Life with Jesus After Trauma
The nature of trauma is that it is too overwhelming to integrate, so survivors often end up like amputees who have had to cut off parts of themselves in order to survive. In some cases, survivors dissociate from their memories, and in other cases from the feelings connected to their memory. Either way, this separation of consciousness leaves victims of trauma feeling shattered, incoherent, and tortured by parts of themselves they had forgotten existed. As someone who was diagnosed as having PTSD, I wanted to know what kind of hope there was for healing that meant fragments of the past no longer had the power to assault me either in memory or in my way of living.
During my advanced degree coursework on trauma and violence at New York University, those who were “in the trenches” with survivors had no real hope for healing from PTSD. They acknowledged that some degree of post traumatic growth was possible, but that the D in PTSD meant that the post traumatic symptoms had become a stress disorder, a permanent part of the survivors’ chemistry, psyche, and soul. So, I requested Christian resources for trauma victims, and received pamphlets that failed to address the repetitive nature of symptoms, the ingrained behavior patterns, and invasive haunting of the past that overtakes survivors at unprovoked and unexpected times. I was caught between the overly optimistic trajectory of those who seemed to lack a depth of understanding about the disorder that sets in after repeated or prolonged trauma and the voice of experience that said there was no cure. So I began reading the Word of God for myself.
The Lord showed me - not just in His Word but through experience over the last ten years of my life - what healing looks like according to the hope of the gospel. It is not a dismissive kind of being “all better,” in which there is no longer pain, and things that were bad somehow go away; it is a wholeness which can encompass, own, and take authority over the bad as we allow the Savior to hold together the things that have made us fall apart. Just as the knitting together of bones hurts when the body is healing from a break, the reclamation of painful trauma is not an easy journey, but it is a glorious one that continues throughout life not because there is no cure, but because we are always growing in Jesus.
