What is trauma and why is it important ministry knowledge?

We have a horrible habit of downplaying trauma — both our own and others. This is, at least in part, a protective mechanism. If we admit others experiences are traumatic, we might have to admit things that we have experienced are also traumatic. If we admit our experiences are traumatic, we have to deal with them, and we do not like admitting we may have problems largely because we are not equipped to feel our feelings around our more difficult life experiences. It makes sense we would want to avoid this! Sitting with the pain we have experienced in our lives sucks! Unfortunately, when we don’t deal with our pain, it affects our minds, our bodies, our relationships and our communities. We pass our hurt on to those around us and down to the next generation. In ministry, we are hurt people dealing with hurt people in unhealthy systems and we just keep on keepin’ on because we don’t know how to do it any other way. Traumatic experiences are, in fact, incredibly common. It’s my hope that understanding what trauma is and how common it is will begin to open doorways to healing.*

So, what, exactly, is trauma? According to Judith Herman (drawing on the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry), who wrote the groundbreaking book Trauma and Recovery, “ the common denominator of psychological trauma is a feeling of ‘intense fear, helplessness, loss of control and threat of annihilation.’” Trauma is when we fear for our lives. We generally associate trauma with physical violence such as living through war or sexual assault. Even when these clearly traumatic events occur, we have a tendency to downplay their effects in our own lives and in the lives of others.

Trauma is so much broader and more common than we realize. Think about all of the ways humans can experience a perceived* threat to self that is out of our control. So many things in our lives can be experienced as trauma: divorce, death of a loved one, miscarriage, difficulty in childbirth, fear for the life of someone we love, sudden loss of a job: the list goes on and on.

Let’s think about childhood. There are things we are willing to recognize as trauma for children, like losing a parent or being physically or sexually abused. However, those aren’t the only childhood experiences that can be experienced as trauma. As adults, we are far too quick to dismiss children’s fears and experiences. Think about being a kid, a tiny person who doesn’t fully understand the world and is totally dependent on caretakers for survival. What happens when those you depend on for survival hit you — even once? When you come to them for comfort and receive mocking or silence? When they scream at each other? What happens when you grow up feeling like you have to perform in a certain way to get love and affection (and therefore food and a safe place to live)? There are so many things in childhood that effect us deeply and permanently that we would rather see as just part of growing up, something we need to suck up and deal with. How many times have you heard, “Well, my parents did that to me, and I’m fine” (narrator: you are not fine)?

From 1995 to 1997, researchers at Kaiser Permanente, in coordination with the CDC, studied 17,000 people in the first large scale study into childhood trauma, with the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES). The study was borne out of the experiences of a doctor who began to notice that a lot of his morbidly obese patients were disclosing a childhood history of sexual assault. He began to wonder how these and other experiences affected health outcomes, and, eventually this huge study was born. The study found that almost 2/3 of the respondents experienced at least one ACE, with 1/5 experiencing three or more ACEs. The more ACEs, the poorer long term vitality in physical and psychological health, as well as educational achievement and economic stability. ACEs have a profound impact on our lives, and they are far more common than we think, and many ACEs are things we file under normal life experiences. The ACEs questionnaire takes into account childhood experiences ranging from sexual assault to having a parent who is an addict to being regularly insulted by your family. Even with all that the original ACEs evaluation covers, it does not take into account things like being bullied (tell me being bullied doesn’t feel life threatening and I know either you were never bullied or you’re not able to be honest with yourself), or dealing with racism. Four or more ACEs is considered experiencing childhood trauma, and according to my therapist, four or more ACEs isn’t that hard to come by. When all of the things not included in the ACEs study are included, it’s not hard to conclude we’re all walking around with some wounds from childhood that impact our daily lives as adults. (Take a basic version of the ACEs evaluation here)

Let’s go deeper. Researchers have found that infants can tell when a caregiver isn’t attaching to them (Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score). Babies can tell if their caretakers are in a bad mood or don’t want to deal with them. In infancy we learn if crying annoys our parents and that we will get more caring attention if we are quiet and compliant. Infants and children can read displeasure and interpret it as a threat to their ability to get food and to their safety. Our emotional brains and resiliency are most formed 0–5 years. Now, every parent has their moments, and you’re not irreparably messing up your child if you aren’t always able to be caring and attentive. But the studies show that if we are met with comfort and reassurance regularly we grow resilience and confidence, we know our caretakers will provide for us and protect us, and we grow up feeling safe. If not, we can be formed in such a way that we spend our whole lives repeating the patterns we learned as small children would keep us safe and get us fed.

Not all trauma experiences cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There is a complex interplay between our genetics and out environment. But trauma can frequently be found to be a root of depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, addiction, and a host of other mental (and physical) health issues. Even when a person doesn’t receive a diagnosis, trauma, especially repeated childhood trauma, creates pathways in our brain and survival behaviors that travel with us our entire lives if left unaddressed.

Take, for example, a child whose caregivers have no capacity for dealing with crying. They were shamed for crying in their own childhood, or maybe they are overwhelmed by parenting, and either do not have the skills or the resources to deal with a crying child. The child perceives this and quickly learns that their crying will lead to them being ignored (at best). Being ignored can lead a child to believe they will not get their basic needs for safety and food met. So out of self-preservation, the child learns not to cry. Eventually they learn not to ask for things or to appear “needy.” Now they’re 40, they can’t feel or express sadness or pain, much less ask for their needs to be met AND they view everyone who does cry or wants their needs to be met as needy and look down upon them. By now, they have had their own kids and passed this down, just like this was passed down to them. If spending childhood feeling like expressing needs might leave someone unloved or unfed, that’s traumatic. Like many experiences of childhood trauma, it is far too common and too frequently dismissed as something we just need to get over.

We are all carrying trauma, repeating behaviors that kept us safe that no longer benefit us or anyone in our lives.

Why is knowing all of this important at ministerial leaders? It makes sense to know how to better respond to someone who comes to us and discloses sexual assault or abuse or is reeling from a cancer diagnosis, but why is the rest of this important?

First, because how we respond to people disclosing trauma to us matters. The ability to talk about a traumatic experience and the responses received have a huge impact on whether a person develops PTSD or not. People who feel they have no place to share their story or who receive shaming, blaming, downplaying *or* anger at the perpetrator are far more likely to develop PTSD (Herman), so we need to get better at sitting and being present when people disclose. But also it’s important because the day-to-day annoying, problematic, hard to deal with people in our congregations are using coping mechanisms they learned in order to survive. Things like being controlling, gossiping, having anger management issues, being passive aggressive, avoiding conflict, creating conflict, and the whole long list of the reasons you wanted to quit last week (or this week, or actually did quit your last call) are usually survival strategies embedded in us at some point in life. I am so much better at being compassionate when I can frame people’s behavior this way (it does not excuse being hurtful, however). When someone is behaving in a way that seems out of relationship with whatever is happening, I ask myself, “What is making this person feel unsafe?” Asking this question has been immeasurably helpful when working with people I perceive as being difficult.

By becoming trauma informed we can not only understand our people better but, ideally, create environments in which people can learn to let go of their no longer necessary or useful coping mechanisms. Through the love of God and community grounded in the source of love we can (again, ideally) help people feel safe and loved enough to deal with their shit or help them get safe.

Some might say, “But this isn’t my job! I’m not a therapist!” You are correct about one of those points. Ministers are not therapists, and we should all build relationships with some therapists in our area (if possible, I know a ton of the country doesn’t have this option physically and many people don’t have resources for affording therapy) for referral purposes. Therapy is not our job. But the care of souls is. Healing* is. Jesus sent out his disciples to cast out demons and to heal and we have abdicated this responsibility to a degree that is irresponsible and has deeply harmed our individual communities and the wider church. We provide inadequate, uninformed, and sometimes harmful care to people dealing with acute trauma and allow old wounds and behavior patterns to fester and devour our communities from the inside. How many of us have inherited a congregation with deep dark secrets or really unhealthy systems that are destroying it but have no idea what to do? Our lack of ability to deal with these problems is one of the things pushing the much coveted younger generations away from church. They feel these patterns. Younger generations are far more aware of their lack of mental health and actually want to do the work to become healthier — then they walk into our doors and see unhealthy people perpetuating unhealthy systems and are like, “nah, I’ll stick to my yoga and instagram therapy TYVM.”

Trauma is a social justice issue. Frequently we are unable to empathize with the pain of others because the pain of others shows us something about ourselves. If we admit that certain things are hurtful to others we either have to deal with our similar wounds or with the ways we have caused harm (which probably go back to our wounds). If we want white people to be able to deconstruct their own racism, we have to help them get better at dealing with their own pain and shame. If we want to create supportive communities for any marginalized community or that is inclusive of marginalized communities, we have to make those spaces safe, which means creating space for people to deal with their own pain. We need to understand how the trauma lives in the bodies of everyone, marginalized people in particular, to be able to see how our trauma responses are acted out in our congregations and the wider community. Communal healing and individual healing are interwoven; one cannot be done well without the other.

Finally, being trauma informed, if nothing else, helps us see and work through our own issues. Becoming trauma-informed helps us see all of our own unhealthy patterns and gives us tools we can use (along with therapy! go to therapy!) to help us not only survive but thrive in ministry. Like most of our congregation members, we have coping mechanisms that kept us safe that are now super unhelpful when dealing with conflict or trying to be present with people in their pain or joy. We people please or hide or get confrontational because that’s how we kept ourselves safe, but these things sure aren’t helping us now that Steve and Marsha hate the fact that we switched to common cup and are intent on destroying us.

Unfortunately, there are not a ton of resources specific to trauma-informed ministry. When it comes to being trauma informed, folks working in ministry are way behind social workers, life coaches and yoga teachers. In a time when there is an increase in addiction and suicide, when our youth appear to be struggling with anxiety and depression at unprecedented scales we need to start diving in to figure out how we can support people in their healing.

Next time: What does it mean to be trauma-informed? How do we provide trauma-informed care?

I am not a therapist. I am a pastor who started teaching herself/learning about trauma because it became necessary for the ministry I was doing. I’m doing this to share what I have learned with others in ministry in the hopes that we can start having more conversations and maybe create something new. However, I do have a licensed therapist who specializes in trauma read my stuff so I get it right.

*I have seen many in the disabled community do not like the term healing, but I don’t know of a better alternative. I am happy to take suggestions for better phrasing.

*An important thing to know about trauma is the experience of trauma is based on the person who has experienced trauma’s perception of the experience. No one gets to define for anyone else what is or is not traumatic.