From trauma’s immunity to healing’s opportunity

Sometimes I’m completely unprepared for what someone might bring to me in a counselling session. But this is good, because it makes me rely on God and not my own understanding.

Occasionally I have people come to me to receive specific teaching, which is allied by mode to counselling, but then as a session unfolds it can grow apparent to me that we need to abandon the original plan and forge a new path in the session. I always see this as an opportunity, that God’s at work in this, and that departing from a plan is a good thing; we always plan to return to it or weave the original plan back through the lattice of the work being done, by God’s guidance.

I want to discuss how trauma can seem to have immunity to our healing efforts, but that healing truly is the opportunity at hand. But first, I want to imagine a scenario and how I go about it:

Imagine, for instance, that a person has something traumatic occur to them in a social setting and they suffered a breakdown. It’s certainly happened to me, and more than once. We might talk about what may have triggered it, the varying levels and degrees of trauma related to the event, the sheer number of quantifiable burdens related to it, and the time just before the event and the time since. We might talk about the mind and the nature of feeling overwhelmed; about how utter preoccupation of mind to the distraction of other things is a normal part of stress and trauma—the way the mind works in all of us.

With the person’s permission, I might slowly and patiently step back with them, through the event, even the days and weeks leading up to the event, and I also step with them through the days afterward. We would be careful as we approach and identify triggers, being very watchful that they remain safe. We might talk about the support they received, and the empathy that was shown—if that were the case—and how the capacity for empathy may have grown within them because of this experience. If they lacked support, we would try to determine in what way that was significant, and what they would have preferred. In other words, we use the experience as an opportunity to imagine what it might be like to support someone else in the situation that they have just suffered.

We also may talk about the varying emotional responses, including the guilt experienced if they felt that they had let others down in any way, and the shame of the embarrassment in having broken down, because such experiences always leave us feeling out of control. All these are very normal experiences, but of course guilt and shame add ever deepening levels of complexity to our already burdened, variegated and intricate emotionality.

I am often led to share some of my own experience. This sharing is even more powerful if it has recency. It shows the person I’m with how vulnerable we all are; I’m a counsellor and pastor and I experience low self-worth, doubting, anxiety and depressed thoughts. I just see it as normal and nothing to be ashamed about, not that I would ever tell someone to think that. They may observe that it’s nothing to be ashamed about, however, when I share (when I can) how only weeks beforehand something similar had happened to me. See how we can show people through our example and often don’t need to ‘tell’ them what to do or how to think. Example is a more powerful teacher than instruction is.

We might also wonder if there is an opportunity ahead out of such a traumatic event; whether, indeed, the trauma experienced might be observed as a learning opportunity, if only we can step back enough to view the experience through the safety and surety of objective eyes; imagining ourselves as a third person looking into the situation. Traumas are part of our equipping if only we can see them as an acceptable part of our experience. Trauma does happen and we need ways of reconciling it.

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Now to the question of trauma’s felt immunity and healing’s opportunity.

Trauma can feel as if it’s been granted immunity within us; as if it has permission to invade us and cannot be challenged. It can feel as if there is no answer to it. And it can definitely overwhelm us for an answer. Trauma asks so many complicated and convoluted questions that seem interminably difficult to answer.

But healing is the ultimate answer
to the questions that trauma raises.

We can go from a place of trauma’s immunity, where we have no way of efficient affective response, to another place where healing has its opportunity.

First, we must believe this is possible. We must then gear ourselves up for the challenge, acknowledging that this is a marathon and not a sprint. Healing is the long game. And ultimately, if we can willingly and passionately engage in varying levels of support, including therapy and a great deal of reading and the preparedness to try different healing techniques, there is hope. We balance our efforts with rest—lots of rest.

If nothing else, healing is actually a pilgrimage of self-knowledge towards self-mastery. To be oneself is to know oneself. And to be one’s complete self, from the viewpoint of trauma, can almost feel like an impossibility, but please be encouraged; if you believe you can arrive there, you eventually can. And there are always moments of oneselfless along the pilgrimage to encourage us.

So even though the effects of trauma can feel so powerful to the point where it feels like it has immunity against our healing efforts, there is always hope for varying levels of healing. God can do so much more than we ever thought was possible.

Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash