There is (now, finally) much talk in Christian circles about trauma, complex trauma, trauma-informed ministries, and much more similar terminology besides.

What is particularly interesting for me, as a psychotherapist, is the interaction of church leadership structures and individuals with this concept. I will avoid giving anecdotes of the sort of thing church pastors say to me, but there is often a sense of a particular level or seriousness of problem being ‘too much’ for the pastor, and so it may be time to call in a trained therapist.

Let me explain.

Within most of the recent Christian writing about trauma that I have read, there seems to be a baseline assumption of ‘I’m alright- it’s this other person over here who’s in crisis’. Terms such as ‘big T trauma’ and ‘little T trauma’ are used to make the distinction and give some sort of attempted clarity. It is true that our culture has lived through several decades of peace, security and stability. And now, in our current age, we are perhaps more likely to encounter people coming to our churches who have, for example, lived in a refugee camp, or been the subject to the horrors of close-up war or armed conflict. This is the reality of large-scale immigration influx. 

I’m not sure how the everyday ‘big T’ events which can’t be avoided in any culture (loss of a child, major car accidents, life-limiting diagnoses) have been ignored in this dynamic. It is perhaps a sign of something within us that we expect this sort of thing never to happen. It’s always a shock.  

We are also, simultaneously, becoming aware of historic sexual abuses and similar which in previous generations were covered up. For example, someone close to me attempted to disclose family sexual abuse to her GP in 1984, and her trusted doctor suggested she was under a lot of stress and would benefit from some vitamin pills. This is a shocking and true story, sadly not an isolated incident, and an evil oversight which cannot be forgiven lightly. 

And of course, it is correct to describe the entire world population as coming out of a period of high distress with the covid era. Whether it was the brutality of covid measures and lockdowns, fear, shock and grief at vaccine injury, or fear of the infection itself (depending on where you land in this narrative), the entire world population (in nations of high infrastructure, at least) has lived through a period of significant distress. 

Robert Stolorow’s definition of trauma is the best one I have found yet. I will quote it in full here:

‘Existentially a trauma is a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of being in the world by exposing the universe as random and unpredictable’(1).

Note that this does not reference the required ‘seriousness’ of the event, but only the individual’s reaction to it. 

From a Christian point of view, this sort of experience is an enormous challenge to faith. Despite obvious narratives of extreme suffering in Scripture, it can often de-stabilise someone’s view of God as Father when life gets very difficult.

So- is it time to stop saying ‘big T trauma’ and ‘little T trauma’ yet? Personally I dislike the distinction very much indeed. How can anybody else label someone else’s appropriate level of distress? I have rebelled internally at other professionals labelling things in my own life (in ignorance, they didn’t know I’d experienced them) as ‘big T trauma’ when I did not experience them as such. I was conscious of feeling infantilised and also unconsciously disrespected by people who were ill-informed. It might well be that some situations are the stuff of nightmares for you, but please don’t impose that on me.

So suddenly we do need to be ‘trauma-informed’. But I don’t think it’s going very well in the church. Perhaps I don’t have enough information, but I haven’t seen it going well.

One thing that doesn’t seem to be happening is self-examination at the appropriate level. In a secure and sheltered church experience, ‘other people’ seem to have problems we can’t even imagine. So, ok, we’re naive. Let’s own that.

And let’s not hold back from looking at our own conditioning, conditions of worth imposed in childhood, defence mechanisms, dysfunctional ways of being. To use therapist-speak, and please excuse the swear, but let’s ’look at our own sh*t’ first. 

When I stop distinguishing ‘levels’ of trauma-inducing experience, and start looking at my own dysfunction and the reasons why I might be the way I am, in a non-shaming way, it provides me with a chance to surrender another aspect of my life and character to God, and gives a space for personal and spiritual growth. And it also opens me up to understanding and caring for victims of serious world or life-altering events, because I’m not busy trying to deny my own problems and categorise people as ‘ok’ or ‘not ok’. 

It is foolish to ignore our own inherited trauma from such cultural moments as WW2. We’re one or two generations on from this conflict (depending on your age and the the generational gaps in your family) and you might be surprised to understand how that world-changing event affects everybody in our country to this day. If it affected our grandparents, and they developed ways to cope (and probably knew these were ways of coping), then it affected our parents (with less understanding, they probably didn’t quite know or look at the reasons behind certain family behaviours or defences). And it also affects the third generation, who definitely has no knowledge at all of why they are the way they are: why some families ‘never talk about problems’ or ‘never have a conflict and repair situation’ because keeping the peace is so essential. And other families fight all the time. Have you ever wondered why this is, and how it affects you, depending on what your family was like? This is only one example. There are many family dynamics which are only ‘normal’ because we haven’t experienced anything else. It is no surprise to me why so many marriages, including Christian marriages, fail, because the spouses are unconsciously carrying inherited inter-generational trauma, often from WW2 and other historical suffering.

The Abortion Act in 1967 is another cultural moment. Do you know how many children were killed in your immediate ancestry, completely legally, and you do you know how it has affected you? This sort of information isn’t always available as the whole subject is clouded in shame and secrecy, for obvious reasons. But if there’s a strange family emotional dynamic, it wouldn’t surprise me if that is there somewhere. I’ve seen it too many times.

Not to mention the increasingly recognised ‘BSS’ (Boarding School Syndrome) which many of our current church leaders have to deal with, consciously or unconsciously. 

I guess my point is that functional or seemingly-functional people are sometimes the hardest nuts to crack, therapeutically. Sometimes it takes a major health challenge, or life crisis, for this work to be done. But that’s just because of our own resistance to change. It doesn’t have to be this way. 

While we’re considering how we can be ‘trauma-informed’ towards people who have experienced genuine horror and evil, it might be good if we could look inwards and start to unearth some of our own behaviours and problems, ways of coping and being which are not God-honouring but which are there for a reason. 

We cannot ‘just stop it’ with behaviours like that. I cannot overpower my subconscious with my own willpower. I will fail, and I will be consumed with shame and possibly even succumb to physical disease in the process. There are therapeutic tools and means of safe self-examination and gentle exposure; these can be a wonderful gift of life and change to people stuck in dysfunctional ways of being rooted in early conditioning or trauma-responses to later events. It is open to us all to start this work, and continue it through our whole lives as we walk towards our eternal reward.

1. R.D. Stolorow, 2007. Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. Taylor & Francis.