Who needs trauma–informed pastoral counseling?
“What do you do?”
“I’m a trauma–informed pastoral counselor.”
“Oh. What types of clients do you work with?”
I get this question a lot. When people hear trauma they often imagine war veterans or refugees. I typically offer a broader summary of my work:
“I work with people who recognize that the strategies they developed in the past are not working for them in the present and want help imagining a better future.”
That’s when it hits them. Occasionally an eyebrow will raise and they will ask, “Isn’t that everyone?” “It could be,” I respond. And that’s the point.
We were all born outside of Eden, into a broken and cursed world that caused us pain. Some of us had caregivers who could attune to our physical and emotional wounds and soothe our pain in healthy ways. This taught us that we could voice our needs and find them met in connection with others. The rest of us, however, had to find ways to soothe ourselves and develop strategies to navigate our world.
Sometimes these strategies are obvious and destructive: pornography, drugs, sex, manipulation, or demeaning others. But often these strategies are more charming and adaptive. People–pleasing, over–achieving, and perfectionism are great strategies for gaining affirmation and approval—something every human needs.
Sometimes we find ourselves playing a role that provides for other human needs like worth and belonging: the caretaker, the helper, the performer, the comedian, the hard worker, the rule follower, the secret keeper. These roles helped us find a place in our family and navigate the broken places we found ourselves in. They were good at giving us access to something we needed, but they came with a price.
Perhaps you spent the majority of your adult life shoving your anger deep down. Sure, it would come out every once in a while on the football field, but that was an acceptable enough place to express it for a male in our culture. Yet now that you’re a father of two young boys, you have a harder time bottling it up when your kids push your buttons. Recently you got so mad that you punched a hole through your living room wall. You did’t lay a hand on them, but you saw the fear on their faces, and you lie awake at night wondering if your father’s rage has something to do with your own.
Perhaps you spent your childhood making everyone happy by serving their needs. You were good at it, too, and could even anticipate a need before it was expressed. This skill was useful in hosting social events in your neighborhood and church, but it often left you wondering who would take care of your needs. You can’t remember a time when you didn’t exist for someone else, and you’ve started to resent your ungrateful husband and children. You fantasize about leaving them all, but wonder how life would have been different if the adults in your childhood had acted more like adults than children.
Or perhaps your trauma is the ongoing war with shame. You grew up doing everything you could to avoid it. You tried to make people happy by achieving, but that only kicked shame down the road. Whenever you made a mistake, he would be waiting for you. At some point in life you intuited the lie that in order to be loved, you must be perfect. Any criticism, now, feels like condemnation. When confronted by your errors, you feel the ground shake beneath your feet. Even a small infraction, like being a few minutes late to a meeting, comes with a deep dread that you will soon be shamed and rejected for your mistakes.
Now, we could simply tell ourselves to stop. We could weigh the evidence for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and tell our hearts that our fears are unfounded or unlikely. We could even spiritualize it and say, “repent from the idols of your heart.” But to do so would simply be trimming the branches. To find lasting change, we must look beneath our current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and look to their antecedents—the stories and contexts that shaped them, especially the stories of trauma. What we often find is that the strategies we developed to protect us from trauma end up further traumatizing us, leaving us isolated and fragmented. The only way to move forward is to go back to the beginnings.
When we neglect our stories of brokenness, of lost love, of abandonment and abandoned desires, of harm done to us or harm we’ve done to others, we run the risk of missing God, too. As Frederick Buechner put it: “The God of biblical faith is the God who meets us at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don't stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us and around us and inside us, we run the tragic risk of losing touch with God too.”
Trauma–informed pastoral counseling helps us redeem our stories of heartache. It applies the good news of the gospel to the very places we need it most; the places where God most wants to meet us. It helps us understand where we’ve been so that we imagine where God wants to take us. It’s not just for those who have experience what we might call “Big T-trauma,” but anyone who has grown up outside the gates of Eden. We all have unprocessed pain in our pasts that was too risky to tend to in the moment. Trauma–informed pastoral counseling looks at our stories with curiosity and kindness, and invites us to process, grieve, and heal. And that is something not for the few but for the masses.
Have you discovered that the strategies you developed in the past are not working for you today? Do you need someone to bear witness to the pain you’ve experienced and help you process? Do you want to imagine a better future for yourself and your children? Book a free consultation to get started with Good Shepherd Soul Care.
