I want to continue to unfold and develop the ideas I brought up in the last installment in this series on Engaging Our Stories. In part three, I summarized Westminster Confession of Faith 1.1, 1.2, and Westminster Larger Catechism in this way: The Scriptures are necessary, given by inspiration of God for faith and life, and teach principally what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man. (Scripture proof texts are in the footnotes of the last post.) I want us to continually keep in mind the purpose of Scripture as we continue in this process of letting Scripture inform us as we engage our stories of spiritual abuse. If you didn’t know, I also have a podcast, and the last two weeks, I have featured my friend, MaKayla Ross and she tells her story of abuse and finding healing in God’s Word. Part 1 she tells the story of abuse and Part 2 she talks about how returning to God’s Word and church has helped her heal. I think it’s a beautiful example of the way God works in His Word, and will perhaps offer you hope as you are on your own journey after abuse.

Last Friday, I talked about how trauma does not make a good hermeneutic, and I want to unfold that a little more to discuss how we should not let the lens of trauma and trauma responses allow us to stray away from the truth of Scripture about our healing and our sin in the process of healing.

Scrolling through my various social media feeds, I am inundated with a lot of posts about trauma, and many of them are secular in perspective. That is not necessarily to say that they are not of any help at all, but that I’ve learned that I need to let Scripture help me discern what to take and what to leave. One of the big issues that is controversial or sticky when it comes to talking about our trauma, particularly in our newer trauma informed landscape is the topic of sin. There are a few reasons for why this is difficult:

1. We may have learned that we need to bear the burden of our sin, and fix ourselves. We didn’t understand grace or sanctification, and so we don’t know what to do with our sin, and it truly is reason to feel overwhelm and despair, so we just try to avoid the topic or stop the behavior on our own.

2. When we tried to point out our abuser’s behavior, the abuser (or others) may have said something along the lines of, “You have sin, so you have no business pointing out my/their sin.”

3. Teachings on sin sound similar to things we may have been abused with, bringing up shame that was used to control and manipulate us in the past, causing us to feel the triggers of the past.

4. Trauma informed therapists and online sources teach about trauma responses, and in many ways, skip the idea of sin completely, and it becomes difficult to tell the difference between fight or flight and sin as we wrestle through the aftermath of spiritual abuse.

5. Unhelpful/unbiblical Christian counseling set us up to believe that negative emotions or mental illness like depression and anxiety are a sign of lack of faith, and if we would just repent and live right, those sinful problems would go away, and now it’s difficult to address the issue without it seeming like this kind of advice, when we really need to heal from wrongs done to us, things that are the result of another’s sin.

The trauma informed posts and books that are available have helped us to feel understood and affirmed. We are not crazy. Our bodies have been keeping score, and we finally have words for these strong reactions to triggers, memories, or even anniversaries of troubling events. I think this is good and helpful, but I think where we go wrong is allowing this to absolve us of seeing where we may be sinning in our process of healing if everything can be called a trauma response. In a different way than a spiritually abusive environment that lorded sin over us and used shame to control us, hiding the good news of the gospel from us, this trauma informed way of thinking also can cut us off from the finished work of Christ and viewing ourselves in light of His work because in some ways it takes away the problem of our sin by explaining away behaviors and excusing them, but still leaves us with the effects of our sin and no idea what to do with it. There are also people leading the deconstruction movement who blatantly minimize sin and deny our need for the substitutionary atonement of Christ.

To illustrate, I want to use something I wrestled through in my own life, that I brought to my pastor last year while he was preaching through the book of Romans. One Sunday, he preached on Romans 8:5-8:

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

The gist of the sermon was that once we become a Christian, sin doesn’t disappear, but there will be things that distinguish believers from unbelievers. Paul is saying that there are things that because we are believers that God is working in us, so there will become an observable difference in our mindset (what is my thinking consumed with most of the time?), disposition (more peace, rest, stillness, contentment, satisfaction, and our purpose changing to please God.

At the time of this sermon, I was in EMDR therapy and had opened the proverbial can of worms of my trauma. My PTSD symptoms were front and center for me, so that meant, I was acutely aware of my extreme amount of anxiety and hyper vigilance, always seeking and thinking about safety, and aware of many trauma responses. In fact, for many years before EMDR therapy, I would pray and ask God to help take away my “idol of safety” and I was finally understanding that once my body was entering into fight or flight, it had no idea that it was safe, and that prayer was perhaps not the most accurate way of viewing what was happening with me. PTSD was a real thing happening in my brain, causing me to respond to my past, and feeling as though the past event was currently happening, and not necessarily a lack of trust in God. That was comforting to understand. Yet, at the same time, I knew that within that PTSD diagnosis, amid my hypervigilant frantic search for safety, I would sometimes react with sin. The example that I was the most aware of was snapping at my husband because I was often misperceiving things in our relationship as unsafe, then I would respond in a sinful way to him. I was actively working to uncover and process through the past events in my life that contributed to my panic, and encountering (mostly on the internet, not in my real-life sessions) a vein of trauma recovery that was just sweeping everything under the rug of trauma response. We are victims, so our responses are just to be expected and we are not responsible.

I was in conflict and even felt a painful sting within listening to the sermon. On the one hand, I was getting excellent help in EMDR therapy with my counselor and finding healing in the process. At the same time, I was aware of secular advice on social media saying that everything is a trauma response, and essentially absolving the survivor of behavior, doing away with sin. I had also been under the influence in the past of unhealthy and unbiblical nouthetic counseling which told me that everything was sin, so PTSD was sinful because I was so fearful and depressed.

All of these things were clashing into one another as I listen to my pastor describe with Scripture the hallmarks of a believer, and at that particular time, I was so aware of my lack of peace and stillness (one of the examples of a trait of a believer), as a result of trauma. I even bounced back and forth in my mind about quitting EMDR therapy, wondering if it was actually biblical or helpful. Suffice it to say that I was experiencing turmoil over this topic. So, I reached out and asked, in the form of a pretty long email, my many questions about this that boiled down to: Where do the need for healing and the need for repentance and sanctification intersect? Were my responses sinful or were they not?

I have returned to his response quite a few times over the last year or so and even used it to help as I walked alongside of others struggling with the same thing in the aftermath of trauma, so I will now summarize it to help get us to a place of understanding multiple things can be true at the same time.

He responded by using an analogy he’d used before in the sermon series. That idea of what makes a dog a dog? It’s its DNA, and that makes it an internal objective reality that a dog is a dog. Just listing external markers is not really accurate because dogs can look all kinds of ways, especially if they’ve been neglected or abused. They might even be unrecognizable, but as time goes on, and they receive care and healing, they start looking more like the dog they are. He related this to my situation. (And this was when I told my husband that our pastor called me a dog. I’m KIDDING!)

So now I’ll relate it to all of us recovering and navigating these tricky and difficult issues. That we are in Christ is an issue of changed DNA. It is an internal, objective reality that God’s Spirit dwells within us and it is just simply true. We may struggle and have some traits that don’t look exactly like a Christ follower because of abuse and hurt. As time goes by and we experience healing and goodness, we will start to look more and more like Christ.

So, there are things that are the result of living in a broken world, like our abuse stories and the aftermath. (This is where the idea of sinners, saints, and sufferers comes in handy!) So, all of these post abuse PTSD and other kinds of struggles are likely also mixed with sin. I’d like to directly quote the email, “Our prayer ought to be for Christ to reveal where sin is, either the cause or maybe a secondary result of our hurts and help us to repent. At the same time, it’s ok to admit the damage that has been caused and the effect it has had on your mind, heart, and life… I think it’s perfectly acceptable and the only sufficient explanation to say BOTH, that you have been abused and have a fight or flight response AND that you can/are sinning against your husband {or whomever}. You can admit it openly to him. You can pray to God for help, healing, and forgiveness for all the same things.”

I know that it’s not popular to go ahead and tell survivors that they also need to repent of sin as they struggle through the pain and trial of recovering from abuse, but unless we can acknowledge that part, I don’t think we can effectively reconstruct our faith, appreciate the gospel as good news for us, or view Christ’s life of obedience correctly in the midst of His experienced trials and his own kinds of trauma. He did for us what we could not do for ourselves, and it is a great relief to be able to call upon Him in the middle of our distress. We can freely confess our sins to Him and have a great calm assurance that we are forgiven, and we can also bring the tangled up mess of our post abuse lives without understanding it all, and just lay it down before Him.

For more discussion on confession and assurance, please also listen to my latest podcast episode which talks about the true affirmation, “He has paid fully for my sin.” I am releasing it today instead of waiting for Thursday because I realize that it could be a helpful companion to this post.

Next Friday, I want to take a look at Jesus and the New Testament and see what we can learn about His perfect life of obedience in the face of trial and what some would call trauma.

I want to plainly state what I see happening in the aftermath of so much of our collective trauma awareness as a culture to explain why I feel so strongly that a warning is needed about how we engage with our stories.

The Good

• There is a growing awareness of the issues of abusive pastors and leaders within the church, and knowing the warning signs of abusive leadership.

• The church is also being cleaned up because of the exposure of many false shepherds.

• Survivors can understand and name what happened to them and seek healing.

• We can care for one another in wiser and more trauma informed ways within the church.

• We understand the importance of churches being safe, both in preventing abuse and taking it seriously, and in receiving survivors and caring well for them.

The Bad

• There are wolves in this survivor movement, that want to prey on the vulnerability of the traumatized.

• There is an overuse of words like abuse, trauma, toxic, narcissist, and other terms, and when everything is abuse and trauma, then nothing is.

• We are too preoccupied with safety as the end goal of our faith and life.

• Survivors can tend to find their identity wrapped in a trauma diagnosis, which can lead to other damaging beliefs about themselves and God.

• When survivors are too focused on trauma and the need for safety, they miss out on learning to be resilient and obtain skills and tools to press through difficult or scary things (why seeing a personalized care and qualified counseling and not relying on social media therapy culture is very important!)

• Survivors are tempted to view everything through the lens or worldview as trauma survivor, and this becomes especially dangerous when we approach the text of Scripture.

I realize that I just opened up a big can of worms, and I also plan to take the time to unfold each of the above “bad” points, as I continue these Friday posts, but to start, I want focus on the last point on the list. Trauma is not a good hermeneutic and we need to be very careful that we don’t let our traumatic stories distract us from the greater narrative that is being told in Scripture.

A hermeneutic is simply a method of interpretation. Our trauma does not make a good hermeneutic because the effects of trauma and the unbiblical teachings within “trauma culture” (I don’t know what else to call this for now) pose the risk of making us biased as we approach the text, potentially causing us to miss what the text is saying. The Bible tells us what it is about, and there are a several guiding principles we must use as we read the text if we are to understand it properly, including understanding the original intent of the author, letting scripture interpret scripture, and seeing the overarching story of the grand redemptive narrative of the text. The Bible is telling us one unified story and the Bible is about God.

I would like to invite you to look at Scripture from the perspective God has given us within His Word. Full disclosure, I am coming at this from a confessionally reformed perspective, and so I will be quoting from the Westminster Standards when applicable as we work our way through these ideas in the coming posts. I will quote and leave the scripture proofs in the footnotes and encourage you to pause and spend time studying each one. Additionally, If you are new to the idea of confessions and catechisms, a simple explanation is that the confessions summarize the core doctrine of Scripture can be found here.

Chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) 1.1:

I. Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable;^a yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation;^b therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his Church;^c and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing;^d which maketh the holy Scripture to be most necessary;^e those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased1.^f

I wanted to quote this entire section because it tells us why Scripture is necessary. Essentially, this is saying that what we observe around us that gives us information about certain aspects of God, but is not sufficient for us to have the specific information we need for the knowledge of salvation, so God spoke in the past through many ways (think OT prophets and NT apostles), to reveal Himself and declare His will, that time of God speaking through prophets and apostles is finished and we have all the ways God spoke through them written as The Bible.

WCF 1.2 lists the sixty-six books of the Bible and tell us that they all “are given by inspiration of God, to the rule of faith and life2.”

And finally, The Westminster Larger Catechism Question 5 asks, “What do the Scriptures principally teach? And answers, “The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man3.”

To summarize everything up to this point:

The Scriptures are necessary, given by inspiration of God for faith and life, and teach principally what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man.

This is the starting point for us as I take us down this path of what Scripture has to say to us and our trauma stories. The Bible is not meant to be a text that we can take and make it our own to make statements for our particular issues of interest, but a place for us to lay down what we have experienced, and let the truth of Scripture illuminate our hearts and stories by the power of the Holy Spirit. God, the Maker of all, who knows us completely, and knows far better than any finite trauma informed person the effects of trauma on His creation, and nothing can separate us from His love.

It was middle of October of 2013 and I can remember how I was feeling. My mind was spinning with rapid thoughts, eyes moving quickly, short breaths, and I felt like bursting out of my own skin from head to toe. I was terrified, convinced even, that I was alone and that no one could understand me well enough to help, and nothing was safe. I was triggered. I was in anguish and pain. I felt like I was losing my mind, and I was trying to process my entire life, but I didn’t know how. I was desperate to know the truth of what happened in the cult I just left, and in my own family, but no one could explain it. And, I felt like not only was I voiceless, and no one was listening to me, but that I was also being drowned.

When I first left the cult, I sought refuge in another church that turned out to be spiritually abusive in different ways than how I grew up. I had been trying to get the pastor and his wife to listen to me, and to try to understand the despair I was experiencing. They had me come to their home every other Tuesday, and have sort of counseling sessions in their basement after dinner. I have mixed feelings about those days. They welcomed me into their home when I had no family, and they even helped me leave the cult I grew up in. However, the pastor was ill-equipped to help me, but that didn’t stop him from giving me a book by Jay Adams, and telling me that my depression (the only word I had for it at the time) was sinful and the result of self-focus.

I remember trying to advocate for myself, trying to research and understand that something different was happening than simply sinful self-focus. I brought a list of books about spiritual abuse to the pastor and begged him to read them so he could know what was happening with me, but he didn’t read them. He actually made me promise to stop researching spiritual abuse, and told me instead to read the Jay Adams book about how Scripture was all I needed to heal.1

That is an example of how sometimes, oftentimes, particular types of biblical counseling can go extremely wrong, and be very dangerous.

I’m sharing this because I want you, dear fellow survivors, to know that I understand the kinds of pain that people with good or bad intentions have done by stressing the sufficiency of Scripture and faith in healing from trauma, without having an actual biblical view of suffering, an understanding of the serious effects of trauma, or even what the Bible actually does say to someone after trauma. I want you to know that there is a difference between what they may have said, and what I want to say about the sufficiency of Scripture to speak to and inform your trauma of truth (in addition to whatever professional mental health work you need).

So, back to the bad counseling story, I listened to the pastor, and I did seek comfort in the Word of God, and God did meet me there. However, I did not see nearly complete healing in my symptoms for more than 10 years after finally seeking qualified mental health therapy. I want to stress that although the counsel I received was terrible and dangerous, I did cry out to God in that season, and He met me where I was in His Word, in the book of Job. There, I saw Job’s friends, saying things very similar to what I’d heard recently about my own suffering. I began to wonder if my pastor and his wife were also “miserable comforters” like Job called his friends. I saw hope in those pages, and I believed that “my Redeemer lives,” and God gave me the strength to go on. I saw that what those unwise counselors were telling me was different than what God was saying in Scripture, and eventually it was Scripture that led me to leave that group as well.

That week in October 2013 when I was spiraling in fear and despair, and researching spiritual abuse, I found a helpful quote from a book called, Recovering from Churches that Abuse, by Dr. Ron Enroth. It says,“Spiritual abuse is a kind of abuse that damages the central core of who we are. It leaves us spiritually discouraged and emotionally cut off from the healing love of God.”

That quote helped me put words to what I was experiencing. Spiritual abuse (trauma) distorts our sense of self and our sense of God and who he is. And this is precisely why we need inform our trauma of truth because there, we will learn to take courage and to understand that we are not cut off from God in our times of grief and lament. There’s a danger in our stories of reacting to this kind of so called “biblical” counsel I described earlier by thinking that perhaps Scripture is not sufficient, or that it is too triggering to read, that can cut off the answer to finding a source of true and lasting healing in the depths of God’s Word, which actually is a very safe place for survivors to go.

II Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” All Scriptures are from God. He did not just breathe on or give a little help as men were writing. Scripture is filled with the very words of God he breathed out to them as they wrote. These words are sufficient for everything you need, particularly, learning who God is, and who you are in light of that.

This II Timothy passage was used more like a weapon in the fundamentalist circles I was in, less confidence and comfort in the power of the Word, and more of a threat to be quiet and not ask questions. We had to accept whatever our leader said that it said, and any mental health struggle was demonic or spiritual and a lack of faith. But when we look at the whole Bible, we can find expressions of lament, grief, depression, despair, deep betrayal. We find Jesus, the one alone “who has the words of eternal life” 2. We can see that He experienced deep sufferings and temptations on Earth as a human, so that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,” and who endured without sin, so that we can now, “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” 3God’s word is full of beautifully good news for you as a sinner, saint, and sufferer.

This is all I have time for this week, but next Friday, I want to spend some more time looking at how Scripture speaks specifically to us in our trials and suffering, and how we should not let trauma be our hermeneutic for reading Scripture.

In keeping with my last post, I have been wanting to write on some of the ways that I was able to heal from my PTSD/C-PTSD diagnosis after trauma. I am writing from my own observations and experiences, and this is not meant to be specific advice, but more like “big sister energy.” I think that it matters the way we view our stories and the resulting struggles after trauma, and I have learned over the last couple of years that I need to be careful with how I engage with both my and others’ stories.

The next several posts in this particular series will be unfolding that topic, by telling my story, and relating the lessons I learned through my time in trauma therapy. I also realize that not everyone is in a safe place yet where abuse has stopped, or yet in a place to face and begin to heal their trauma, which is why I am trying to leave a little breadcrumb trail for when you’re ready and able. If you are not ready, please do not feel any shame. Healing takes as long as it takes, it is not linear, and God is with you where you are. Trauma and the resulting struggles are not your fault, so please read this as one speaking from a place of gentleness and compassion.

Last spring, I broke my right elbow and tore my MCL and PCL in my left knee, interrupting and redirecting most of our year. I spent around 9 months in difficult and painful physical therapy for my elbow and knee, and God used this experience to help me understand what He was also healing within me regarding my own story of trauma.

One afternoon, I cried driving home from physical therapy, and it wasn’t because it had been that painful! It was because my physical therapist said something that went way past my broken elbow and right into the difficulty of working through all the internal healing I was simultaneously doing in EMDR therapy. He explained the swelling and stiffening of my muscles and ligaments around my elbow kept further damage from being done to the bones. It helped my elbow survive the traumatic event. However, it no longer served me to have my elbow stuck in nearly a 45 degree angle, even though it felt safe, and was what I had grown accustomed to, not using my arm, and protecting it. It hurt to try to extend it, and that felt scary, similar to the pain that caused the damage in the first place. But, my arm was literally stuck and weak, and it was time to remove the (obnoxious) brace, to engage in the productive discomfort of stretching and strengthening, and to bring my elbow out of survival mode. Just like me. I cried because I realized that the ways I had been engaging with my story and my trauma felt safe, but survival mode no longer was serving me.

Author and licensed therapist, Aundi Kolber, talks about different types of strengths in her book, Strong Like Water, and describes the survival kind of strength it takes to make it through traumatic events and times as situational strength. It keeps us alive. It makes us survivors, and that is something to celebrate! It has an important role to play in our lives and stories, but we were never meant to stay in that kind of strength. It’s easy and almost inevitable that without outside help and a lot of hard work, that we survivors will just live in that kind of survival mode, but that mode, like my stuck elbow, is not where you or I were mean to stay after our abuse and trauma. Aundi conceptualizes strength as a flow, like water changing from gas, to solid, to a rushing river or a gently flowing stream. So, we too, can move from situational strength, the essential kind of strength God equipped our bodies with to survive our circumstances without completely losing our minds, to transitional strength, as we begin the healing process, to integrated strength, the place we were meant to live and flourish.

One of the ways that I think we can unhelpfully engage our stories is by activating our trauma responses in an unnecessary way and creating a cycle that keeps us in fight or flight mode, keeping us in the kind of situational strength we must move out of so we are able to heal. I see this happening in multiple ways, and it’s mostly what I’ve observed in the online world, in spaces where we are all recounting our stories to one another over and over. We survivors are craving someone to validate and understand what happened to us, so we find people who understand, and I think that validation and being believed is very important, even crucial, to finding healing, and at the very least, establishing safe and healthy relationships with people as we are working through healing. But, I do think we can overdo even a good thing. Let me explain. (As the youths say, “Let her cook!”)

Early on, my therapist pointed out to me that I kept wanting to tell her my story, and she challenged me on that, and she explained why. I honestly was pretty angry at her and thought she was wrong at first, but I do credit her now with teaching me how to get myself into a calm enough place long enough that I could get out of fight or flight. For me recounting my story re-traumatized me because I still had PTSD and was reliving the experience in real time, so my body was feeling like the past events were still happening in the present. This means that I had many symptoms that would manifest themselves in things like hypervigilance, panic, and even lashing out at times. I hated it, but it was a cycle I didn’t know I was in until it was too late.

I also was immersing myself in listening to other people’s stories of abuse, and that was also re-traumatizing me. I was in survivor groups online and the venting and sharing was also triggering me. All of this had me in a constant state of fight or flight, and I was not functioning well. I was hypervigilant in safe {enough} places with safe and loving people. If I am being totally honest, feeling panic was sort of a comfort to me because if I let my guard down, something bad could happen again, and all the survivor groups I was in and all the news I was consuming were confirming that. Abuse was happening everywhere, and nowhere was safe, and if I were to just live the normal life that I longed for, then maybe all the bad things would sneak back in.

It was scary for me to step away from constantly ingesting information about abuse, current and past news, and to let my body calm down. It was also scary to stop trying to process my story on my own, like perhaps, I would lose my story somehow, or that I would suddenly be overtaken by abuse if I wasn’t always watching out. But I began to panic less, and that meant that more of my rational part of my brain was on, and I could hear and process truth better. I could also notice my symptoms before I was overcome by them, and this helped me deescalate more often, and stay grounded in the moment.

In addition to removing myself from online spaces and being inundated with abuse stories, or retelling or talking about my own as much (like I said, there is a place for it), I learned to practice several things during this time, and I want to share two of them with you now:

1. Containment

2. Self compassion

Containment, simply put, was me learning how to be able to have a place to keep everything (my trauma stories) until I could come back to therapy to work on them. There are lots of ways to visualize this, but the only thing that worked for me was to place them into God’s hands each week after a session. (I know He was already in total control of my life, but I felt like I could just tell God that I was leaving these things for now, and actively doing this practice helped me step away from constant, unnecessary processing. I say unnecessary because things will naturally come up all the time, but it was best, at least it was for me, to not actively engage all the time.) I was not squishing down my emotions or memories, but I was acknowledging them, and learning that not everything was as urgent as it felt, and I could put them away most of the time until I was ready to deal with them again.

Self-compassion sounds a little “woo-woo” to people who grew up the way I did, being told that liking yourself was not a good idea and it was Christian to basically hate yourself. But what I learned was that I was trying to use the same tactics my abuser did on myself when I began to feel an emotion I didn’t want to feel or “shouldn’t feel.” Like, for example when I would start panicking at church for no apparent reason, I used to try to force myself out of that emotion, rather than being curious about it, looking at it objectively and then addressing it. Then, once I was able to locate which emotion it was and the likely why, I would speak truth to myself with compassion. Often, I would put my hand on my heart (This worked for me, and actually you can calm your nervous system down with hands on your heart exercises. Here’s a link to a podcast that discusses this and other helpful things.) The reason I was able to become so mindful ( I know this also can be a woo woo word, but it’s a real thing!) was because I had withdrawn from the constant trauma cycle, and began to notice and name my emotions. Then, I could speak to them. One Sunday, early on as I was learning this, I was beginning to panic at church, and I remember putting my hand on my heart and calming down, rather than internally yelling at myself, “Why are you feeling anxious! You’re safe! Stop it!” I acknowledged the emotion, and I gently reminded myself of the safety of the place I was in, of God’s work in my life, His love for me, and the rising panic broke into soft, and open tearful release. My body understood it was safe. I was leaving situational strength. I could be in the moment at church, and I could participate in the service with a clear mind, and it was a lot easier to receive God’s Word and to feel safe in church in this state.

I think these practices, or something similar to them, are crucial to healing from our trauma and rebuilding our faith because something else trauma does is alter our core beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. An element of spiritual abuse or abuse within a faith environment is that these events can alter our core beliefs about God, and if we are constantly in fight or flight, it makes it so much more difficult to access the Truth and internalize it, as a replacement for lies. I have said before that I believe it was both the EMDR therapy and the “ordinary means” that helped me heal from my post trauma diagnosis. I’ll discuss more of this in my next installment on how to address our trauma and inform our trauma of truth, rather than letting the false core beliefs learned to keep us stuck next week!

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