I am writing this book, and you are likely reading it, in the most trauma-inducing years of our adult livesâyears that include millions of worldwide deaths and lockdowns due to the pandemic; job losses; food insecurity and houselessness on massive scales; exposed racial injustices; political and social unrest. Catastrophic wildfires are consuming farms, homes, and wildernesses; ice storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes are becoming more destructive, and more frequent. I know that many of these traumatic experiences are causing pain and grief for you and the members of your faith community.
In this book, you will read about people with different types of trauma, including some who carry unique traumatic burdens. You will become familiar with traumaâs initial and long-lasting mental and physical symptomology. You will learn to recognize and heal lingering traumatic shadows from the pandemic. You will inevitably explore your own trauma, from the recent past to as far back as your immigrant or Indigenous ancestors. And then you will learn ways to heal trauma and build trauma resilience. Each chapter is designed to help you serve others by bringing trauma awareness to all aspects of your pastoral care.
What Is Trauma?
Letâs begin by exploring traumaâs two main components. Trauma can be the result of circumstances outside of our controlâthings that happen to usâlike a car crash, a physical assault, earthquakes, a pandemic, and such. These life-disrupting, painful experiences shake us to the core and cause us to rethink goals, relationships, core beliefs, and faith. This is the first component.
But trauma also has a second componentâwhat happens inside our bodies during those experiences, the way our central nervous system fires up so we can escape pain or death and live to talk about it another day. Life-threatening experiences activate and forever change our brainsâ prefrontal cortex (the area that manages impulse control, story formation, and executive functioning) along with our bodiesâ inner processing centers that energize us during fear and calm us down thereafter.
Trauma expert Bessel Van Der Kolkâs classic book is aptly named The Body Keeps the Score. Trauma is initially an external experience with an internal response, but without therapeutic interventionâand even sometimes with itâtrauma lingers in our bodies. Trauma then becomes an internal experience with an external response.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM-5) avoids any single definition of the word trauma and instead identifies symptom clusters that appear after a traumatic single event or multiple events. When those symptoms persist, causing mentally and physically uncomfortable reactions, they are fit into categories called disorders, which we will take a look at in the next chapter. Trauma is defined by what takes place inside us when we become alarmed and afraid, but it can also be identified in the physical and emotional scars it leaves behind.
Becoming Familiar with Trauma
For the next few pages, I invite you to notice the different types of trauma I describe. See if you can identify the trauma symptoms I illustrate and the trauma-relieving strategies I include in each story.
A few years ago, my husband and I bought our first SUV to expand our horizons with a road trip. We went to Arizona in December to visit family and then on to Los Angeles to spend Christmas Day with friends. The next morning, we had planned to head home to Oregon, but the I-5 freeway, called âthe Grapevine,â was packed with snow, ice, and stranded vehicles and was not expected to be clear for several days. We had time on our hands, so we took the scenic drive, not realizing that everyone else heading north would take it too.
We drove in stop-and-go traffic for six hours from LA to Santa Barbara, stopped for a meal, and since hotels were all full, decided to push farther north. As the traffic cleared about an hour later, drivers were like caged animals whose gates had been thrown open. On a curvy divided four-lane highway, the traffic thinned out and sped up. Then it suddenly stopped. A person two cars ahead of us made an overly fast lane change, forcing everyone to brake. We heard screeching tires and a crash. My husband tried frantically to avoid the car ahead by pumping the brakes and steering us toward the uncertain terrain of the center island, but we still crashed into the car ahead.
Thoughts flashed through my mind so fast I couldnât tell you what they were. Next thing I knew, we were checking in with each other. âAre you okay?â âYes. Are you?â âYes, I think so.â The inside cabin was remarkably intact, and as my husband got out to check on the woman in front of us, the OnStar lady provided some relief: âIt appears youâve been in a crash; do you need an ambulance?â âNo,â I said, sighing deeply, letting my shaking body ease up a bit. âWhere are you?â she asked. I hadnât a clue. Now, this is a GPS system, right? âMaybe you can tell me,â I said. The irony helped me laugh away more tension.
A saintly highway patrol officer found us a hotel, and the next day we left the car in San Luis Obispo for three months of major repairs. A rental car and clearer roads took us home to rebalance our equilibrium by reconnecting with friends and family. In the first few weeks, I told the story a dozen times or more, each time reliving and releasing it.
Whatâs Going on Here?
A car crash is a good example of a singular traumatic experienceâa life-threatening moment over which one has no control. Eighty percent of the time, people who experience this type of uncomplicated, short-lived trauma do not go on to develop a diagnosable mental illness. Most recover fully.
During and immediately after the crash, I never lost consciousness, I didnât witness my husband or anyone being seriously injured, and I soon knew that everything was all right. After the crash, I slept well, and my memories about that day were easily and comfortably retrieved. Did this trauma linger? Yes, on rare occasions when road conditions deteriorate and I consider driving, my pulse goes up and my hands get clammyâa few physical remnants. It would be a chicken-and-egg debate to explore whether my memories of the crash lead to these physical symptoms or I have unconscious physical symptoms that arise and prompt me to think, âItâs dangerous out there; maybe I shouldnât go.â The good news is that I can sort out those old anxieties. I have learned to reduce and release them in order to get in the car for another trip.
Relax and Breathe
Reading this section, you may have noticed tension in your body, especially if you have experienced a frightening car accident. Before going on, take a minute to breathe deeply, stand up and walk around the room, scan your environment through your senses (touch, sound, smell, sight, taste). These mindfulness techniques can ground you in the present moment and will help you focus on the reading. Give yourself permission to take a longer break if you need to shake off and release old memories or awakened physical symptoms.
Exploring Trauma in the Pandemic
While I write this book, the Covid-19 pandemic is still raging around the world, but US deaths have slowed as vaccinations have become widely available. The pandemic has caused millions of deaths, and studies about the trauma legacy it leaves behind will be forthcoming. Unlike the trauma from a single incident, Covid-19 trauma has consumed several years and has been full of multiple traumatic moments and prolonged stressors.
Covid-19 brought contagion fear, disrupted routines, tragic losses, and disconnection from typical sources of comfortâour family and friends. With little data to go on and misinformation rampant, our basic belief that we could protect ourselves from harm disappeared. For the foreseeable future, many people will still be grieving. People who carried multiple traumas with them into the pandemic felt even greater triggered physical and mental anguish. Safety and connection, traumaâs healing opposites, were just not consistently available.
So many lives were disrupted by the pandemic that as we come out of it, we need to create safety nets for basic welfare such as jobs, housing, health care, and mental health treatment. Psychologist Abraham Maslow developed a well-known theory in the late 1940s that suggested a hierarchy of human needs. He proposed that psychological and spiritual well-being can be tended to only after our basic physical needs (health, shelter, and food, for example) are taken care of. Jesus worked from a similar hierarchy in service to others. He healed the sick, visited the incarcerated, fed the hungry, and then tended to their broken hearts. Itâs good spiritual care and good trauma-informed care.
Pandemic Trauma
Early in the pandemic, along with many others, I became addicted to âdoomscrollingâ (the tendency to track anxiety-producing âbadâ news by reading newspapers online and scrolling through social media sites). Psychologists who study peopleâs attitudes about misery have discovered that the adage âmisery loves companyâ is true only if the company is miserable too. In other words, misery loves miserable company. Doomscrolling seemed helpful at firstâdistraction can lower anxietyâbut it also leads to unproductive avoidance. It is actually a trauma response that psychologists call hypervigilance. When we donât feel safe, we scan the environment for enemies, so weâll be ready to run or hide if we need to. In Covid-19 we had nowhere to run, so we read and watched and listened to more news.
The New York Times online, my primary source, offered me a smorgasbord of misery, posting charts with Covid-19 case numbers from around the world as US deaths climbed unimaginably higher, tapered off, and surged again. Pictures and interviews told stories about racial discrimination and social inequity. Many of us read and cried and railed against false narratives, flawed vaccine distribution, a conflicted congress, and delayed or confounding national and local responses. Numerous personal losses and reports from chaplains, doctors, and nurses on the front lines broke our hearts.
Coping Strategies
To get me out of the house safely in the pandemicâs first months, my husband bought a map of our southwestern Oregon college town with the goal to walk every street. We spent lockdowns walking and talking to relieve our misery, and afterward highlighting those streets on the map. Passing through the downtown area provided us with a reality check on Covid-19âs economic devastationâbusinesses were closed, signs on every door described safety protocols, and restaurants posted new âfood to goâ menus.
Walking through the railroad district was like taking a pilgrimage or prayer walk. People had hung Black Lives Matter flags and memorial T-shirts on the chain link fence, naming innocent people killed by policeâBreonna Taylor, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, and Aura Rosser. The name George Floyd would soon be added. By yearâs end, nearly our whole city map was highlighted. But while the walking helped, we didnât walk off our grief or all of our stress.
Cortisol relentlessly pumped through our bodies. Would we make it through the pandemic alive, or would we die alone, gasping for air on a respirator at the hospital? Nature appeared to be random, but I was less physically vulnerable than my husband, so I took on the task of protecting us both by going out infrequently. I paid local businesses over the phone and asked clerks to leave my purchases in bags on the sidewalk. I said, âSorry, I donât share airâ and frequently told my husband to order it (whatever it was) online because it was ânot worth dying for.â We experienced feelings our non-White neighbors have felt on a daily basis throughout their livesâsubstantially unsafe every day.1
We distracted ourselves as often as possible, had our first gin and tonics in years (one each), and ordered the Disney Channel. These strategies helped, but they couldnât wipe out the trauma load. The traumatized body seeks reassurance, but we werenât comforted by our ânormalâ connections. We reached out to our single friends who felt this loneliness even more acutely. We were reminded with every text, email, and video call that loved ones and dear ones were getting sick, suffering ongoing symptoms, and dying. Grieving our nationâs health care abuse legacy, we felt ashamed and outraged that Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities were grossly discriminated against throughout the pandemicâin the availability of hospital beds, respirators, treatments, and vaccinesâand died at exponentially higher rates than White people in the United States.
Pandemic Denial
Depending on where any of us lived at the time, our political affiliation, our ethnicity, and our religious affiliation, we may have approached the Covid-19 threat differently. A large swath of the American public and people on social media platforms decried the pandemic as âfake news.â Denial and minimization are protective functions people use to avoid pain. Denial that Covid-19 was anything worse than a flu was a defense mechanism many people used to repress fear. No small number of people refused to admit or recognize that something life-threatening was occurring. A woman who lived in a community where the pandemic was often scoffed at as âoverblownâ and âexaggeratedâ told a friend that her grandmother had died in a board-and-care facility. Her companion asked, âDid she have Covid?â The woman replied, âWell, she had Covid, but she didnât die of it.â
For many people, traumatic components of Covid-19 led to social withdrawal and deteriorating mental health (i.e., increased suicidality, addiction, and anxiety). Domestic violence and child abuse were underreported while increasing exponentially. Other people fought against social isolation by taking risks and became sick after attending social gatherings, funerals, or worship. When voluntary vaccinations lagged, and the Delta variant spread, family members and faith communities became politically divided.
Fear was understandably prevalent among vulnerable populations. American Indians and Alaska Natives, Black people, and Latinx people who caught the virus were far more likely to be seriously ill and hospitalized than non-Hispanic Whites and were more than twice as likely to die.2 At the start of the pandemic, a high percentage of all Covid-19 deaths occurred in senior care facilities, severing the bonds between beloved elders and their families forever. People who developed serious neurological disabilities and other conditions known as âlong haulâ symptoms told their stories to the press in order to combat those who claimed that the virus was no worse than an ordinary flu. These people could not ignore or deny their overwhelming losses or their pain.
While chaplains and clergy on the front lines helped people die with dignity and grieved family membersâ deaths, many of them resided in communities where Covid-19 was minimized or denied, worsening their trauma. I liken this to a young woman who goes home at the holidays and finds the courage to tell her family that as a preteen she was molested by a family member, only to be told that she was âmaking it all up.â At that point she experiences retraumatization.
Retraumatization is a physical or emotional reaction to a situation, interpersonal encounter, or current event that replicates an original trauma. Responses to current stimuli are intensified by one or more previous traumatic experiences. For example, when a victimâs story (pain, abuse, trauma) is denied, this re-creates the lack of control and powerlessness that occurred during the victimâs initial trauma.
Many people were retraumatized during the pandemic. When a nurse got off her shift late one night and went to the grocery store, she saw a person in line behind her without a mask and, seeing a stack of them nearby, offere...
