How Can We Help Victims of Trauma and Abuse? (Questions for Restless Minds)

Stephen N. Williams, Susan L. Williams, D. A. Carson

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781683595113
• eBook ISBN: 9781683595120
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

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INTRODUCTION

“Trauma” and “abuse”: two dark words that describe the experience of a vast number of devastated people throughout the world. Unless we rightly understand the psychospiritual impact of this ordeal, our Christian response, however good-hearted, may not be helpful. What we think is helpful for non-professionals, is to acquire an understanding of the multi-dimensional impact of trauma. So we are giving time to describe the experience of the trauma of abuse. If we set out our task in terms of description and theological reflection, it may sound clinical and callous. Right from the outset, both authors wish to distance themselves from this attitude. Susan Williams’s counseling in the area of trauma and wrestling with its psychospiritual impact is the outcome of her personal immersion in that world. Stephen Williams’s involvement is the result of seeking to think with her through the implications of that world in the light of Christian faith. Our aim is to bring understanding where ignorance can be seriously damaging both to individuals who are not understood and to the whole body of Christ, where the disconnections caused by traumatic wounding make us corporately less than we are destined to be as “the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:23 ESV).1 We do not want to end up where people like T. S. Eliot ended up: “All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance / All our ignorance brings us nearer to death / But nearness to death no nearer to God.”2 The experiential world of trauma and abuse is much darker than these two words connote for those who have not experienced them, but there is a Light that no darkness will ever extinguish and a Life in him that death cannot destroy.

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WHAT IS TRAUMA?

Trauma (trauma) is a Greek word, meaning “wound.” It occurs once in the New Testament in the story usually called the parable of the Good Samaritan where it refers to the wounds of the assault victim whom he helped (Luke 10:34). Apparently, the word “trauma” in English did not come to mean a psychological wound until the 1890s.3 We are adopting this usage and so not dealing with trauma in the sense referred to in a “trauma center” in major hospitals, where skilled medical practitioners provide specialist care for the most severely injured patients. Psychological trauma can be part of the experience of these severely injured patients, but those who suffer abuse with no major physical trauma (e.g., inappropriate sexual touching) are just as likely to experience psychological trauma with all its enduring consequences, including flashbacks and intrusive thoughts about the trauma and overpowering avoidance of certain aspects of the experience; they are easily startled, on edge, and have trouble concentrating and sleeping.

There is no hard and fast distinction between the psychological and physical implications of trauma. The relation of the mind to the brain has long been a contentious subject, but however we understand it, the physical brain is clearly affected by psychological trauma.4 The impact on the brain simply of remembering an overwhelming event can be observed using technology such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This technology is being continually refined through advances in neuroscience to give us increasingly detailed images of brain trauma caused without physical force.5 When this impact is enduring, the neurophysiological consequences of trauma can be life-changing. For example, the amygdala (which is the threat detector in the brain) becomes hyperreactive so the traumatized person often feels on red alert. Every time the amygdala is triggered, it shuts down higher brain functions to focus on preparing for fight or flight. Yet those are the very functions that help with making wise judgments and good choices. In addition, the corrosive effect on the hippocampus of chronic stimulation of stress hormones leaves survivors6 of repeated sexual abuse with neurological damage to the brain hardware that stores this memory, sometimes resulting in learning deficits that vex them for life.7

Other posttraumatic changes in the brain can affect the heart, blood pressure, and the autoimmune system, significantly damaging health. An otherwise very healthy man who was a teenager when his father was brutally murdered by a car bomb during “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland had to have a pacemaker implanted in his heart not long after his thirtieth birthday. There are also numerous examples of various types of arthritis in young victims of trauma, including former soldiers and extreme abuse survivors. In this way the impact of psychological trauma is indirectly physical. We therefore must not falsely spiritualize psychological trauma any more than we would falsely spiritualize the physical condition of an earthquake victim with broken limbs. Psychospiritual damage is thoroughly embodied. Any account of trauma that ignores this is reductionistic.

With or without life-threatening wounds to the body, the impact of a traumatic event catapults the survivor into an alien world of psychospiritual pain. If such an event occurs when a person is old enough to notice change, everything suddenly looks in some indefinable way altered by the unfathomable distress. The control seat at the very center of your lived experience, the observer self through whom you perceive and interpret the world, has been bizarrely transmuted in ways which cast an unfamiliar light on all of life, suffusing posttraumatic experience with the sense of being a wounded stranger in a strange world, a world often encountered as hostile, enemy territory because of the enduring resonance of unassuaged terror. The global loss of the safe and familiar world, including the familiar self and self-control, amount to a radical unmaking of the lived world of the traumatized. The intense yearning for normality, to return to the time before trauma, coexists with uncontrollable memories erupting into conscious life as a consequence of such things as nightmares, images, and sensory or emotional memories.

Most of this also applies to those too young to remember a time before their traumatic experience, but for children the traumatic impact of abuse is compounded since they are inherently more vulnerable and helpless. There may be no “normality” to return to. Instead, traumatized children will create their own kind of stable “normality” out of the materials in their often severely limited social environment, which can be more destructive than life-enhancing. The ways that caregivers deal with their own emotions become models for the ways that children learn to manage their own emotional distress. When caregivers silence their own emotions and avoid their emotional needs, children also learn to silence their own emotions and to avoid their emotional needs. And when caregivers use addictions to soothe their own emotional distress rather than seeking comfort from others or through pleasant diversions such as music or nature, children also learn that addictions are a necessary way of managing emotional needs. Thus, the very world that traumatizes children also shapes them in the ways they cope with their emotional distress in the future. We will explore this further when we look at some of the defenses children use to contain distressing emotions they cannot regulate.

Under these circumstances, emotions (which are the initial communicators of a person’s inner world) are quelled before they can begin to be expressed. Nevertheless, emotional fragments may break loose, as it were, from the memory of the event that created them, still conveying distress in the form of an emotional memory. This is particularly painful and bewildering, like living in the heart of an emotional volcano with no context for understanding where you are or why you are there. The fact that this emotional information is not only urgent but explosively unprocessed means that the body is puppeteered without the victim’s knowing why he or she is not really in control. This powerlessness over the posttraumatic internal world makes a mockery of any resolve to find solid ground. It can be as challenging for the traumatized to get a grip on the psychological consequences of trauma as on the overwhelming experience of the traumatic event itself with its own shocking sensory and emotional data. A sense of utter helplessness already stamped on the soul of a survivor by the overpowering event is stamped even deeper by these overpowering emotional consequences.

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WHAT IS ABUSE?

Abuse is one of the experiences that can cause trauma. It can take a number of different forms. When we encounter the word “abuse,” we normally think of it in physical terms, often specifically sexual. It goes without saying that we keep this in mind.8 However, there is a wider, frequently neglected sense. All forms of abuse have an emotional dimension, but the abuser who repeatedly silences, demeans, humiliates, undermines, manipulates, coerces, or deceives a person inflicts emotional abuse. Naturally, this comes in degrees as well as kinds and not every example we can think of from the list above should be stretched to fit the term “emotional abuse.” However, such patterns of behavior can be abusive on a horrendous scale with devastating consequences.

The UK Serious Crime Act of 2015 makes behavior that is persistently “coercive or controlling behaviour against an intimate partner or family member” punishable by a prison term of up to five years.9 Whatever we think of this sentence or various applications of the law, the Act rightly indicates the seriousness of the behavior. Coercive behavior is understood in this context as “a pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten their victim” which bridges the physical and nonphysical aspects of abuse.10 The introduction of this legislation reflected a wider public awareness of the extreme harm caused by emotional abuse, which was also reflected in themes treated in popular BBC soaps at the time. On June 17, 2017, the British newspaper The Independent published an article revealing that reports of child emotional abuse had surged 200% in seven years amid cuts to child protection services. The subtitle reads: “ ‘Devastating’ rise in reports of parents telling their children they hate them or wish they were dead.” North American statistics for child maltreatment are just as disheartening, though they fail to show the full scale of the problem. The SPCC (Society for the Positive Care of Children) website admits that the reporting of emotional abuse is hampered by ignorance of what exactly belongs in that category, indicating that more work is needed to raise awareness before the extent of emotional abuse can even be assessed.

Emotional abuse occurs when people are repeatedly silenced at home, given no chance to voice their needs either verbally or through emotions, and treated as though or told that they are unloved. The impact of additional emotional abuse, such as being bullied in the public sphere—bullies often sense the vulnerability of the emotionally abused—increases the sense of devastation. Tragically, a grim cycle often characterizes the lives of the abused. The monumental Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta showed that “women who had an early history of abuse and neglect were seven times more likely to be raped in adulthood.”11 Childhood trauma thus carries with it a higher likelihood of accumulating traumatic experiences during the course of a lifetime.

As Christians, we need to be aware of the spiritual suffering that inevitably follows emotional abuse. While physical or sexual abuse is obvious to the victim, emotional abuse is much less obvious and easily infiltrates relationships in the church that are meant to model the noncoercive love of Jesus. Yet it is often not even on our radar. When the abused hear Paul and Peter modeling noncoercive respect for others (2 Cor 9:7; Phlm 14; 1 Pet 5:2) they can often barely hear these apostolic voices as noncoercive. Where emotional trauma leaves a legacy of terror in an inner world that feels locked in helpless isolation, the sense of the presence of God is banished. If we have been subject to emotional abuse, we may conclude that God is not there, because our experience of life is of the emotional absence of anyone meant to care for us. Alternatively, we may conclude that God is there but not willing to help, because that is how we have experienced the presence of those meant to be there to help. Or again, we may conclude that God is there, but that he is a terrifying presence, because we continue in God’s presence to experience the posttraumatic emotional memory of terror.

Traumatic experience is often made up of a number of perplexing strands that must be disentangled. Each strand is significant because accumulation of abuse means accumulation of traumatic (di)stress. A single rape is seriously traumatic. Being trapped in a relationship where rape is a persistent, if unpredictable, feature of life brings wave after wave of horror, affording no space between events for the safety needed to begin the process of healing. Abuse is often multifaceted. It can take either a conspicuous or a subtle form. For example, the violation of personal boundaries, conspicuous in the case of physical abuse, occurs more subtly in emotional abuse which diminishes a person’s sense of ownership over his or her own body; this often paves the way for more explicitly abusive violations of the body’s boundaries. Our contemporary lack of social consensus on sexual ethics and cultural obsession with erotic sexuality complicate the question of relational boundaries. What counts as violation and victimhood may be unclear. In our supposedly shame-free society, sexual violation nevertheless brings a shame that defies the “anything goes” culture, a culture that makes the shame puzzling. Disentangling the threads of abuse is further complicated by the subtle nature of incremental abuse as it moves from the psychological to the physical dimension—a common progression.

Those who are traumatized can be overwhelmed by the complexity of their experience. The enormity of just one aspect of abuse can blind them to other, hidden layers of experience. The physical harm caused by sexual abuse varies but sometimes it is overlooked in its own right because there is a focus on the sexual component. Further, emotional pain is intensified with the shattering of belief about the person who is actually causing harm, especially when this is the one who is meant to protect the victim from such harm. When the victim is deprived of a sense of safety in her or his own home, the basis for flourishing becomes radically insecure. If the perpetrator of abuse was in a trusted relationship with the victim, the betrayal of trust constitutes another facet of the abuse that the victim must work through. If someone in a position of spiritual authority commits the abuse, then a form of spiritual abuse is also involved with an attendant impact on the survivor’s capacity to trust anyone in spiritual authority in the future. Each aspect of abuse accumulates stressors, so that the more facets of abuse someone experiences, the more stressful the abuse becomes, and the greater the overall stress load, the more likely it is that the capacity of the traumatized person to cope will break down.

With each stressor entailed in a traumatic experience, losses are incurred. In major event trauma, losses are often blatant consequences of the event, for example, disability, bereavement, loss of a home. But all too often the hidden losses of abuse go unrecognized. People who are abused feel their very being is made “defective” in some extraordinary way by the abuse and it cannot be made right. While our sinfulness is a defect common to all of us, this posttraumatic defectiveness is experienced as personally unique, something which marks out the traumatized individual as a thoroughly deplorable person, beneath contempt from any point of view, even God’s. How can we measure the loss of a sense of a healthy, “undefective” self? Or the loss of the sense of well-being associated with a safe world? Trauma is a subtle as well as a blatant evil. The evil is accentuated when a child is involved.

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CHILDHOOD TRAUMA

Before exploring further im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface (D. A. Carson)
• 1. Introduction
• 2. What Is Trauma?
• 3. What Is Abuse?
• 4. Childhood Trauma
• 5. Major Implications of Traumatic Abuse
• 6. Christian Reflections
• Acknowledgments
• Study Guide Questions
• For Further Reading
• Understanding Trauma