Church Psychology

Defining "Trauma"- Distress, Impact, and the Power of Connection

• Narrative Resources, LLC • Season 1 • Episode 15

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Are we overusing and misrepresenting the term 'trauma'? In the latest episode of Church Psychology, we take a hard look at this pressing issue. We uncover how our society’s rampant misuse of 'trauma' often blurs its distinction from 'distress', diluting its profound meaning and leading to a fatigue that might potentially silence genuine cases of trauma. We want to change this narrative and offer a deeper understanding of trauma, not just as an event, but as an ongoing response to an experience.

Trauma is insidious; it doesn't just affect us psychologically but also leaves its imprints on our physiology. We break down the science of trauma and its effects, discussing how it disrupts our brain function, making it difficult to think rationally when our emotions are in turmoil. We also highlight how trauma can be carried across generations, often surfacing in ways that are not easily identifiable. How does our brain's amygdala play a role in this? And can we harness this connection to break free from distressing patterns? Join us as we weave through these intriguing questions in our discussion.

We believe in the power of connection, compassion, and contribution as potent tools to address trauma. We also discuss the work of Bill O'Hanlon in post-traumatic growth, throwing light on the concept of victimhood culture and its interplay with the term 'trauma'. In the backdrop of all this, we delve into scripture, drawing parallels from the lives of Joseph and other biblical figures, cementing our understanding of trauma from a psychological and biblical perspective. Together, let's redefine the way we understand and address trauma. Tune in for an enlightening conversation on Church Psychology.

Show Notes:

Speaker 1:

Welcome. This is Dr David Hall with Church Psychology. The word trauma is thrown around a lot and it does mean something In an emotional, psychological sense. Trauma is absolutely a real thing but it may not be exactly the thing you assume it is and if you're interested in learning more, unpacking that, see how that may be playing into your role in personal life, in your ministry. Hope you stay tuned in this episode of Great Conversation with Matt and I. Now it's time for that intro music.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to Church Psychology, a podcast of the Nagev Institute. We are mental health professionals looking at the intersections of social and behavioral science in the Christian life. Please connect with our free resources in our open community library at churchpsychologyorg. We would be grateful if you would follow, like or subscribe to Church Psychology wherever you are finding us, and also leave us a review as we start. If we are to love the Lord, our God, with all of our mind, it makes sense to work on our headspace. Let's get to work Well. Welcome everybody to the Church Psychology podcast. My name is Matt Schooniman. I'm here again with Dr David Hall. Hey, david.

Speaker 1:

Hey, matt, good to be with you again. As always, it is, so it is. We are. We are getting a bit of a roll and it's nice because it's funny. You and I have shared different text messages of people that have reached out to us and I will say one just for those who have connected with the podcast early on. We have at least a time in recording. We have not really done a whole bunch to spread the word, which has been neglectful of us. We've been involved with so many different things. Telling people about the podcast feels like Do we even care what?

Speaker 2:

we're doing here, but it's great and we've, you know, as people have connected with the free community library.

Speaker 1:

We're so grateful for that, because that allows us to be able to reach out to you directly, as we have different things for and you know, matt, you were telling me your sister, who lives in Virginia, shout out to Megan, if you listen to this, yeah, and people that are a church community and so grateful and hopefully we're bringing things that are helpful and hope today is one of those things. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 2:

And I think it will be. We've obviously talked about this off recording, so, but you and I, david, we're talking about the use of the word trauma and how often we use it. Well, the society uses it, and so it kind of prompted us to have some discussion about it and we felt like, well, this would be probably a good one to bring to the table. And so today, for those listening, we want to talk around trauma from a place of understanding what it is and how do we differentiate that from other things. This word that you and I had discussed, david, was distress, because I think we use trauma to identify things that are not necessarily traumatic they are maybe distressing but to help both of us in talking about it, but help everyone listening with the concept of how do we peel those two things apart, because I think it's important to do so.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And so that's where we're going to dive into, and wanted to see where those thoughts in your head lead you, david Sure, all the five billion thoughts that circle around.

Speaker 1:

There's plenty. There's plenty. Yeah, they're not. All of them are equal quality, definitely yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's what you've got.

Speaker 1:

So you alluded to this map. We live in a cultural space that the word trauma is thrown about often, yeah, and from a mental health standpoint, incorrectly a lot of the time, I find. Particularly for a lot of younger generations, it becomes the word for anything that is experienced. Sometimes it's uncomfortable of you know, my, you know, doordash was 30 minutes late, it was so traumatic.

Speaker 1:

And oftentimes I think it's much more accurate to say it is dramatic and not necessarily traumatic, and I find this really problematic on a few different levels and I don't want this to be kind of old man rant of like kids these days using the word wrong and no, I want to make it practical of why I find it so problematic. Yeah, it is distorted the actual meaning of the word and the word is a helpful one to understand a lot of what individuals or certain people may experience. And I find that because it's often invoked in very shallow or superficial ways, it also deadens our response to responding to or actually hearing out people in true trauma and the fatigue of how it that term is used in a very shallow way. I see people in the mental health space, I see people in the church space and generally, just in the general public. There's less of a willingness to hear about trauma, I think on an emotional level, definitely to respond effectively to it, because everything's kind of been thrown in the same bucket of distressing experiences to true trauma.

Speaker 1:

And I want to be clear as we start that met and I both believe in emotional trauma. Yeah, we see it, we see the impact of it, it is a real thing, yeah, but I also think so. I think there's an issue with the overuse of the term, how it's crept into general popular culture to talk about just distressing experiences, yeah, but also I think we even just have with a sympathetic hearing. We have a misunderstanding of what trauma is. You're right, we assume that trauma is an event. Trauma is an experience that we have that is upsetting, distressing, disoriented.

Speaker 2:

Well, we even use that phrase, and maybe incorrectly, but a traumatic event.

Speaker 1:

Mm. So you bring up an important point.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Because there is a traumatic events are a thing, but that is not trauma. Trauma and this is a confusing thing about sometimes, where Matt and I are kind of called to speak into things of will be. Someone will tell us, maybe recount something that happened to them or something that happened to somebody else, and they'll ask was that trauma? And what defines something as trauma or not? Trauma does not hinge on the experience. It hinges on our reaction. Or the event, yeah, or the event Right.

Speaker 1:

It hinges on our reaction to that going forward. That's right. So to have trauma, there does have to be a traumatic event, and that is a distressing event, right yeah.

Speaker 1:

So there are such things as traumatic events, but not all trauma traumatic events. All trauma comes out of traumatic experiences or traumatic events, but not everybody develops the same trauma responses, so that's right. For the sake of definition, I'm going to quote. This is a popular writer in the field of mental health trauma, bessel van der Kolk, who's a Dutch psychiatrist and trauma researcher. His book that's really big and famous is called the Body Keep Score, brain, mind and Body and the Healing of Trauma. That came out in 2014. And that's just a very popular book in the mental health space, and not just there. It seems like everybody has that, but for him, van der Kolk, he defines trauma not just as the event itself though it comes out of an event but it's much more to do with the impact on the individual of that event.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, for Van der Kolk's perspective, trauma occurs when a person feels intensely threatened or overwhelmed by events that they cannot control and has no way to escape. This could be the experience of physical or sexual abuse, particularly of a young child. Yeah, this could be a conflict, war zone experience. It could be a traffic accident or any number of things can be this initiating thing of a traumatic event. Yeah, yeah, they go through this, and from Van der Kolk's research there's this idea that these experiences are stored in different parts of our body and in the way that they are stored it affects the person going forward. Trauma can be defined then as an emotional response to a terrible event like a natural disaster, accident, sexual assault. But trauma has more to do with the survivor's experience of the event rather than the event itself. That's why you can have multiple people go through the same event and not necessarily experience the same trauma response. This includes their response both during the event but also in where trauma carries forward, how they continue to react outside of the event, how they carry it with them, and so that's what makes밉.

Speaker 1:

That is one of the difficulties of answering the question of I experienced this event. Was this traumatic? And the answer depends on how you process it, and certain people can go through very similar things and respond to them very differently. And in mental health we often talk about trauma. We use the colloquial expression big T, little T, trauma, and that little T is this idea. There are smaller sorts of things that we can have trauma responses with, in that there's something about the experience that we carry forward in ways that are kind of unprocessed. One of the more helpful metaphors that I learned years ago is to think about trauma sort of like a form of undigested food. There's something in your system that isn't being processed, but anyway. So that's some vanderkel stops in my thoughts, your thoughts, matt.

Speaker 2:

Well, I think it's hard to go on top of any of those. The caution I would give and maybe you can speak to this a little bit in a second is we don't want to minimize people's distressing events and those that actually have traumatic responses. And so it is hard, I think for people at least the kind of person that doesn't have a baby mental health training to kind of cipher through like is this really a traumatic thing for this person or not? Well, ultimately it's a distressing thing. It's how stuck are they? I think is more of the indicator of whether or not it was traumatic for them to even be considered like diagnosable by our standards and at risk of self-diagnosing or people listening and maybe self-diagnosing. I don't want them to do that, but could you maybe speak to a little of what are signs that someone could be responding in trauma?

Speaker 1:

The stuckness that you highlight, matt, I think is one of the big things. It's this idea that one of my favorite songs by the band U2 is stuck in a moment and you can't get out of it and it's like that. There's something that you experience in the traumatic event that sticks you in it and it speaks into your past, present and future in ways that is disproportional to even what's reality. Another person I really like who speaks on trauma is a therapist named Elliot Conny. He's big in a field of psychotherapy called solution-focused brief therapy. In one of his more recent books, the Solution-Focused Diamond, this is a direct quote from that in talking about trauma. That I thought was really helpful.

Speaker 1:

When people experience trauma, their hippocampus, which is a part of your brain, is impacted and has a difficult time distinguishing between past, present and future.

Speaker 1:

Consequently, when they experience a flashback, they can't determine whether their trauma is currently happy or if it's in the past.

Speaker 1:

To make matters worse, the amygdala starts flooding with fear, worry and stress. So, going back to your question, how can someone tell? I often will look at what are their current experiences and do they match the current stimuli, the current event, or do they more align with something they may have experienced in the past, and I'll try to think through just some examples of what Matt and I experienced as mental health counselors, of how this happens. But let's say someone was in an emotionally abusive relationship in the past and they're no longer in that relationship. Let's say we're talking to people in the context of couples therapy and it's a new relationship with a new person. This past relationship may be years in the past, but we're seeing a dynamic play out that the person who has experienced the trauma is responding to their current spouse or their current partner in a way that is disaligned for what that person is doing, but much more aligned with the experience that they had with the previous significant number.

Speaker 1:

And it will be oftentimes a metaphor I use for this in counseling is you're being asked to cover checks. You didn't write that there was something that this person is carrying into this present moment. That doesn't have to do with you, not directly. It has to do with patterns or things they learned in these previous experiences or previous emotions. Another example I think of I've had different friends or family members who've adopted children out of different cultures, different environments, and even though the circumstances now are radically different, the kids will often exhibit behaviors that had to do with their survival in the past, whether that's food hoarding is a common one. That will happen.

Speaker 1:

They may know and I think an important thing to realize in this that the person carrying this trauma isn't unintelligent necessarily. They are confused sometimes for their reactions because it's not happening out of the logical processing part of their brains. Talking about the hippocampus and the amygdala, these are parts of the deeper brain, whereas we reason in a lot of. Where reasoning happens is a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. That is very different from the parts of the brain that will manifest or experience trauma, and so you may know like, hey, there's plenty of food in the refrigerator, but I'm still hiding food in my room because it's being driven by this emotional sort of thing, because I'm carrying with me this part of my past, where there wasn't enough food.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's the emotional flooding is kind of the phrase that's the flooding is kind of that psycho phrase of what's happening to.

Speaker 1:

Psychological phrase. It's not a psycho phrase.

Speaker 2:

Well, psychological psycho-bamb. I don't know what I was trying to say, but there's a level to which it's helpful, because I've expressed this to people in, and this is not necessarily trauma, it is distress when emotions become so overwhelming that it shuts down. What you said was the prefrontal cortex, and so for those listening or those watching, the prefrontal cortex is like your forehead, kind of that area of your brain and the kind of limbic system that David's talking about is in the middle of your brain, kind of back. But that's where emotions are and supercharged and a healthy brain, there's an emotional response that then is sent to the prefrontal cortex to check it out and see is that a legitimate threat and normally it's a no and then it sends it back to the emotional place and it calms everything down.

Speaker 2:

Well, someone that is stuck in trauma or a traumatic response, that connection between the emotion center and the rational center is cut off, at least in the emotional charge or the flooding, and so they can't think rationally about the situation because they're flooded with the emotion.

Speaker 2:

But oftentimes this is sometimes people feel this they're not necessarily in trauma response, but when they're overwhelmed by emotion they can't think clearly.

Speaker 2:

That's why I so encourage or discourage people to think that when they're emotionally flooded they're thinking clearly or they're making strong decisions there, because it's not based on the rational part of your brain and so you kind of have to work to bring the floodwaters down to then begin to reconnect to the rational part when a person's stuck in trauma. Someone told me once it was like it's like you have an alarm system that's always on. We have kind of an internal alarm system where something sparks it and you're like, oh my gosh, someone scares you. Whatever, my alarm system will go off, but as soon as I see that it's my friend just being a jerk, I will rationalize and come back down. Well, some traumatic survivors or people that are stuck in trauma, they can't come back down. That part of the brain is always seeking for danger, and that's some of the stuffness that we're talking about there A lot of us and trauma is not rare, so it's unfortunate.

Speaker 1:

But I think, as we're talking about it, I think I want to make some clear distinctions too. The trauma isn't necessarily something that somebody else has. That a lot of ways. We all carry a certain amount of trauma. How problematic it is depends how big the trauma is and that kind of goes what Matt's talking to. But I'll give some different examples of things. Most of us have gone through different things upsetting, distressing events where we felt powerless that we have carried forward in our lives. Depending on what it is and how intense that trauma is, it will affect our lives in different ways. Sometimes we'll carry trauma in a certain way. That maybe is great, but it's not getting in the way of our lives so much that we feel we need to get it addressed. I'll give an example for this.

Speaker 1:

My grandpa grew up in the Great Depression, in a poor family. Not just depression-era poor, but even before the Depression yeah, I see it had to very much scrounge to survive. He and his siblings would go over, go into potato fields after they'd been harvested and pick over the gleaning for that. My great grandfather was not great with money. He was a bit spin, thrift, as they say, like he was very social but not very dependable. The stories I've heard of him so there was often debt collectors coming to the front of the house and escaping out the back and stories like that are the stories that came down to me and, like a lot of people in a generation in general that grew up in the depression, my grandpa was really tight with money. He was desperately frugal and my memories I fortunately had him in my life. He passed away in my later twenties and so I had him in my life for a significant amount of time and had some great experiences and time with him throughout my childhood and young adult life. But the story's about how tight grandpa was with money. But you can look at that it's a trauma response because he had very visceral, to a certain degree unprocessed, experiences of want, of what happens when there's not enough. So he responded in ways and the reason you can identify this in trauma is because his emotional response to money a lot of ways had nothing to do with how much money he had available to him, because he would want to save money even in something he didn't need to save money on, and it's where the experience of this earlier part of his life carried over into something else.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, a second anecdote I wanna share, and this is one that was very recent for me. I was in my community in Knoxville, tennessee. I was found myself at the gas station sometime back filling up, and the person next to me was filling up and they were on the cell phone and I could hear some of their conversation, which kind of led me to glance over to them. And it was a man of a certain age with a certain kind of physical appearance of how his hair was cut and how he dressed that made me think that he could have been somebody who had served in the military. He kind of had a look that brought up that thing to mind.

Speaker 1:

It was a good thing I thought of that, because it affected things that happened next. But he's on the phone with his wife talking about how he's gonna pick up some Kentucky Fried chicken and come home and that's gonna be their dinner and talk about kids or things like this. And this is just as I'm at the pump next to him, I'm kind of picking up bits of the conversation and while this is happening, a car backfires and he gets flat on the pavement very quickly chest down, just drop.

Speaker 1:

And sits up and begins having a panic attack and I was able to go up and speak with him and to help what we call mental health grounding, and the fact I had caught some bits of his conversation before helped me know what to do. And I say hey, my name's David, I'm a therapist. Where are you right now?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And he said and it took me a second, he's hyperventilating and I'm like, hey, we're in Knoxville, we're at Wigles gas station, You're getting some Kentucky Fried chicken. Where are you right now? Finally he said I'm in Fallujah. Wow, and he's a major battle in Iraq and kind of hands. And we went through different sort of exercises to kind of get him more grounded in that moment and was able to move him out of the panic attack.

Speaker 1:

But that's a trauma response. But here's the important thing in that he heard a car backfire and his Olympic system kicked in and said that's gunfire, you gotta protect yourself. I didn't think it was gunfire, or if I did think it was gunfire, I didn't pick up danger. My first thought when I heard it was huh, I wonder if that's gunfire or if that is a car backfiring, because in the neighborhood there's this one neighbor that's known for like shooting targets and things like that. So I'll hear gunfire, but it did in a quite danger to me.

Speaker 1:

But if you put me in Iraq in 2003, 2004, I'm not gonna survive as well because I'm just kind of looking around. It's like the Dodo birds Just kind of looking around. His response was appropriate for that environment before. That's right. Yeah, the problem was is he was in this distressing environment where his response carried over into a completely different environment and what he needed to keep him alive and this is really important, I think, when we're hearing the stories of people that have gone through childhood abuse of different sorts, different things that oftentimes their trauma responses are the things that they develop to survive. Yeah, but you carry out of the traumatic experience into ideally what's healthier experiences, whether it's a dating relationship, a marriage, dealing with friends, and the response that you needed to survive before could be deeply disruptive and destructive to your life presently. Yeah, anyway.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, I think it was such a powerful question to give him in the sense of helping him ground and grounding mindfulness. Maybe you can kind of share a little bit of why that's so important. But to even kind of acknowledge where he was, I think really helped him not continue to spiral, because in the panic attack state it's just like super flooding. So for those thinking about it I know that some may have had it, but it's like the concept of when you're underwater and you're trying to gasp for air that panic is what people feel, and so, anyway, the grounding piece just stuck out to me. And so why is that, at risk of going down a whole path of like a course that you could, probably we could, give on that, what's so important for that, for a person who is traumatized?

Speaker 1:

I'll talk specifically what I did for grounding, in that it relates to what we've talked about with the brain so far. So I was asking him, trying to get where are you right now? And he may have not been able to tell me that. He was cognizant enough to be able to acknowledge that, and fortunately, because I'd noticed him before and I had some- Context. Yeah, I had some context that made me wonder if this would be the case.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And so I was able to kind of lead into that. But we got talking about the food. I go hey, I heard you're from conversation. You're getting some KFC. Are you original recipe or expert Tasty Crispy? I'm original recipe guy, what are you? And he goes and he's original recipe. I go that's smell. I bet nothing smells like that in Iraq and that's only you can only smell that right here in Knoxville, tennessee and right and so why does that matter? Well, smell is a very powerful thing, and I wanted him to think about the smell, the memory of the smell. Smell is one of those things that will elicit memory, more so than a lot of other things. You go to a certain place or certain. I found myself just a handful of years ago 2018, in a video store, and I had not been in a video store in years, oh, wow.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, forever.

Speaker 1:

Forever, and.

Speaker 1:

I went in and what really struck me immediately was the smell, and the smell is it's kind of the plastic of the cases, but it was a smell that immediately took me back to high school in the 90s, being in Blockbuster Video, but that took me there more so than the sights and the sounds more quickly. But there are different things that will elicit memory. Smell is one of the most powerful, and memory is very much a function of the amygdala, and panic and panic attacks is often very much a function of the amygdala, and so the reason that works is if you speak to the correct part of the brain that's causing the issue, you can more likely get people out of the pattern that they're in.

Speaker 1:

Yeah yeah, because for me to just to try to explain to him in a logical sort of way, that's me speaking to the part of the brain that's not driving the panic, it's the part of the brain that's offline at the point, and so there's no talking him out of that. But if I can elicit things that bring him more into this moment, then that becomes the more powerful thing in it.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, that's really good. Well, we've talked a lot about trauma and kind of what it really is. Now the reality is that a lot of people okay, where my mind goes is that there's a place to which we talked about this in the past, this sense of victimhood culture, and we live in that now. And so sometimes people can use the phrase trauma and not everybody, because I don't want to minimize people's pain but some people can use the phrase of trauma to cast like this victimhood thing of needing kind of the attention and care of others because they went through a distressing event. That's not always the thing. That, though it's maybe rarely the thing that actually gets them through the distressing event or to recover from it or to process. And so, whether it's trauma or distress, like they went through an event that was difficult, how can we encourage people into what to do? That's good.

Speaker 1:

I want to highlight the work of. There are a lot of people that have written into the subjects of trauma and then growth afterwards. It's a field that's called post-traumatic growth. That a lot of language historically around trauma in the mental health field is that trauma becomes, it moves you into this place of permanent victimhood and there's a lot of research that shows that. Not only is that not necessarily true, but it doesn't need to be true. There's a friend and mentor of mine, psychotherapist Bill O'Hanlon. He's written and taught a lot on trauma. He has a course called Resolving Trauma Without the Drama, which is a fun title I love that title.

Speaker 1:

He has a book too and it's in our show notes of Quick Steps for Resolving Trauma, and there are lots of things that he talks about that come out of research of what are some crucial elements that help people move past trauma or not let distressing events turn into trauma, and there are three things that he highlights and going to tell them all now and then unpack them. So the three things crucial elements that O'Hanlon talks about in Resolving or moving through trauma is connection, compassion and then contribution three Cs. We'll start with connection. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in Washington DC and New York, it was the era of multiple cable news, 24-hour news channels and a lot of talking head experts talking about what the effect of trauma was going to be, and there were a lot of people and O'Hanlon talks about this that were quote experts kind of coming on those people saying how are people going to get over this? And there was one person saying they'll never get over this event. And Bill O'Hanlon talks about wanting to reach through the screen and shake this person Because he thought that was so negative and so lacking help and insight.

Speaker 1:

And even taking that event itself, there were a lot of people that assumed that people in New York specifically would have that the trauma responses would be pretty wide. And what mental health practitioners and researchers discovered? That the occurrence of traumatic responses, of post-traumatic stress disorder, was actually fairly low. And brings up the question of why. And one of the things that the research shows is connection that a lot of what will compound or deepen trauma is the isolation that people will feel in it. They are alone and they're cut off in the experience.

Speaker 1:

And the thing about the 9-11 attacks is it was widely felt and experienced. Everyone saw it to a certain degree. Even I was in Middleton Newsy but I watched it on the news and I connected to it in some way. And there are stories of people in New York in the weeks and months after the attacks that would see somebody who'd be looking pretty downcast on the street and would stop and be like are you doing okay? This is not what New Yorkers are historically known for, but the fact that there was this connection of community, that they weren't suffering alone, made a difference and so go on then.

Speaker 2:

Just one anecdote on that, one thing I learned this was back in my graduate school, and I don't have a reference necessarily for it. The concept came up of why have we seen more PTSD as it relates to military events now more than we did before, especially from the World War II generation. And it's not to say that no one from World War II had PTSD. They called it something else. They called it Shellshock. Yes, shellshock, thank you.

Speaker 2:

It was less in one comment that someone had made, and I think they got it. They obviously got it from somewhere, but the differentiation between how fast the soldiers would get home differed a lot. So in World War II era you would have to basically take a ship for two weeks or so to get back to the US, and in that timeframe you're with your buddies in war, your comrades, your superiors, and all that you can probably really do is process what just happened and it's not always the best processing, but it is connection with other people you take. Nowadays it takes you half a day to get home and you're thrown back into the community that has no idea of what you just experienced.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's a key thing too, because, you're right, there has been a lot of people came back from the Second World War with trauma, but not as much proportionally as later wars, and I think that I had not thought about this idea of the Liberty ships as oftentimes what they were on.

Speaker 1:

That's right, that's right, it would be these long and so there's more time to decompress. But part of it was it was a much shared social experience. The proportion of the population that served in some wartime capacity in the Second World War was much wider, as a more population, and also you Good yeah, the home front was involved too. But the idea of, like you're sharing this for a community.

Speaker 2:

Well and you mentioned this in the past podcasts I think it was on our generation one but how there was a kind of shared understanding from even the home front of the importance of the war, and so it was much more of a welcoming. Now take stories that you may have heard from the Vietnam War, where at the home front there was a disunity of what we're doing and so men would come back or people would come back into that space and not have the connection of community because they saw them as problematic for engaging in this war, that they didn't believe in.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, a lot of people would talk about getting spit on when they come back, being called baby killers and so that sense of they were much more isolated in the integration process. Coming back to society and even looking at more recent wars for the United States and Iraq and you understand, you had a much smaller portion of people in service and so you're coming back and you're far less likely in civilian life to be connected.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, and that goes to your second sea of compassion.

Speaker 1:

Yes, and I'll can, because the act of forgiveness is super important and this is a really hard one to talk about, particularly for those who've experienced deep wrongs committed against them.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes.

Speaker 1:

And I want to, before we move into this, of what this can mean for people in their personal trial. There's some caveats, I think, there. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean that you can be fully reconciled to that person based on different circumstances. Yes, that you can. They may not be willing to step into reconciliation and repentance. Even if they are, there may be things about them that you have reason to believe that they're not going to be a safe relationship.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they're not trustworthy, they're not safe.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and forgiveness, though Scripture bounds us to that we are not given an option in that, if we are to live in faithfulness in our walk, that we must forget and that's hard, to quote CS Lewis Everyone's all about forgiveness until they really have something that's big to forgive. And in saying this and I try to walk this very carefully as a mental health counselor with people I don't wanna make light on the ways that they've been harmed and how there's a big part of them that cries out for justice, that works against the desire to forgive. But the science, beyond just the biblical principle, though that is the highest principle, the science of this and the power of forgiveness. There is a research psychologist, ebb Worthington, who's a Christian, who's written a lot on the power of forgiveness in our psychological health. Of that it frees us. This is compassion. This compassion is where we give for ourselves and for others.

Speaker 1:

A lot of people who experience trauma often will feel very there can be a belief that the traumatic experiences themselves were somehow their fault. Oftentimes that is the messaging they're given in the experiences by abusers. Otherwise, that, like this, is the victim in that sense is culpable. They are responsible for this. They may feel a deep sense of guilt and shame in their current circumstances that they are reacting out of in this very visceral, flooded sort of way like you were talking about, matt that they may be lashing out their spouse in ways that, when they calm down, they realize this was deeply unfair. This person did not deserve this. And when we can engage in compassion for self and others, even when it's very costly and difficult, it allows us to heal and transform.

Speaker 2:

That's really good. The last one is contribution.

Speaker 1:

So we've got connection, connection with others, connection in community, compassion for self, for others, even those who have done wrong against us, the third being connection, contribution, contribution, sorry, yeah, all right, thank you Matt.

Speaker 2:

Contribution.

Speaker 1:

To quote Elliot Connie again, one of the things that he says that I really like is when pain has a purpose, it ceases to be as painful, when we can turn our experiences into something that possibly contributes. It doesn't take away the pain, but it does change its impact and its meaning. Yeah, and the hurt that any of us go through, whether it's big hurt or a little hurt. We can let that become lead to deeper isolation or bitterness, but it could also be the vehicle that moves us forward, and I know for myself, matt, I've not known a therapist that doesn't have a certain amount of trauma in their past that affected them getting into the work.

Speaker 2:

Well, there's a concept of and it has a shadow side to it but of being the wounded healer, and we talked about this in grad school, but at the time I saw it as a bad thing.

Speaker 2:

I witnessed a lot of people and not at a healthy space and wanting to be a counselor, or at least I was judging in that sense that they didn't seem at a healthy space and I was worried that they were going into it with the sake of trying to heal their wounds.

Speaker 2:

Now, as I got older, I recognized that you know, to some level I'm doing that too.

Speaker 2:

My hope is that I don't take advantage of the other person to make it all about me, but it is okay to let that which has happened to me fuel my passion to help another person, and that's what I think the wounded healer is. The good side of it is that there's a sense of I can take this pain in the empathy that's built within me for the pain that I've experienced, to truly sit in a tune with someone else's pain and walk with them through that process, and so I think that's the good of what you're talking about, that really anybody in this field I would even say any kind of helping field, there's a level to which something has inspired you to care for another, whether it's a direct hurt that you've happened or witnessing a hurt of another person. You know, I know a lot of doctors that probably went through that at like young time of their life. They're like you know, I want to help someone, not have to deal with that, and so, yeah, I think that's really powerful motivation.

Speaker 1:

I know for myself that it was growing up feeling like a really different sort of kid. Yeah, what we call now is really neurodiverse still in fairly neurodiverse, but that's the but. I had a very strong sense as a child that how I was in the world was different and a lot of ways difficult. Yeah, there were a lot of things that, particularly in school, that really were hard for me, but in that pain that's become a lot of my motivation in counseling. Yeah, because it's given me a source of empathy for other people, and not necessarily people that have gone through the exact same experiences. But when I see other people that feel like the misshapen toys, like I felt, it's easier for me, I think, to see them and have compassion. And yeah, and I think this is so difficult to talk about, where? Because how pain can be transferred into something good or transformed into something good. And it's in our role we're always trying to hold this balance and if you've listened to any of our podcast episodes so far, like everything comes back to, we're holding things in tension.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and the tension here is we want to commiserate and acknowledge the pain that people have suffered and not let them just sit in it in a way that doesn't continue to move forward. And there's several scriptures that outline this. I want to highlight a few, and then there's a longer one that I'd like you to read. But in this idea of scripture kind of gives us this picture of how our afflictions, how our trials, shape us and move us forward. In Psalm 119, 71, it was good for me to be afflicted so that I could learn your statues. In Isaiah 48, 10, look, I have refined you, but not a silver. I have tested you in the furnace of affliction, and then one that really big for me, as in high school I remember learning this is James 1, 2, 3, 4. Consider it great joy in my brothers and sisters whenever you experience various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.

Speaker 2:

And let that endurance have its full effect so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing and Matt, you were talking before as we were preparing for this 2nd Corinthians 1, 3, if you have that, look for you to read that one Well, and before I read that, the thing about those passages are it grows the character and strength of the individual, which is good, and I think that the imagery of the furnace to in the gold being refined like it brings quality to the product. But the one that in 2nd Corinthians is Paul writes, has a different. Focus is not on the self as much as it is on the other person. And so he says that blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort. He comforts us in all our afflictions so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction through the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ overflow to us, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.

Speaker 2:

If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation. If we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings that we suffer. And our hope for you is firm because we know that as you share in the sufferings, so you will also share in the comfort. And he goes on to say, kind of the extremity of what he went through, but how much Christ is more. And so you know the reason I love that is because Paul is kind of saying to us in that, at least from his understanding of the afflictions that he has carried, is for the building up of the people that he's writing to in this space, and I think that that really makes purpose and meaning in the suffering that we walk through. Talking back to that third point of contribution and giving it away to others, Well, matt was just reading, I misspoke it.

Speaker 1:

But second Corinthians one, starting in verse three, I said second Corinthians three. So what people find that right? And this is in the show notes. What's hard in this is I can see people in this saying is like so are you saying that trauma I went through was good? Are you saying that the fact I was abused in this way, of the horrific thing I witnessed, are you saying that's good? Right, and I want to be very clear no, I'm not saying it is good, but I do believe that part of what I believe about the Christian life and God's purpose for us is he works through the death and destruction that we are in the middle of. He goes through it, he doesn't go around it, he doesn't ignore it. Part of conquering death is letting it become a transformative experience. And I don't look back on things that I've experienced that I would call very difficult and distressing things and think, yeah, I would love to do that again or that was a pleasant experience. I don't. But I do look at the fruit of certain things that I feel I'm grateful for and I wouldn't want to be without it, and I have to look back and say would I have been transformed in this way, without this difficulty.

Speaker 1:

The last bit of scripture that's we're starting to wrap up that I want to touch on is larger narrative, but it's at the end of the book of Genesis, of the story of Joseph. He struggled, his brothers are envious of him. There does seem to be in how Joseph is kind of telling them stories of the dreams he's having, that he is kind of being an irritating younger brother. He's been a little brother for sure. He's been a little brother for sure. And then so his brothers decide to sell him into slavery.

Speaker 2:

Not the appropriate response to that Not the appropriate response.

Speaker 1:

But that becomes. And then that becomes the series of things Get sold into slavery, ends up in the house of Potiphar, ends up getting falsely accused of sexual assault, gets thrown into prison. It's not one thing, it's multiple things over many, many years, but eventually gets to a place of high prestige and leadership within Egypt. His family back in the land of Canaan is in famine and suffering from that and, come and through the series of many different things, Joseph is able to call them to the safety and provision that he can provide through his position. And there's at the very end in Genesis 50, their father, Jacob, then known as Israel, has died. And then his brothers become afraid. This idea of, now that our father's dead, is Joseph finally going to have his revenge? Because he said before he spoke forgiveness to them and understanding to them. But they were very afraid once their father died.

Speaker 2:

And this is.

Speaker 1:

Genesis 50, 20, and Joseph speaking to his brothers you planned evil against me. God planned it for good to bring about present result the survival of many people. It doesn't change the difficulty and the hardship of it, but it doesn't change the initial fact of it, but it does allow it to become transformed into something different. So, as we're wrapping this up, I want to speak to one trauma. Trauma is not just distressing things. Not all distressing events are traumatic. Trauma is the sense of being stuck somewhere and how those experiences carry on into the future with us, whether it's in big ways or small ways, ways that are hugely disruptive in our lives, or even small things we may be able to identify. But also, trauma has the ability to be transformed through the things that we're talking about of connection, compassion and contribution. You and your wife are involved in a great ministry Street Hope.

Speaker 2:

Street Hope, Tennessee, that's right.

Speaker 1:

And talk a little bit about the work of that, just because I think that's a great example of where people do it's speaking to trauma.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and Street Hope is an organization here based in East Tennessee, a nonprofit ministry that is trying to end domestic minor sex trafficking, and so a lot of times when people think about sex trafficking they're thinking about the movie Taken with Liam Neeson and to some level that happens. There's like these organizations, these crime syndicates and all that stuff. But a lot of what the domestic place is is that there's a lot of hurt with the systems that people are placed in, whether the family is so in need of food or they're hooked on drugs or there's this sense of giving their child away for those type of things, and so it looks a lot of different ways. But the organization is to end that and in ways that they've been doing that is through prevention, education to parents and others about the internet and different ways that there's predators out there. But one big way that they're doing it now is that they've created one of the first safe homes in Tennessee for minors that are in this area, and a lot of the work that they do is creating a space that is a place of going through.

Speaker 2:

These three C's connection with other people, other girls who have been in the same situation, providing group therapy, art therapy, individual therapy, providing that compassion, letting them grow in their if they're willing to even process their religion, their faith in Christ, and then contribution about like how do they give it away? And so that's one organization that I think is taking something that is so traumatic in being, whether sold for sex or abused, probably in that way, and then trying to bring healing into it. And so yeah, I think you know, as a little plug for them, because I help volunteer with them, if anybody listening this wants to look them up at Street Hope, tennessee, and they'd love your support. I appreciate you bringing that up, david, because that's a near and dear to our hearts in this process.

Speaker 1:

And it is a great example of where trauma can be transformed. It doesn't change the traumatic base of this, but it doesn't let it become this permanent reality. And people that usually get into those organizations to help people who are often motivated to start any number of non-profit or charitable organizations often come and were shaped by pain that that's trying to speak to. That's homelessness or childhood hunger or abuse or drug addiction. And trauma is real but it can be transformed. But also, don't be talking about when your food's a little cold coming in postmates. That's not trauma, that's maybe un-appreciated, annoying.

Speaker 2:

Distress? I don't think that.

Speaker 1:

Let's let our words be the correct words Anyway that's right.

Speaker 2:

Well, david, thank you for having this conversation today. Yeah, it's been great. We hope that you've gotten a lot out of it, and maybe it challenges you to consider some of the areas of your life, and so we look forward to talking to you again and bringing new topics your way. So, david, until next time, it's good to see you. Good to see you, matt. Thank you again for being a part of our latest episode of Church Psychology. If you have enjoyed it, we hope that you will share this episode with others in your life, and please do remember to follow, like and or subscribe to Church Psychology wherever you're finding us, and leave us a review. We look forward to connecting with you again soon.