Engaging Our Stories Part 4: Two Things at Once

Photo by Ayush Madikunt on Unsplash (The dog will make sense later in the post)

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.