I lost 15 minutes looking out the window in a fog after a Zoom call with a trusted, central staff member who was tendering her resignation. This loss came during significant financial stress and personnel conflict after years of departures, accusations, mistrust, and attempts to rebuild. Her departure triggered more questions about my leadership abilities and the viability of our future.
Bits of memory associated with past departures, low staff morale, and extra workloads floated by. I was experiencing a small-t trauma, and I needed to engage the terrain of what trauma brings before I took my next steps.
Understanding the Definition of Trauma
More than a few of you will dismiss the premise that trauma was involved in that scenario, as well as the value of calling an organizational disappointment “trauma.” If that is your initial impulse, I am grateful. It is essential to question the cultural zeitgeist of referring to losses, disappointments, or insults as traumas.
However, the experience of trauma is not merely a matter of the severity of the event but instead what we each bring to the experience of living east of Eden. Small-t trauma, as I describe it—such as being passed over for a well-deserved promotion, losing a friend who moves away, or feeling unresolved conflict in a marriage—is connected to an event but often has unaddressed stories that fuel its fire. Capital-T trauma involves any significant loss or violation that is a soul earthquake—death; severe illness or injury; divorce; financial disaster; or loss of a job, home, or reputation. It is actually often more difficult to recognize and confront small-t trauma because we are prone to dismiss lesser harms as inevitably normal, and the expectation is to press on and get over it.
Biophysicist and clinical psychologist Peter Levine says, “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathic witness.” Indeed, the severity of the insult, loss, or injury plays a role in trauma, much the way the speed at which one is traveling affects a car crash. Still, our history and stories of past harm are the interpretative and experiential grid determining the trauma level of an event. As in my staff resignation example, even small-t trauma has the potential to cause significant aftershocks of unresolved heartache.
Trauma involves a wound that threatens our being—whether physical, relational, personal, or communal. Traumatic experiences seldom remain embedded in the body (leading to post-traumatic stress disorder) if the person feels empowered to respond and the threat is diminished or resolved over time. Trauma becomes wired in the body and brain when the threat is ongoing and there is a lack of safety and attunement that allows the trauma to be processed and addressed.
Why is it crucial to become a trauma-informed pastor?
Becoming a trauma-informed pastor provides a context in which to engage with the deepest questions and struggles of the heart and seek what it means to be deeply human and pursue God. Unresolved trauma significantly ruptures our relationships with God, others, and ourselves. When we feel under threat, our thinking gets scrambled as stress-related biochemicals diminish our cognitive processes. We feel vulnerable, and emotions other than fear (flight) or anger (fight) go offline. We become numb, and the more out of control we feel, the more likely we are to isolate.
As we disconnect from our internal world and others who can provide a compassionate witness, we become more self-protective and invulnerable. It is tragic that many consider toughness and self-reliance a form of trusting God and spiritual maturity.
Understanding trauma helps pastors see the ways the kingdom of evil offers faux solutions that only add to trauma and take hearts far from God. We enter trauma to war on behalf of the gospel. Understanding trauma is knowing the ground on which the battle is fought.
We are story people, shaped by and living out a character formed by broken moments where shame and heartache intruded into our lives. The loss of the valued employee triggered my long history of feeling responsible for keeping a “system” intact and stable. The story undergirding that unwieldy burden is my history of taking care of a mother with borderline personality disorder. It was my job to soothe her, absorb her rage and insecurity, and shrug it off as no big deal when she was once again sane.
Trauma—big T or small t, surfaces the brokenhearted stories that call for the prisoner to be set free, for the blind to receive sight. Healing comes as we enter the stories, present and past, that we are most reluctant or scared to feel the weight of what occurred. Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger writes in Spiritual Trauma Care, “Healing begins as the traumatized manage to piece together a coherent narrative, creating a web of meaning around unspeakable events while remaining fully connected emotionally both to themselves and to their listener.”
We can’t find coherence and meaning by hovering high above our heartache and attaching a Bible verse or a great theological truth as a palliative to the wound. We must enter the debris to piece together the crime scene where the harm occurred.
The trauma-informed pastor needs to walk the terrain of the valley of the shadow of death before accompanying another on that journey. (Notice, this is not a normal part of the curriculum of most seminaries). We don’t need to suffer every loss, insult, or injury our people may endure; we only need to know what debris any of our trauma triggers and what it tempts us to become instead of wrestling with God. You can only take someone as far as you have been willing to travel in your own trauma.
The trauma-informed pastor will be story engaged, caring for the trauma in the moment yet aware of other stories impinging on what is being experienced in the present. A tender, wise witness invites the struggling heart to enter the complex narratives of our story with the story of Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. These are more than truths; they are also windows into our experience of trauma (death), rescue (resurrection), and return (ascension).
Engaging with the trauma of those you lead will invite you to a deeper engagement with the core questions that need the presence of God more than mere answers. The healing path is not only transformative, but life-giving and holy. The people you lead and serve will undoubtedly experience the benefits of your journey.
When you become trauma informed, you develop capacity to weep with those who weep and to rejoice with those who celebrate the healing power of God’s presence.
Dan Allender, PhD, is a leading Christian counselor and founder of The Allender Center. He also serves as professor of counseling at The Seattle School.
