Trauma - Pt 1

Be gracious to me, O God, for man tramples on me; all day long an attacker oppresses me; my enemies trample on me all day long, for many attack me proudly. When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. (Psalm 56:1-4 ESV).

I am often asked how to deal with the trauma in someone’s past. Today I want to begin a short series that I hope will help us understand and cope with the suffering of life. Trauma is a certain kind of suffering, the kind that overwhelms one’s ability to cope. It describes a whole class of wounds that cripple. These are those wounds that bury themselves deep in our consciousness; they become tragedies that are simply too heavy for us. It happens in the past, but asserts itself over and over in the present. It may have been sex, too early; death, sudden and unwelcome; repetitive and familiar violence; prolonged neglect; excused abuse; or pervasive pain. It is not the same as the trauma of combat though they have similarities. I want us to focus on the trauma that is so often close to home. These experiences may be long removed from our present lives, yet they continue to affect us terribly. We must understand how we may faithfully navigate the overwhelming wounds and unpredictable triggers returning us to the pain in a wash of memories and wounds. Some Christians have been trained to think that faithful believers will not continue to experience traumatic symptoms for the rest of their lives because of Christ’s liberating work. On the other hand, hope and freedom are withheld by other well-meaning Christian counselors who insist on our “need to process,” the need to focus exclusively on our trauma, the need to speak at length about the pain, the need to obsess over it, the need to become preoccupied with our wounds. It is a false notion that only in giving ourselves over to our trauma can we be free from it. The first of these means of healing is no more than cruel optimism; the other is an incurable diagnosis. The church seems to walk precariously in these situations between these two serious errors. There are countless stories of churches blanching traumatic experiences and ongoing distress with reductionistic redemptive strategies, undercutting and offending the legitimacy and necessity of true lament. There are countless other stories of parents’ relationships with their children utterly destroyed, not to mention seeming relationships with God, because a counselor was overly fixated on the trauma. For these reasons, the term trauma is heard both too little and too often in our day, too little in addressing the profound wreckage of abuse, and too often as the controlling, decisive narrative in our story. This is where we begin. Trauma is real. God cares enormously. There are five specific things the Bible has to say to those who are hurting. We’ll look at each in the coming days. Today, put your trust in Him (v. 3-4).