Tag Archives: resilience

Beyond trauma and resilience is Love

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Psychological growth, , , , , ,

A rich sense of blessing came over my wife and I not long ago. The experience has stuck with me and continues to loosen the barriers between me and my original union with God. Bessel van der Kolk and Psalm 139 help. Here is a bit of the psalm:

For You shaped me, inside and out.
You knitted me together in my mother’s womb long before I took my first breath.
I will offer You my grateful heart, for I am Your unique creation, filled with wonder and awe.
You have approached even the smallest details with excellence;
Your works are wonderful;
I carry this knowledge deep within my soul.  — Psalm 139:13-14 (The Voice)

You should probably take a deep breath and read that again so you can sink into it.

It took me a few decades of life before I could take a deliberate breath and appreciate what my mind and body knew about God. So much of the Christianity surrounding me as I grew up was focused on being in right relationship with God, the great “external locus of control.” You’ve heard: “Get right with God. God is good all the time. Everything happens for a reason. Jesus is Lord of all. Jehovah is King.” The Church has often been a place where men fight each other to see what image of God is going to dominate, or what philosophy will rule. You’ve seen: Pastors raised up in sky-high pulpits or on jumbotrons, giant altars, a screen from behind which a man brings out holy things, founders who end up as dictators. Even Psalm 39, above, has been used to describe a very powerful creator whose total knowledge gives him total control (“God’s in control”) and so gives infinite opportunity to criticize the smallest details of our sin.

My Christian clients often come to therapy with the predictable effects of their damaging view of God. Even when they accept Jesus into their hearts (often in response to fear of hell or fear of ostracism from their family if they don’t), he resides in them like a prison warden, and the most avoidant are in solitary confinement.  Yet, once given a chance to tell their story, to be seen and heard, to explore the taboo topics of trauma and self-condemnation, they find a surprising knowledge of another God deep within. As they find their own value and exercise their own agency they get a new sense of an internal locus of control, and a new view of God emerges. They are free to form a much deeper relationship. As a result, Psalm 139 becomes more like the very gentle reading in The Voice. In that amplified translation, the rich word they translate “shaped” feels more intimate and, for what I want to say today, like a loving touch.

Bessel van der Kolk recording On Being. (Image by Kelli Wilkes)

Is resilience all we’ve got?

As I have been languidly reading The Body Keeps Score (in order to keep up with everyone else, honestly), I have enjoyed Bessel van der Kolk’s memoir-like presentation of how the science of trauma has developed over his lifetime, since the 1970’s. He’s a learner and open to any way to help people, to whatever works to free them, including spiritual ways. In 2021, Krista Tippet unearthed that his parents were fundamentalist Christians and the fact he “spent a fair amount of time in a monastery in France called Taize.”  One thing he has learned lately impressed me. It came from his own experience of MDMA as a means to revisit places where memories are stuck in a debilitating narrative of trauma.

Van der Kolk was a sickly, impoverished, hungry child with neglectful, traumatized parents. He says in the interview,

In my last experience [with MDMA}, actually, I experienced in a very deep way what that little boy went through, who was starving and his mom was not there for him. And I had a tremendous sense of compassion for, oh my God, what that little boy went through. And the people around me were extremely attuned. And it sort of took care of something so subliminal inside of myself that I think it’s produced quite a significant transformation inside myself. In terms of that I don’t feel deprived. I don’t feel that there’s a deficit anymore.

He says the drug gave him access to the “cosmic dimensions” of himself. It opened him to the “mystery of the universe” and he ended up “feeling at once insignificant and utterly precious at the same time.” He could have written Psalm 139 himself!

When van der Kolk and others explore trauma they are looking for psychological, relational and physical ways to diminish or reform memories that color future reactions to life and love and often shape us for self-destruction. When most therapists get to the “bottom of things” their main hope for healing is human resilience. In their view, our personal capacity, for the most part, is the power we have to get well and feel well, or at least stay safe and sober. Often their confidence is well placed because we are wonderfully made and have an amazing capacity for survival. For most of us, trauma often ends up transforming us, not tormenting us. In North Jersey I think most people say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

What is beyond the trauma narrative?

I am often amazed at the resilience people demonstrate. Once they rediscover their capacity, when it is affirmed, and they construct a new narrative for how their life works, they often feel good to go and they go. Others, once they have a new sense of safety and personal agency, are free to see what is deeper than their trauma. Beyond the faulty foundations of their attachment and the troubles of this world, they have always known God, in one way or another. Van der Kolk begrudgingly sees this knowledge in his parents’ infantile faith. But then he can’t miss it when his normal senses are bypassed with MDMA and wonders are revealed, received by and stored in his right brain, where he knew God before he knew language.

This post arose from a similar experience of revelation and reassurance. We were having a conversation  and both felt grateful for how our faith had helped us keep going and even transforming us when we were deeply hurt, not only by each other and the forces surrounding us, but by the trauma of the last two years and experiences clear back to our early childhood.  We were helping each other memorize the new narrative of love we had learned, the love that preceded our trauma, the trauma to which we had devoted much energy recounting and fearing.

Maybe now that scientists like van der Kolk are belatedly acknowledging the primacy of the right hemisphere of the brain, more and more people  will be open to their natural state of oneness with God. He says in his book, “The right brain is the first to develop in the womb, and it carries the nonverbal communication between mothers and infants” (p.79). I believe it is primarily in the right hemisphere where God also nonverbally communicated with us and continues to nurture us in a spiritual womb. I often tell about my first experience of church as a five-year old. I did not bother much with the left-brain lessons. But when we sang the songs, music being among the languages of the right brain, I felt like I was at home; they gave my senses the words to explain how I had always known God.

Psalm 139 gets at the sense we have always been with God and God has always been with us. I think it has always been a good reminder, a symbolic representation, of what we all know in our deepest hearts beyond our brokenness. We were created in love. Psalm 139 is another version of my kindergarten experience of oneness, “If it happened there it happens everywhere.” We are all known by a loving God. Jesus makes that plain.

So we can all find faith in God which supports us even better than our own resilience. We can find assurance that allows us to keep going when we are hurt. In the face of all the trouble we face, it makes sense to be stubbornly loved and always looking for love, even when the absence we feel hurts, knowing it is there, sinking into it beyond words, feeling it in the love of others. If it happened then, it can always happen. Deeper than suffering, than resilience, even deeper than trauma transformed is love. My prayer remains, “Your works are wonderful; I carry this knowledge deep within my soul.” I am the work of your love.

FFF #15 — Resilience: The faith factor in climate action

Climate, , , , , , ,

Posting every Friday at noon is how I act in solidarity with young climate strikers all over the world who want their elders to save their future. 

There is general agreement about what needs to be done to combat climate disruption:

  • Mitigation: reducing emissions.
  • Adaptation: preparing infrastructure to endure the changes.
  • Resilience: deepening the capacity of people to cope with trauma and build a new way of life.

The third response in the list is even weaker than the previous two.

In his book Transformational Resilience, social systems theorist Bob Doppelt says, “No response to the climate crisis will…succeed unless individuals and groups of all types around the globe understand how trauma and toxic stress affects their minds and bodies, and use skills to calm their emotions and thoughts, learn from, and find meaning, direction, and hope in adversity.” The hard scientists and social scientists are doing great work. But people are the problem. If you think their view matches the often-maligned “anthropocentric” worldview of the Bible, I agree with you. The fate of the earth has been given over to humans to steward in collaboration with one another and God. But love rarely rules. So things often die.

Personal resilience

I’m enjoying reading Sarah Jaquette Ray in A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety as she tries to work on the missing link in climate action: the “personal resilience” of people. What she means by “personal” and “resilience” would be interesting to debate. But you probably get the gist of it. It is the same strength, vision and hope you need to call on when you realize you actually matter and you need to do something important with the skills you have in your present context. When you look into 2022 you may not automatically sense a lot of strength, vision and hope. You may be tempted to go with feelings of despair that lead you to withdraw and merely survive.

Some of you Bible readers, however, probably automatically dialed up Romans 5 when you heard “personal resilience;” you could feel the Holy Spirit drawing you to fearlessness when it comes to 2022:

We have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.
And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.
Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings,
because we know that suffering produces perseverance;
perseverance, character;
and character, hope.
And hope does not put us to shame,
because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

Sarah Jaquette Ray is a Buddhist evangelist, but I think she can align with Paul’s point of view. (Besides, divvying up the spoils between rival religious/political parties should probably be consigned to “pre-climate change.”) She gives some useful suggestions for building resilience (or faith, if you like) in the face of the blooming catastrophe we face. Here are three of them, in brief.

Don’t measure so much

As good consumer capitalists, we hardly do anything unless we think it is a good deal, from buying a washing machine to making love. So when we look at what we should do in response to the huge work of fighting climate change, we shy away from the effort because we can’t guarantee the outcome. You might not do your part because you can’t see your effort resulting in enough impact to justify the cost. But it has often been said in response to such thinking, “If you expect to see the final results of your work, you simply have not asked a big enough question.”

I admire people who can stick with their big questions and stop “counting beans” to measure whether their good is producing the best and most good. I am more with Paul, who knows his vision is limited but knows he serves in an eternal arena.

We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. — 2 Cor 4:16-18

Fixing our eyes on what is unseen is a big enough question, in itself! Thanks to God, the eternal has been planted in history in Jesus and planted in us by the Spirit so we have strength beyond our own to call on when we face our troubles.

Redefine action

Sarah Jaquette Ray is dismayed to see the movement of climate action in bondage to the left-brain. She says, “Many people want to be problem-solvers and to fix things right NOW. They want less feeling less thinking, less talking and more action. But urgency and its sidekick, non-thinking, result in unintended consequences that can undermine our goals.” Resilience needs the right brain, too.

Our sense of inefficacy may have more to do with whether we think we make a difference than with assessing the difference we make. We may have an “instrumentalist’ view that says the only actions that matter are the ones which make immediate, impressive, large-scale change. If we view ourselves more realistically, accepting our limits, we often gain more energy to do what we can. Our problem is rarely that we have no power or influence; it is that we don’t use the power or influence we have because we think it is not enough.

Christianity has unwittingly taught an “instrumentalist” theology for ages. I think the Bible always starts with “You matter” and THEN gets to “So act like that.” But that truth is often turned around so people think, “I’d better do the right, the best, the most things so I can matter as much as I ought to.”

This Bible passage was often misinterpreted in that way when I was coming up

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God — even as I try to please everyone in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved. – 1 Corinthians 10:31-33

I think Paul is in the middle of a big discourse grounded in “You matter” when he writes those lines. So it follows that he says, “If you do anything, do it to the glory of God and you will be fine. You have nothing to lose. Love everyone, build the common good and anything else will follow — you are brothers and sisters with Jesus no less.” Even though I think that is the core of what he is teaching, I don’t know how many times I have been hit with, “You are making someone stumble” as the takeaway I should get. Don’t do anything that could be wrong! A lot of us never do anything because it might be wrong or not right enough! Doing the good we can with the Spirit we have is enough — and who knows, it might lead to more!

There are starting points in climate action everyone can do. Express dissatisfaction with the status quo. Bear witness to a crisis — don’t turn away;  know about it and speak about it. Help people on the front lines. Give money. Build community. Talk about the good action that is happening  — e.g.: a friend posted a picture of a smokestack near his house belching black smoke the other day on FB. You get the idea. Listening to the voice that tells you “You don’t matter” and doing nothing is the sin, not failing to do something spectacular.

Go slow enough

Urgency and action without mindful deliberation and contemplative depth does not serve the mission of climate action.  Resilience takes time. Sarah Ray quotes the writers of the workbook Dismantling Racism as they teach that a relentless sense of urgency makes “it difficult to take time to be inclusive, encourage democratic and/or thoughtful decision-making, to think long-term, to consider consequences” (p. 29). Likewise with climate action, the urgency of problem solving can run over the human and community development which is crucial to solving the problem.

Dee Dee Risher (a Philly hero) writes in The Soul Making Room about how pausing to turn into gratitude slowed down her action-oriented, anxiety-driven life enough to help rejuvenate her strength.

Gratitude is the great demon-vanquisher. We cannot be grateful and carry emotions of fear anxiety or anger. Our wiring is not capable of it. Moreover, gratitude changes our place in the chain of being. Gratitude by its very nature makes us a recipient. We are not the giver. That weight is off our shoulders. Gifts are bestowed upon us and we recognize them. We do not have to produce or be worthy. Instead, moments come into our unsuspecting and outstretched hands. Our job is simply to unwrap them.

In the cause of slowing down for gratitude, some Bible verses should not be made into songs. Like this one:

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. — Matthew 6:33-4

The old song I linked helped me remember a bit of the truth. But it was so sweet so short! Our seeking is long and slow. Righteousness is incremental. What’s worse, verse one of the song (the one most of us will remember) ends with “all these things will be added to you” when it would do better to lead us to check our anxiety about not getting what we imagine we need or deserve. We need to do the best we can to trust God with the trouble at hand instead of thinking about three years from now.

The good things the people of Earth are doing in 2022 to combat climate change may or may not be enough. We know what needs to be done but people will always be the problem with doing it. Will we build one another’s capacity to cope with the trauma and learn how to build a new way of life? Will we find resilience and trust? I think Jesus followers have profound answers to that question and the means to answer it with faith, hope and love.