauma cedes control of our presents over to remnants of our pasts. Reliving or re-experiencing trauma keeps us in a state of alert, a state of mind understood to be linked with the overproduction of stress hormones. Over time, it is believed that excessive endorphin production—by the "fight or flight response"—actually rewires our brain’s circuitry, creating psychological and emotional distress.
Alternately, we can create precautious strategies to avoid revisiting those places, inventing language games and careful routines to protect us from our triggers. Trauma can make us more delicate, causing us to internalize a sense of powerlessness. And—frankly—general descriptions of trauma like these may feel hollow when held up against our own experiences.
A Few Therapeutic Traditions
Following a medical model, or called a disease and recovery model, therapy for trauma is often thought of as symptom alleviation. Clinicians may break down trauma’s effects—inexplicable anger, sadness and despair, flashbacks, feelings of guilt or shame, patterns of isolation, physical symptoms like headaches—and create recovery goals. Here are a few different approaches that inform these goals.
A behavioral approach to trauma therapy focuses on the mastery of new more positive skills and replacement behaviors. For example, exposure therapy (also called In Vivo Exposure Therapy) invites traumatized individuals to slowly and incrementally revisit their trauma, resisting their tendency towards avoidance.
A behavioral approach is often combined with a cognitive approach, which explores our structures of thinking and seeks to heal our internalized attitudes and beliefs. For example, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) attempts to bring together and foster a form of radical acceptance—that we cannot take back the past or what it has done to us—with a commitment to action, promoting greater psychological flexibility. [3]
A narrative approach to trauma recovery encourages us to separate ourselves from our trauma and reframe its effect on us through storytelling. One argument behind this approach is that telling your trauma story, verbalizing it to others, at once lessens its triggering effect on you and over time transforms your self-image “from victim to victor,” as a teacher of mine has put it.
To an extent, body-oriented approaches to trauma recovery such as Mindfulness practices, Heart Rate Variability Training (HRV), Neurofeedback, Holotropic Breathwork, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) reflect the truism that the human body is a self-healing agent. These approaches seek to nourish our conscious mind: our thoughts, memories, feelings, and wishes that we are aware of, as opposed to the other approaches which seek to delve into the unconscious, the unacceptable or unpleasant thoughts outside of our awareness. For this reason, body-oriented approaches are often used alongside talk-therapy.
The phrase “trauma informed care” is not so much an approach to therapy, as much as it is a set of commitments a trained counselor should make when helping those who have experienced trauma: to "first do no harm"—to not repeat traumatizing experiences—and when possible to seek to restore a person’s sense of safety, power, and worth.
So for the young girl I met in the crisis center where I work, perhaps the best thing right now is to encourage her mom to continue to be nurturing and safe for her daughter. According to one psychiatrist, Judith Herman, this is the first stage of trauma recovery, "Safety and Stabilization." [4] "Remembering and Mourning" is next, which involves naming our difficult emotions and grieving. Finally, "Reconnection and Integration" names the stage of regaining a sense of personal power and control. Important parts of this process are possible for a pre-teen, but developmental limitations may impede a quick recovery process. It's a long journey, but there is hope.
Rebuilding Your Life
If you can stomach a few more words (I know I'm past the recommended word count for the casual F-pattern web reader!), let me share one last perspective on trauma and recovery that I've encountered. It's about resiliency building.
Are counselors the best people to turn to for help with trauma? Maybe. Philosopher Paul Maxwell has said “There is a cultural myth that counselors are experts in trauma.” Instead of simply going to counseling, he urges that we should enroll in a whole-life, self-guided crash course in resilience: We must learn to take care of our healths, our homes, our social lives, our careers, our relationships.
Remember, it was said trauma appears to hit at a time when we do not feel the control, preparation, or competency needed to defend ourselves. In this way, those who have control and competnece—in a word, resilience—are less likely to experience things as traumatic in the first place; furthermore, developing resilience aids in recovery from trauma.
Photo by Meghan Holmes on Unsplash
So, instead of simply starting with the symptoms of trauma to guide therapeutic outcomes (as in the medical model), Maxwell thinks one should start with psychologist Abraham Maslow’s "Hierarchy of Needs" and starting from the bottom of the pyramid ask, “What competencies would enable me to overcome and process my post-traumatic experiences?” Ultimately, regaining control in life by relearning core competencies is a fundamental, though sometimes neglected core of trauma recovery.
The advice often given to victims of trauma is this: There's no medication to resolve trauma, there's no easy fix, there's no quick fix. [5] What has been said of the Christian life can be said of recovery from trauma: It's "a long road in the same direction" but recovery is possible and there is hope.
[Dialogue is a two-way street. In the second part of this post, the author will bring this discussion on trauma into critical dialogue with concepts from Christian Theology.]
© Kyle Lincoln 2020. Use with Permission
Contact: kylejordanlincoln@gmail.com
Further Reading
[1] A good overview of why trauma happens as explained by Paul Maxwell can be found at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP-38ku-sj0>.
[2] See Garth Sundem, “Study Shows That 40% of U.S. Kids Are Insecurely Attached,” Psychology Today, April 02, 2014, <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-trust/201404/study-shows-40-us-kids-are-insecurely-attached>.
[3] Matthew Tull, “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for PTSD,” Very Well Mind, April 1, 2019, <https://www.verywellmind.com/using-act-for-ptsd-2797661>.
[4] Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Hachette UK, 2015).
[5] Note: There are some medications that may help to diminish cortisol ("stress hormone") levels.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of other Therapy and Theology contributors.
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