Through Dangerous Terrain

A Guide for Trauma-Sensitive Pastoral Leadership in Times of Threat

Jennifer Baldwin

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781725276857, 9781725276864
• eBook ISBN: 9781725276871
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

When times of threat and uncertainty come, it can be challenging to know what to do or how to help. Through Dangerous Terrain provides a guide and map for how to understand the human threat-response system, how we connect in times of safety, and how to provide wise and informed leadership during and after threat or trauma events. Though it is written in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and offers some reflections particular to the viral pandemic, it can be applied to any experience of personal or societal threat. When we can more fully understand how human physiology detects threats and seeks safety, we can mobilize the gifts of our religious and spiritual traditions and communities to offer the community care that is essential for health and outside the purview of traditional therapeutic contexts. This book offers key insights from leading trauma care models (Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing, and Polyvagal Theory), neuroscience, and pastoral care to help religious and spiritual community leaders offer informed care, hope, and support in the face of threat and trauma.

1

When We Feel Unsafe

Human beings and other mammals are remarkable creatures! The sheer complexity and beauty of how bodies function physiologically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially have captivated many of our best explorers and thinkers for thousands of years. We are intricate, layered, responsive, nuanced, self-repairing, and largely self-protecting. Just as each being is both one in itself, as a whole, and a collective of systems, organs, cells, psychological parts, and subcellular structures, each one of us is also a single “cell” in the larger organism of our family, community, species, and global ecosystem. When one part of the system is healthy, it contributes positively to the health of the system; when parts become unhealthy, they can undermine the health and vitality of the system. We are all interconnected.

A key feature of a healthy biological system is the capacity to respond to changing conditions and to return to an optimal balance, baseline, or homeostasis. At each level of our biological, psychological, social, and ecological system, we are always navigating our internal, external, and relational environments. Biologically and largely outside of our conscious awareness, our bodies are continuously assessing hormone levels, electrolytes, blood volume and pressure, oxygen saturation, and the presence or absence of biological threats such as viruses and nonnative bacteria in order to keep our physical organism healthy and functioning. When there is an imbalance or threat to our biological system, our body has a host of strategies available to it to assess our vulnerability and act protectively to return to homeostasis. Our behavioral and conscious choices can work in alignment with our internal systems to promote health, or we can make a whole host of decisions that cause our body’s processes to work harder to maintain or return us to homeostasis. While there are many choices we can make that directly impact our physical system, some threats to our continued physical health are outside our conscious control. These threats can come from physical vulnerabilities like chronic diseases and cancers, or they can come from external systems like public health failures, interpersonal violence, systemic oppression, and poor environmental conditions.

Living With Vulnerability

While most experiences of threat are largely benign enough and we return to balance or homeostasis, some experiences pose an existential threat to the continuation of our life. Sometimes the existential threat is to our biological life; at other times, the threat is posed to our psychological, relational, financial, societal, or planetary life. Our current definitions of trauma generally require the presence of a threat to biological life. However, limiting our understanding of threat and trauma to a challenge to the continuation of physical life minimizes the varieties and depths of ways in which we are connected and value necessary connections for vital living. Threats to our psychological or internal life can be just as disruptive and can potentially lead to physical demise. Ruptures of our relational life (e.g., divorce, the death of a loved one, a substantial move we did not choose) can generate ongoing grief responses that need to be honored and processed while also carrying a sense of the passing of a way of life. Financial threats arising from loss of employment, economic recession or depression, underemployment, poverty, or divorce can undermine our basic capacity to procure the resources for safety and necessities for daily living. Threats to the vitality of our community and society disrupt our patterns of social engagement. As highly social beings who often take our cues of safety and threat from our peers, rupture of our social connections can be profoundly disorienting. Finally, threats to our planetary system can generate devastating consequences for all other dimensions of life. As increases in severe weather from climate change (wildfires, stronger hurricanes, flooding, drought) have demonstrated, human beings are not exempt from our connections to other life on the planet or the life of the planet. We are merely one nexus in a far larger web. When we are out of balance with our ecosystem, the whole web suffers. These forms of threat, while not often considered, can directly impact one’s ability to sustain life in a healthful manner and can generate significant stress. These dimensions demonstrate that each of us holds a position of greater vulnerability than we generally consider.

Every component of life holds some degree of vulnerability. Most of the time our vulnerability is eclipsed by the likelihood of safety. For instance, it is possible that I could aspirate while brushing my teeth; however, the likelihood is so low that I rarely consider the risk. For those of us who hold the privilege of perceived safety and low vulnerability, the potential of threat in daily life is ordinarily fairly low. We often feel safe and can cultivate a personal awareness that we are safe and a belief that we are entitled to safety. For those of us who have had to become acutely aware of our vulnerability for survival and safety maintenance, the risk of threat is enhanced, our felt vulnerability is more pervasive, and we do what we need to do to navigate a risky world. When our lived experience is marked by pervasive threat, safety can feel like a luxury offered to some but denied to others. While our assessment of risk and vulnerability can be objectively discerned and has clear manifestations in our relational and societal structures, how we organically and physically detect threat is the purview of our brain and autonomic nervous system (alongside their many other job descriptions).

Our Brain and Autonomic Nervous System: Threat Detectors

While we popularly think of our brain as this organ that is separate from our body and lives in our head, it is perhaps more accurate to think of it through the imagery of a tree and its root system. Like the canopy of a tree, our brain is intrinsically and necessarily connected through the brain stem (like the trunk of a tree) to the spinal cord and the branching of sensory and motor nerves that extend through the entire body (like the root system of the tree expanding through the soil). Our brain is one component of an intricate, multifaceted system designed to maintain the functions necessary for life, sense our surroundings, and mobilize as appropriate to our context. In this fuller vision of the brain, spine, and nerves, we can more fully appreciate the intricate connections of our internal communication system. In addition to their role in regulating all of the functions necessary for sustaining life like respiration, blood circulation, and digestion, the brain and autonomic nervous system, which consists of the nerve structures that communicate with our vital organs, also play an integral role in keeping us safe. Many of the ways in which our anatomy and physiology keep us safe and healthy are completely outside of our awareness.

One way to think about it is that our cognition and awareness are like the flowers on a tree. They are pretty, colorful, pleasant-smelling and are the product of the work of the leaves, stems, branches, trunk, and roots. While these other components of the plant sometimes get our attention, most of our attention goes to the flowers. As we move from the floral focal point of cognition, long-term memory, and awareness, we encounter the leaves of our limbic system. The limbic system is partially available to our awareness and is primarily related to emotions, learning, and working memory. Further down, we encounter the branches of our brain stem. The activity of our brain stem as well as our fuller nerve (root) system is entirely out of our conscious awareness and volitional control.

As a mammalian species, human beings have a multilayered threat detection and response system. We have the capacity to utilize the top layer of our brain, our cortex, to notice and respond to impending risks. This threat-management system is really helpful when we can see potential threats, like hurricanes, coming and take wise, evasive maneuvers to get to safety. This layer of response is fully in our conscious control and utilizes the resources of our thinking brain. Our second layer of threat response is our amygdala, part of the limbic system. The second layer is helpful when we are generally safe enough but become surprised by a potential threat. Our awareness and control at this layer is highly limited and is more impulse or reaction based. The third layer of our protective system occurs at the level of our brain stem. This level is entirely outside of our awareness and control. It comes online as either an early warning system of potential threat or a first-line response to immediate and significant threats of danger. These three layers and their mobilization partners (limbs to run or fight, eyes to survey the surroundings, vocal cords to call for help, etc.) collectively form our threat-response system. Because the various layers operate with different degrees of conscious awareness, it is helpful to note the purpose and presentation of each layer. To get an embodied sense of these layers, let’s do a quick exercise. If you were to hold your hand in your sight line and fold your thumb into your palm, cover your thumb with your fingers, and flex your wrist, you would have a pretty decent and highly portable model of the human brain. In this hand model of the brain, your arm is your spinal column and cord, your wrist is the brain stem, your thumb is your limbic system, and your fingers are your cortex. At a basic representation, your fingers or cortex is your thinking brain (the first layer), your thumb or limbic system is your feeling brain (the second layer), and your wrist or brain stem is your reflex brain (the third layer). Because the first, cortical layer of threat detection is available to conscious awareness and is the most readily known, the following discussion will focus on the second and third layers, the limbic response and the autonomic response.

Basic Model of the Human Brain

Protective Strategies of the Limbic System

The limbic system is the part of the brain between the unconscious automatic work of the brain stem and the conscious, cognitive work of the cortex. This portion of the brain performs several essential functions. In times of significant threat or trauma, the work of the limbic system is significant for assessing risk from our external world through sensory input and determining if it is safe enough to continue with our ordinary memory, learning, and emotional work or if we need to put all of that on hold and mobilize for safety. While the processes of the limbic system can be confusing or overwhelming for those unfamiliar with neuroscience or trauma studies, I have found that understanding how the limbic system processes information is the keystone in understanding what can go awry in experiences of threat or trauma and how it then generates many of the symptoms of PTSD. Over the years I have benefited from training in several of the most effective model...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: When We Feel Unsafe
• Chapter 2: Navigating from Threat to Safety
• Chapter 3: Orienting to Where We Are
• Chapter 4: Practices for Community Resiliency
• Appendix: Helpful Resources
• Bibliography