Voices 4 Peace
Voices 4 Peace strives to provide real information for those seeking to learn more about Jewish and Christian relations. It is also a place for understanding the many dynamics at play in the struggle for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. We seek to lift up those who are truly doing the hard work of peacemaking in the region.
Voices 4 Peace
How Trauma Shapes Conflict with Dr. Lavender Kelly
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In this episode of Voices 4 Peace, Pastor Todd Stavrakos sits down with Dr. Lavender Kelly—writer, educator, therapist, and board member of Pathways for Peace to explore how trauma shapes individuals, communities, and even generations.
Together they discuss generational trauma, the importance of reclaiming agency, why listening is one of the most powerful forms of healing, and how understanding trauma can transform the way we approach conflict, relationships, and peacemaking. It's a thoughtful conversation about empathy, resilience, and why peace begins with learning to hear one another's stories.
Show Notes
During the episode, Dr. Lavender Kelly discusses the practice of “revoicing” the Psalms as a way of creating space for people to express experiences of pain and trauma in their own words. Here is an example shared by Lavender, inspired by Psalm 88:
No Silver Lining
A revoicing of Psalm 88 by Dr. Lavender Kelly
Please don't tell me
everything happens
for a reason.
Don't tell me
this made me stronger.
Don't tell me
I'll understand someday.
Today,
I am simply tired.
Today,
my body remembers
what my words cannot say.
Today,
darkness is not my enemy.
It is simply
where I happen to be.
“No Silver Lining” © Dr. Lavender Kelly. Shared with permission.
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Pathways for Middle East Peace is a nonprofit educational organization that works to support collaboration between mainline churches and the Jewish community.
We advocate for peace and reconciliation through dialogue and building relationships. While the world seeks to build walls and silos, we believe that Christ has created a pathway for us through the example of His life, ministry, death and resurrection: to build community by bringing people together.
Visit Pathways4Peace.org for more.
You listen to voice. Outline. Unreal. Welcome.
SPEAKER_02Well, I'd like to welcome everybody back to the podcast, Voices for Peace. Today we have a very special guest, someone that I know very well. They are sort of a beacon of leadership and care, compassion and empathy for many who are living in trauma environments. They have been hard at work as a writer, educator, consultant, and therapist, and they recently have achieved a status of becoming a doctor. So I want to introduce uh Lavender Kelly, who is a friend but also a colleague on Pathways for Peace. She serves or they serve on the board and has been very influential in helping Pathways better understand traumatized communities. And that's really what we want to focus in on. So Dr. Kelly, first, congratulations. What should we know about you?
SPEAKER_05That in my wonderful introduction, I skipped.
SPEAKER_00I don't know. Uh so so I would say that that I spent I've spent over 20 years in direct pediatric chaplaincy, so as in boots on the ground working with people. And and that's you know, very much formed and informed, and the continuing education involved in that, where I've come to now. Um I'm also a cancer survivor, and so in a way that is deeply personal, I understand that distance between people wanting to help, but ending up just being busy doing things at you rather than for you and with you. And and that too also speaks to how we understand and need to understand interactions in traumatized communities. So but yeah, recently I've sort of transitioned more toward the education, teaching, writing, research side.
SPEAKER_02So tell me a little bit about the the honor of becoming a doctor and what was your what were your studies focusing on?
SPEAKER_00So, you know, honestly, I it's not that I wanted more letters before or after my name because I really didn't. But there is a truth in that if you want access to getting certain ideas out there, then you need the credibility to be able to publish it, right? And so that was really so so that piece plus the the need to take focused academic study time to to hone in, uh, is is why I ended up doing that. So I actually it my the specific research that I did in my doctoral work was with people who queer people who had experienced religious trauma and and testing some different interventions, like a sort of mid-rash notion on rewriting psalm. You know, the the idea of what do you wish God had said to you instead of the way this psalm got used or the way that the Bible got used against you. And uh, and so a sort of reclaiming process, if you will. Because one of the biggest problems in trauma healing and recovery is actually the onerous on the care provider to take real care to find ethical approaches that are not going to re-traumatize, stir up things that can't be disentangled in that limited therapeutic space. And so uh one of the things that that research has told us over recent years is that almost non-cognitive types of processes, so it can have a thoughtful piece to it, right? But um, artistic outlets, more creative outlets, um, even movement therapies tend to be far better at helping disentangle that trauma experience from what from the day-to-day life. And so, yeah, my research very much uh was a was a was a collection of working with people, experiencing these interventions, and then them responding to that and writing that up.
SPEAKER_02So help us better understand when we say that we're that someone is in working in trauma uh communities or doing therapy or or other work for a trauma uh uh somebody experiencing trauma. Well just describe that. I mean, I mean I'm the pastor kind of done the CPE thing, done you know, the the therapy and counseling and what's sort of different and or unique about working with somebody who has trauma in in their lives? What what's that kind of look like?
SPEAKER_00Uh you know, all metaphors fall apart, but I'm gonna use a metaphor here. It's it's a minefield because they you don't know all always where the trigger point is going to be for someone. So take, for example, someone that's working through well, I mentioned religious trauma. So uh a lot of people, their answer to that was just to leave religion, right? But you never know, say, say, for example, they get a birthday card from an ant that has a Bible verse in it. And that Bible verse had once been used to create great shame in them. And this ant did not mean it that way, right? But that doesn't mean that that moment isn't just going to explode in that person's face and and leave them perhaps in a shame spiral or whatever their sort their particular response is in that. I I think uh, you know, I have a very good friend who she's a psychiatrist. She, you know, knows cognitively all of the things about trauma. She's she's also Jewish and a 30-something year old mother to a small child. And so when the uh attack happened at that Michigan synagogue a couple of years ago, and and a young woman, young mother died in that attack, my friend was it started out as I thought she wanted to talk about the attack. But what became very clear to me is that she wasn't, we weren't having a conversation at all. She was having a release valve moment of all of that anxiety and all of that fear that, and this comes to the idea of generational trauma, of that could have been her because she is so much like this woman that died. And so that connection for her in this case, it was the similarity between something, something that that uh happened to someone else that reminded and triggered in her how vulnerable she is. And so that's what we did is we didn't really have a conversation. We had a sort of emotional release valve moment for her to let that out. But but you never know when those moments are going to happen, and all of the trauma training in the world didn't stop her from spiraling into that. You just never know when it's going to happen.
SPEAKER_02So there there are those, you know, trigger events that are lying at different depths within us. And so working, you know, as a doing therapy with traumatized people, it's gotta be even more challenging than doing just regular therapy. I mean for sure. Yeah, it it's it's sort of like even as a therapist you you might say something that could be a a triggering mechanism.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. Wow, wow. And I mean, I think I think one of the things that that we have to do, and this is true with our friends, our family, this is true professionally, pastorally, that that we have to listen to what other people are already doing and how they're managing this themselves. A lot of people are already doing therapeutic work, if you will, to try to heal, you know, humans are amazingly resilient. I've come to loathe that phrase resilience, but but we are, and we're really good at managing this. So, you know, take for example, how many people do you know that have playlists on Spotify that fit different uh different moods they're in?
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And people are already building playlists, people are already building playlists that help them tell their story or help them remember they're not alone. Uh and you know, so no matter what you've been through, there's a song about it. Kesha has a great song about surviving sexual violence, Beyonce has some incredible songs about grief, you know, and and the the joy too, you know, there are songs about it. And and so we are constantly finding those pieces around us and very often in the arts that are able to ground us and remind us that we're not alone. And so if we listen to what other people are already doing and using, a lot of times that's a sort of safe pathway to help them go a little deeper if they're looking to do that.
SPEAKER_02So in and working in this field, is it more that we we try to find ways to? I mean, I can't imagine anybody truly gets over trauma. Right? So so the work that you do is more is it helping people kind of come up with coping mechanisms when trauma emerges, or is it letting people know where the trauma might have been in their lives and and helping for it to surface? What not the end game, but what is sort of like the the techniques that or the gifts and the skills that you're trying to help people better grapple with?
SPEAKER_00Um D, all of the above, plus some well, honestly, I think different people need different things. That's another reason that so much care has to be taken in being a trauma care provider, is because it's a one size fits none endeavor.
SPEAKER_05Right. Okay.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I I I sort of fancy myself as being in the middle of writing a book right now. And every pretty much for everything I say, I set up a couple of caveats to it because the truth is everyone needs something different. For some people, it is actually just the most helpful thing to help them know what to avoid. And for others who are more dogged, say, by by persistent uh flashbacks or nightmares, things like that, it becomes very important to try to unravel that. So I am by no means a neurologist, but of course, you know, in studying this, I've had to delve a good bit into the neurology. And, you know, we understand very little about the brain in the big picture, but we are coming along with some really fascinating things. So, for example, the storming portion of the brain that gets stirred up during a trauma trigger moment is actually the same storming portion of the brain that that uh gets stirred up in OCD. And so they're finding that some of those same medications can help de-escalate that to give people space to then work through some of those experiences so that they don't just automatically go to that storm of fear and chaos. So, you know, it very again, one size fits none. What one person needs, another person may not. But I do find that the the one thing people really need is to reclaim agency because that's the thing, right? Trauma stole uh autonomy, trauma steals community, trauma steals, it steals our ability to grieve in in in more direct ways. I mean, it steals so much, and so anything, any activity, any intervention, any ritual that someone can add to their life that helps them reclaim some sense of this is my life, not my trauma's life. This is mine and my community's experience, not trauma's experience. That those are the that's the goal ultimately is if you can get in the groove of finding those things, they go a long way.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_00You know, even from the outside, being a witness is is incredibly healing. I think about the true can truth and uh reconciliation commissions that um, for example, both Canada and South Africa have done some of this work that had incredible results of helping people find a new center, a new hope, a new sense of peace with the past. And a lot of that had to do with the the gift of having their experience witnessed and held in community.
SPEAKER_02So just because there's uh a couple issues that are dear to my heart, and one is our unfortunately failing education system, particularly in our urban metropolitan regions. The kids, the students, the children have uh varying levels of trauma due to what they've experienced in their lives. How challenging is it for teachers and others to try and help the students who are who are living either in traumatic areas or have experienced trauma of family issues, et cetera, et cetera? Can you speak to that in a way? Because I think a lot of people don't understand that reality that many of our you know the kids in our communities, you know, that that are struggling with and how that just even impacts their education and and other things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I should have brought my wife with me because she's uh been an educator for many years. She actually started out as a middle school special ed education specialist in an urban setting. She's only worked in urban settings. We're, you know, we're such good urbanites. Anyway, you know, I so I'm gonna take my cue from her on answering this. You know, she keeps snacks in her desk because of the number of students that show up hungry. You're not learning if you're hungry. She uh keeps relationships with community supports of various types that provide different wraparound services to families because uh, well, let's come back to this hunger issue. She uh had a student that would only eat half of his the school provided breakfast and lunch. He would only eat half of his breakfast and half of his lunch, so he could take the rest home to his sister in the evenings. And so my wife was able to uh connect this family, and they were they were open to that connection to some other food pro food provisional resources and such. I don't remember what all was going on in their family, but but you know, hunger is its own traumatizing factor, and it is very real in this country. Um you know, there's also the the legacy of violence in specifically black families in urban areas, you know, the you meet the num the number of students that have a parent or sibling who's incarcerated or who has been killed, and and maybe you know, too many stray bullets, you know, they weren't doing anything wrong. Not that that makes it right or wrong, but it adds an extra layer of injustice that that people can't reconcile. And so, and that's the difference, right? The the what the difference between trauma, a traumatic traumatizing experience, and and a horrific experience is not being able to get over that hurdle to somehow process it. And there is no processing that kind of injustice of a stray bullet that hits a toddler, you know. And so when you encounter students, and like I said, my years of chaplaincy were mostly in pediatrics, which means both the patients and the families, but mostly the patients, right? You know, they're they're constantly carrying these stories that they don't have an outlet for. Or that it that within the chaos that they're they're living and the lack of resource and the lack of support, they've not had the additional supports to help them along the way. And so it does tilt from being a horrific experience into a traumatizing experience. And that's not shame on them, right? That's shame on all of the opportunities that the rest of our community missed to sit in those gaps.
SPEAKER_02And you touched on uh generational trauma and its influence on families, communities, etc. Can you unpack what what we mean when we say generational trauma?
SPEAKER_00Uh wow, that would be another good book.
SPEAKER_05I'll create a list while I'm talking.
SPEAKER_00So I'm gonna have to go two routes on this, and I'm gonna have to go back into some some some some science that I am not qualified to teach, but I am very knowledgeable about. So generational trauma is essentially the way in which trauma takes hold in the next generation and the next generation, despite the fact that they didn't actually experience the event. Or maybe they're still experiencing echoes of the event, but not the beginning of the event, or not the core of the fear or or whatever. And and there's there's a couple of things to understand about that. So we're I think we naturally want to think about the psychological pieces of it. Of my my grandmother taught me to be afraid of of not having enough stuff because she lived through the depression and hunger, and and so she made me, you know, always make sure I have a very full pantry, right? That is a psychological generational thing. What we don't talk about enough, and is very real, are the epigenetics of it. So uh the easiest way I can explain this is no, trauma isn't changing your genes, but constant exposure to the neurological and biological chemicals of stress does change in you how different genes are turned on or off. And so, for example, a child who's never smoked but grew up in a house that's where there was a smoker, there are genes that can get turned off that actually protect them from respiratory illness. But because that gene was turned off in that child when they grew up to be an adult and they have children, that gene is probably going to be turned off in their children. Now, their child is now two generations away from anyone who's smoked, but they have a physiological leftover artifact of smoking. Okay, so okay, sure bounce forward to trauma, the constant exposure to stress chemicals in the body. And you know, we think about cortisol, but there are also neurolog bioneurological chemicals that are happening just in the brain alone, or a lack of chemicals, right? You know, not enough dopamine, not enough oxytocin, that that changes the way different genes are expressed. And so we, you know, a lack of oxytocin and turning off the Which is the chemical that makes us primed to make connections, right? One of the things we're finding through research is that people who grew up in the midst of fear of attacks, fear of further violence, it's not just them, it's their children and their children's children who keep that gene for both producing and receiving the good effect of oxytocin gets turned off. And so one of the biological things that makes us primed to want to connect to other people gets shut down. Oh wow. And so the pure epigenetics of trauma is maybe what we need to be most concerned about. I can't, you know, as a as a care provider, I can't fix that. But I have to be aware of it because I have to be aware that as I'm helping you, there may be real, you know, what recovery looks like for you may look vastly different. And it also means that sometimes we have to put hope not in that you will have this, you know, amazing, flourishing recovery, but that maybe your children will instead.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00And that's not justice, it's just a trajectory toward healing. Right. Now I long for the day that we have better answers. Right. And that maybe we do understand how to return on some of these things. But but in the meantime, again, it you know we we have foster children and uh and I am in working with them constantly aware of these little nuggets of pieces that I see of man, this this has been going on in your life since you were little. And so you don't even like it's not that you know, you're not programmed to lie or programmed to be hidden. You are programmed to not trust, and that all of the genetics of it are going on as well. And so this is not about morality or choice. People are very much living biological echoes and effects of traumas that happened long ago. Well, even my friend that I I referred to, my my psychiatrist friend, who, you know, this when she started talking about the attack in on the synagogue in Michigan, that was not about the attack in Michigan. It was about what it means to be a Jewish woman who feels unsafe and echoes of generations of that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's a great segue because one of the one of the things I wanted to speak to you more about. Um, you know, we serve on Pathways Board together, and and Pathways um kind of sees itself as how do we help the two communities, Israelis, Palestinians, how how do we help them plant seeds of peace? And that's sort of like the the long-reaching, you know, 6,000 miles away work. But then there's also the work between mainline Protestants and the Jewish community in the United States, which are having tensions and and uh sources of conflict. And I think one of the things that um we aren't adequately speaking about is Israeli and Palestinians are two traumatized communities and not just individuals, but whole societies, generations upon generations and generations have uh lived through violence and trauma. And now this this conflict is is a situation where every little thing that one side does or says is a trigger, and the other side will just respond out of trauma. And not that it's good or bad, it it just is. And you know, even in the United States, when we see the anti-Semitic attacks and and other things, and and those outside the Jewish community don't quite understand why the Jewish community responds that way. It's it's there's this trauma here. So how do we, you know, as as mainline Protestants, as you know, of of you know, Christians coming from that tradition? How did how should that inform the work that we try to do for peace in Israel-Palestine, as well as peace within our own communities here in the United States? This is a third book that I'm now dumping in your lap. So I don't know what you have planned for the rest of the day, but here you go.
SPEAKER_00Let's solve it. Yeah. Uh so I'll definitely come back to what I said earlier that helping people reclaim agency matters.
SPEAKER_05Okay.
SPEAKER_00But I think peep helping people reclaim that in community matters. It's not, it's not the isolation of this person who's traumatized is going to go in isolation and heal their trauma, right? That's it's all always happening in community. And the broad more broadly we can construct these communities, honestly, the research tells us the better the outcome. And so, even by, you know, I'm I'm Christian, and let me tell you, Christianity has its problems and history of having inserted itself in inappropriate ways. But there are places that we are being invited into, and we need to take that invitation very seriously and with great care, because anything we can do to help expand and support other people's longing for expansion of communities of trust and care. Because it may not be that a Jewish community developing a relationship with a Christian community solves the problem of them suddenly trusting a Palestinian community. But it come back to this idea of epigenetics, all trusting experiences reinforce the body's natural want for creating oxytocin and doing the things of connection, right? And so we want to reinforce and be a part of that. And so I'm talking about this in like a systems and sort of medical way, but it comes really just down to relationship. And honestly, as a Christian, I would say that the gift that Palestinians or the gifts that Muslims, Christians, and Jews have in common is the gift of covenant relationship. We are people of covenant, we are people who understand what that means in community, and we are people who are called to community. We have that so in common. So anything we can do to help bolster that is a step in the right direction. I I also look at, you know, I believe in in the importance of sharing stories. I mean, the research is is overwhelming about, you know, I I I mentioned the truth and reconciliation commissions, but you know, that's that's about getting people's stories out there. And those stories ripple, right? So I had nothing to do with the truth and reconciliation commissions, except that the stories that came out of those touch to and informed what I'm doing and turned me into someone who cares about being outward focused. And so we don't even know where the end point is of those ripples. And we don't need to know. I mean, that's beauty, right? Is uh I mean, some would call that the Holy Spirit. Marjorie Suwaki called it the the whispered word, you know, that that the moments of relationship ripple out and touch far beyond where we can know. And, you know, ask me what I have faith in. I have faith that that that divine love somehow weaves all of that together in ways that are far more profound than any of us as individuals can attach. Now that's the metaphysics of it, but the practical side means that we as people who are entering these spaces have to constantly prepare ourselves, which means becoming trauma aware and knowledgeable. It means seeking extra supports. You know, we can't be, we are not. I can't tell you the number of times I make referrals. I have my area of specialization not, you know, I am not the community healer. We need doctors, we need other practices as well.
SPEAKER_02It's I mean, the words you're offering, I I mean it it it's we sort of get like the storytelling part down. Like we want people to be able to tell their story. But what we don't get and we don't do, I think as human beings, is listen to those stories. Right? It's all about oh, let them tell their narrative. Okay, that's fine, but we're not gonna like hear it in the ways that we should hear it. And and I think that goes to the you know what the levels of trust. Do we trust the other person that we're telling our story to that they're actually going to hear what I am saying? Or are they just immediately going to insert their own narrative into it and not hear my story?
SPEAKER_00Well, this is I think where we also need to remember that stories are stories, if we approach them purely through a cognitive phase, we're gonna start thinking about it before it someone even finishes their sentence. What if we approach stories more as an art form? You know, what if what if it was what if we taught one another to just take a different posture when we hear stories and look at it like an art piece and and look for the movement in it and look for the underlying pieces. Um I've done several uh communal art encounters that are designed to be therapeutic. And one of the things in doing those art encounters is that you kind of change stations and end up sort of doing some artistic work over and around other people's artistic work. And so you end up with this big combined piece, right? And it's a beautiful process because it makes people look at one another differently, because what we're putting on the page artistically is a story, but then we're interacting with our own story, but through an artistic lens, which I find that people tend to do with more care than a cognitive lens.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Again, this doesn't fix this is not still one size fix none.
SPEAKER_02Right, right.
SPEAKER_00Wish I could give you answers, but but I do think that they're that you know, from I from our roles, we have a unique position to encourage people to change their posture of how they hear stories, to look at it through the lens of an art and a and a movement and an experience, instead of looking at it through a cognitive. I need to dissect this, I need to understand it. No, you need to experience it, and that experience will in fact make us more empathetic.
SPEAKER_02That what you're touching on is fascinating and kind of profound of changing our posture, both uh physically, emotionally, intellectually, to hear the story. And and that's what art does. Art hits us on so many different levels that it you know it changes how we we view things. That's fascinating. Uh, and I think a truth that uh perhaps we need to be expressing in our lives, in our society in general, and certainly in places of conflict, uh like Israel and Palestine. Um Lav, we could talk forever about this, but I want to thank you so much for sharing and helping us better understand uh those people who have been traumatized, communities who have been traumatized, and that perhaps we need, as Christians, perhaps we should be the ones leading the way of how do we change our posture to better not only hear stories, but to be moved by them and help hear and see and build trust and build empathy and compassion, uh, not only for those who are who have been traumatized, but for the others who may have been part of that traumatization process. And so I I I really thank you. What you've offered today, I think is a gift, and I thank you so much. You deserve those those initials.
SPEAKER_00By the way, I never refer to myself as doctor or reverend.
SPEAKER_02No, you you do the I am the Dr. Lavender Kelly. Right? Yeah. Well, it's been great to to to chat. We'll we'll do this again soon because I I think there's probably more we could talk about here in helping us better understand communities and individuals in trouble. So thank you very much. Appreciate you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you take care.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for listening to Voices Repeat.