I recently started reading his classic book, The Body Keeps the Score, and will be posting excerpts, but I thought I’d start with this video overview below from van der Kolk, and a key passage from the video overview:
Bessel van der Kolk says in the video:
“The nature of a trauma is that an experience enters into your ears, into your skin, into your eyes, and it goes down into a very primitive part of your brain that automatically interprets what’s going on…. an event becomes traumatic when there is nothing you can do to stave off the inevitable and your body goes into a state of fight/flight or collapse.
The lingering effect of trauma is that you continue to react to mild stressors as if your life is in danger, and so you tend to become hyperreactive.
…Most people are barely aware or not aware at all that their reactions that they’re having right now is actually rooted in experiences that they’ve had before. That event itself is over, but you continue to react to things as if you’re in danger.
…. You need to really develop a deep sense of, ‘This is what’s happened to me. This is what I’m dealing with, and I need to take care of the wounds that I’m caring inside of myself.‘
This issue of self-compassion and really knowing that your reactions are understandable and are rooted in you getting stuck in the past is a terribly important part of beginning to recover from trauma.”
I’ve written this many times before, but the Christian church — well put it this way. It’s remarkable how many have been traumatized by it, and yet remained Christians. It’s a testament to God’s power, but also Satan’s penchant to show up as an angel of light.
To begin with, you have the obvious and tragic abuse of every kind that’s so common in churches.
Read The Roys Report’s outstanding work on exposing abusive church cultures. There are so many who’ve been traumatized in God’s very temple, and when they work up the courage to confront their abusers, the church goes into overdrive to protect the powerful and further victimize the victim.
If Christians want to complain about a “Deep State,” Abusive Church Culture is the real Deep State because it works far more damage than any other, imaginable institution on earth, because it cloaks its abuse in Christ’s name.
That’s the clearest example.
But on another, more quiet level, the entire ethos of Victorious Christian Living runs contradictory to the idea of trauma itself, and thereby, dismisses it.
And here’s perhaps the main reason.
When you come to Christ, you are famously a “new creation,” but the church misses the crucial distinction that this means you’re a new spiritual creation, not a new physical creation. We would never tell a stage II cancer patient who suddenly became a Christian that they’re now a new physical creation and their cancer is therefore gone and stop the chemo.
And in the case of PTSD and trauma, we still have trauma from the past stored in us that will play out in continually damaging ways, because our new bodies don’t come until the Resurrection.
In fact, for many new Christians, trauma can become more confusing because they’re taught that it’s supposed to go away because they’re a “new creation” now (just like they’re supposed to be “joyful” all the time now), and if the trauma lingers, then they’re just not “giving it away to God.”
Our traumas are perhaps some of our most sacred experiences, and I mean that in the sense that you have to go deep to get into a sacred place, and when someone laughs or makes a joke while in a sacred place, there’s a kind of blasphemy to it.
When people have doubted the reality of my depression or anxiety, I’ve sometimes been hurt, but so be it.
But when I’ve actually shared a moment of trauma and been dismissed?
That hurts at a level I didn’t even know I had. It’s a conversational dehumanization unlike any other.
And that is why I say it is sacred, because sacred means “set apart,” and it is very precious in the sense that it represents us at our most fragile.
We are all survivors of something deeply hurtful and as T.S. Eliot wrote, “All suffering is unique and the same.”
If you recognize trauma in your life, please look for help. Trauma won’t go away if you ignore it. I tried that for too long, and I’ve still got a long way to go. Thankfully, there’s help.
For readers from the United States….
Find a psychiatrist here.
Find a therapist here.
For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.
For those without Christ, he’s a prayer away.
