Trauma-Sensitive Theology

Thinking Theologically in the Era of Trauma

Baldwin

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532643132
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The intention of Trauma Sensitive Theology is to help theologians, professors, clergy, spiritual care givers, and therapists speak well of God and faith without further wounding survivors of trauma. It explores the nature of traumatic exposure, response, processing, and recovery and its impact on constructive theology and pastoral leadership and care. Through the lenses of contemporary traumatology, somatics, and the Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy, the text offers a framework for seeing trauma and its impact in the lives of individuals, communities, society, and within our own sacred texts. It argues that care of traumatic wounding must include all dimensions of the human person, including our spiritual practices, religious rituals and community participation, and theological thinking. As such, clergy and spiritual care professionals have an important role to play in the recovery of traumatic wounding and fostering of resiliency. This book explores how trauma-informed congregational leaders can facilitate resiliency and offers one way of thinking theologically in response to traumatizing abuses of relational power and our resources for restoration.

Part One

Seeing Trauma

1

Identifying Trauma

The task of recognizing traumatic experience and post traumatic response is deceptively challenging. The challenge rises primarily from humanity’s innate predisposition to turn away in disbelief from experiences that counter our desire for a safe enough world. Judith Herman, whose book Trauma and Recovery6 is considered a classic text in trauma studies and a go-to introduction to trauma, notes the history of society’s “episodic amnesia” of trauma itself. The study of trauma is chock full of fits and starts: from Freud’s early work with Bauer that acknowledged connections between experiences of incest and subsequent psychological difficulties,7 to the waves of attention and neglect offered to veterans of war. It seems as if even the study of trauma itself is historically threatening. The naming of experience/s and associated responses as trauma first requires a prolonged tolerance of acknowledging that human beings are capable of violating societal norms and cultural taboos at a far greater incidence than is comfortable and secondly demands some kind of response from those who are awakened to traumatic violations and violence.

Theologically, we have traditionally named experiences that correlate with trauma as “evil.” While the theological concept of evil is helpful in at least naming those experiences and behaviors that threaten the stability and sustainability of life and relationship, it can also be troublesome when it is preached as a sharp binary with the “good” or holy. The black and white, rigid thinking that underlays the good/evil binary can unwittingly limit theological and pastoral responses to traumatized survivors of violence. This binary is particularly detrimental in instances of chronic child abuse when the child already depends on the perpetrator of violence for survival, when behaviors are conflated with identity, or when the behavior of perpetrators is taken in and internalized as shame by the survivor.

Socially, our attention to traumatic experience and response has historically fallen into an all or nothing binary. In moments of social crisis, our social attention and imagination are beckoned to attention to traumatic wounding and response. When we are able, attention to and funding for research and programs to facilitate recovery from traumatic response dissipates and our cultural imagination “forgets.” On the flip side, when attention to traumatic experience/s becomes a topic and norm of popular culture there can be a minimization of the consequences and struggle of trauma recovery. When everything is “abusive,” then experiences of traumatizing abuse are rendered invisible in the cacophony of popular uses of the language. For example, I was at a pastoral care conference several years ago when an established scholar in the community described his experience of being charged $2.50 for a bottle of water as being “raped.” When we use language of violence and assault to describe our displeasure at normal life events, we are robbing survivors of violence and assault of the very language that holds the depth and gravity of their experiences.

How we use language in discussing traumatizing experience and post traumatic response is important. The language we use to describe our experiences can exaggerate, minimize, or accurately reflect the significance and impact of what occurs. How we choose to speak about and understand what occurs is influenced by what our society can or will tolerate. Mary Daly offers four strategies people and society employ to deny systems that perpetuate harm including the sexual caste system and institutional oppression. The four options described by Daly are 1) trivialization (i.e., experiences of harm are minimized in comparison—“sexual assault is important, but no more so than poverty, war, or climate change”); 2) particularization (i.e., one manifestation of harm is valued as more significant thereby limiting the claim of those who experience different forms—“his trauma is ‘worse’ than mine”); 3) spiritualization (i.e., traumatic suffering is classified as a burden to bear akin to Jesus’s suffering on the cross—“this experience is God’s way of testing your faith”); and 4) universalization (i.e., “all people suffer and encounter experiences that are bad and who is to say that your experience is worse than others?”).8 These four strategies highlighted by Daly are regularly employed in response to disclosures of traumatizing experience. They infiltrate our social understandings of traumatic experience, our personal struggles with traumatic responses, and our offerings of hope and resiliency from trauma. When those who offer support underestimate the prevalence of sexual assault, child abuse, or war trauma, we are more likely to retraumatize the survivors in our midst by unintentionally trivializing the experience or response to trauma, misnaming psychological processing as a sign of a lack of faith, minimizing the struggle of post traumatic response or foreclosing on resources of resiliency, or expanding the category of trauma to include experiences and responses that pose a challenge to life but do not meet the criteria of traumatic overwhelm or response.

Knowing OurSelves

When clinicians, scholars, clergy, or others in the helping professions refer to survivors of traumatic experience/s, there is a temptation to see the person solely in the terms of their experience with trauma. This phenomenon is present, and criticized, with regard to mental or physical health medical diagnosis. People become the “cutter,” the “borderline,” “stage three cancer,” or the “hip replacement.” In other areas of life, we become defined by our professions, our hobbies, or our relationships. The labels that we attribute to ourselves or to others have a social function that can be helpful; yet, they can never capture the fullness of who a person is and how they live in the world. The degree to which a particular label or social designation sticks and encompasses personal or social identity largely depends on how integral that label is to our self-understanding. If I decide that the most significant dimension of who I am as a person is my sexual orientation and it becomes one of the core, centralizing features of my self, then my social identity label as gay, bi, trans, or straight will direct how I engage in the world. If I decide, or learn via social conditioning, that is it of utmost important to be “pretty” and meet the criteria of beauty, then I will make decisions that will amplify my ability to be successful in performing beauty. If we teach boys that “real men” are tough, stoic, rich, and use power (even violence) to obtain desires, then we place traits of a particular form of masculinity (which is often toxic to the individual, family, and society) in a more central identity category. Likewise, when we view personal experiences or others’ experiences with traumatic response and traumatizing events as central to identity, it can become the default way in which survivors of trauma live in the world and how care providers see those to whom we provide care. All of us have a great variety of personal identity markers that collectively make us who we are; health and wisdom come when all the dimensions that make us who we are are welcome in our awareness and work in harmony with one another.

What Trauma Is and What it is Not

One of the highly seductive beliefs that individuals and communities have is to equate one part of us with the whole of who we are. This tendency is especially seductive when one part of us requires or claims a large amount of space within the person. Parts that tend to claim a lot of space are those that are either significantly wounded, burdened, or those that keep us distracted from our experiences of wounding. The word “trauma” etymologically derives from the Greek word meaning “wound.” Trauma at its most fundamental level means wounding. Wounding can occur when a part of who we are is exiled by societal structures (sexual orientation or institutional racism), family norms (expectations of achievement, appearance, or performance), personal expectations (feelings of being “not good/smart/pretty/etc. enough), or life experiences that fundamentally challenge our belief of who we are or how the world works. The more integral the wounded and exiled part of us is to our self-understanding, the greater the felt impact will be and the more other parts of the person will respond in increasingly rigid and demonstrative ways.

Wounding, whether it is physical, psychological, relational, or spiritual, can occur in a variety of settings throughout life—from our earliest years when our cries for comfort and physical needs are met with either neglect or overbearing expectations, to our development as we negotiate the losses of divorce, death, or violence. These injuries can be traumatizing wounds or can remain non-traumatizing wounds that heal via the innate biological and psychological systems of normal processing and repair. Traumatic wounding often occurs when we experience a crisis event or violence. Crisis events include natural disasters, assault, death of a loved one, loss of vocation, home, or ability, and an array of other experiences (including those listed in the diagnostic criteria for traumatic stress disorders in the DSM-5) or a significant threat to life. Crisis events often precipitate responses designated as (big-t) Trauma. Socially, we understand and have compassion for the presence of traumatic wounding and response after experiencing crisis events. It makes sense to us collectively that participating in war, experiencing sexual assault, or losing your home to fire or hurricane flooding would generate feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, terror, despair, etc.

The connection between crisis events and how human beings respond to those events sometimes leads us to draw such a tight connection that we being to think the events themselves are trauma. We begin to presume that the crisis event, and by extraction only crisis events, leads to trauma. It is important to key into the possibility of traumatic response in the wake of crisis events; however, it is a mistake to limit our awareness of trauma responses solely to crisis events. The risk in the mistake is that we become more vulnerable to missing out on other prevalent, significant contexts that also traumatize people and communities. Many times it is the “quiet,” unseen, chronic conditions of systemic and/or relational abuse and violation that generate the most entrenched patterns of traumatic response. These ongoing experiences become habituated and consequently are bypassed in our thinking about crisis. More tragically, it is these recurring, ongoing, or chronic violations that escape awareness, evade our efforts of care, and are distanced from our collective attention. We take on the very amnesia or denial that recurrently plagues our attempts to care for those wounded by crisis and violation.

Whether the precipitating experience is a crisis event or chronic violation or neglect, “trauma” is the response to an experience/s not the event experienced. Exposure to crisis events and chronic violation or neglect set the stage for the development of traumatic wounding; however, there is not a 1:1 correlation. The additional factor that significantly influences whether or not an experience will generate a traumatic wound is the combination of the vulnerability of the person or community prior to the event/s and the degree of support, empathy, and resources present before and after the event to facilitate processing of the experience. A person’s vulnerability to traumatic wounding includes environmental, social, demographic, and biological risk factors that encompass socioeconomic level, history of prior mental health distress, level of education, heart rate variability, and dynamics within family of origin.9 Becoming aware of the vulnerability of developing a traumatic response simply means acknowledging that each person emerges from their own particular social, relational environment with varying resources of support.

We all have a unique set of experiences of receiving support and lacking support that form our internal psychological world. This is a statement of occurrence far more than of judgment or valuation. Each individual takes within themselves experiences of care, neglect, support, friendship, discord, judgment, accomplishment, falling short, hope, and expectations. These unique clusterings of experiences build the resources for our resiliency just as they also generate vulnerabilities. If I don’t have enough support to succeed, part of me learns that the world is a place of scarcity and disappointment while another part of me learns the importance of tenacity. If I have more than enough financial and relational resources to easily meet my goal, part of me learns that there is more than enough in the world while another part of me learns that meeting goals should be easy for me and I may fail to cultivate the skills needed to persevere in the face of obstacles. In both cases, vulnerabilities emerge alongside capacities for resiliency—the trick is finding and supporting a healthy balance.

The other key component in whether or not crisis events or chronic harm will result in traumatic wounding is the presence and type of social response. From the time we are little and throughout our lives, our first response to hurt is to reach out for support and compassion. The toddler falls, scrapes her knee, and cries out for mom. If mom is attentive enough, she will witness the scrape on the child’s knee, acknowledge the injury, provide care either through kisses or band-aids as appropriate, and then send the toddler back into her activity. This innate movement of care that includes witnessing, mirroring, care taking of the wound, and reassurance sets the template for how we give and receive care when we are wounded. If the mother is not attentive and caring enough to complete the ritual of care and misses one or more components, the child will learn over time that she cannot count on others to meet her in her distress; while her physical wound may heal, the emotional/relational wound remains and develops into a burden that part of her carries into future life and relationships. The importance of appropriate social support following crisis events extends beyond the individual into how communities heal or struggle with resiliency in the aftermath of disaster. Consider the impact of the absence of support and care in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. For many survivors, the loss of home was significantly wounding and compounded by the feelings of hopelessness and despair that came from the experience of remaining on roofs for days and other forms of lack of rescue. The experience of being alone in the midst of crisis is often more trauma-inducing than the crisis alone.

When a person’s vulnerabilities exceed their internal and external resources of support and stabilization, traumatic wounding occurs. Traumatic wounding is the overwhelming of a person’s somatic and psychological systems. These systems are part of the focus in the next chapter. All mammals have wonderful somatic/body processes for dispelling overwhelm from our bodies. In the animal realm, this process is most easily seen in the shaking movements of prey animals who have escaped capture. It is the way in which their bodies expel residual hormones and neurochemicals that allowed animals to succeed in their fight/flight response with minimal overwhelm. Psychologically, we all have mechanisms for processing emotional material that facilitates its movement from immediate experience to short term memory and finally into long term memory. When our body processes are unable to escape to safety either physically or psychologically, we freeze or shut down. The process of freezing dampens sensation so that we are buffered from experiencing the full pain of the impending injury. While this biological strategy is advantageous in the midst of crisis, it also is more likely to result in traumatic overwhelm and response. The experience of somatic and psychological overwhelm accompanied by an absence of “good e...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Seeing Trauma
• Part Two: Constructing Trauma-Sensitive Theology
• Conclusion
• Bibliography