If you choose to be the primary point of regular pastoral care and counsel…get to know the person, find ways to quiet the body, retell their story in and through Christ, and offer help for living in the present. Also consider meeting with a trusted, well-informed adviser for ongoing consultation.…While you have the utmost confidence that trauma is addressed most deeply in Christ and him crucified, you also know that wise care seeks out and listens to wise help and advice.

ABSTRACT

How might pastors begin to care for Christians who have experienced real trauma? Trauma literature generally outlines four features of care: know the person, reclaim the body, retell the story, and offer help to live in the present. Pastors and other leaders in a church might usefully apply this framework in their own ministry to sufferers, even as they fill each step with Christ and his word. In the end, common yet profound words from Christ, offered skillfully over time, can uniquely address the depths of the most complex pain.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Ed Welch (PhD, University of Utah), counselor and faculty member at the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation (CCEF), to outline pastoral approaches to caring for those who have experienced real trauma.

Public attention to particular human struggles has its seasons. Multiple-personality disorder, for example, had a season in the 1980s, and ADHD after that. We notice the height of the season when a struggle shows up in bestseller lists or as a top hit in search engines. After a while, the hype settles into a quieter season marked by less attention and gradual refinements, perhaps finding new life in the next generation. Currently, we live in trauma’s season, and we have reason to believe that the season will be a long one.

The purpose of this brief essay is to review how Scripture guides us in understanding and caring for those who have gone through real trauma. We expect to find that trauma is a complex and nearly inscrutable fracturing of body and soul among those who survive it. We also believe that common yet profound words from Christ, offered skillfully, with humility and compassion, across the long journey of faith, will contribute to spiritual strength in the midst of weakness.

My interest here is not to give the details of pastoral care for those who have gone through trauma; rather, I aim to sketch the interests of the trauma-informed literature and how Scripture speaks to those concerns in ways that renew your confidence in how Christ and his word uniquely address the depths of the human heart. With humility, you come to this life-dominating trouble as a learner, without much confidence in yourself but with certainty that God in Christ speaks life and love to all kinds of troubled souls.

Trauma Described

Today the word trauma is applied to all kinds of pains and personal offenses, not all of them truly traumatic. Think of it as an imprecise way of referring to a painful past that has deleterious consequences in relationships and work, even decades later. A pastoral response is less interested in guarding the boundaries of the word than it is in understanding the descriptions and experiences that can be crammed into it.

Time, indeed, does not heal all wounds; some only seem to get worse. Traumas include wars and their destruction; sexual, physical, or verbal violence that you witnessed or experienced; loss of a child; addictions in the home; and abandonment, betrayal, or neglect from someone who was supposed to love and care for you, to name a few of its causes. If you have not experienced trauma, you will discover that it is all around you. Our world is covered with injustices and death. We know of the relentless wickedness within human hearts, even as we will always be grieved by its endless destructive consequences.

With only this simple description, Scripture opens wide and invites us in, especially through the links it makes between the flesh, death, and the devil. The flesh includes wickedness that tears down and destroys, which is among death’s signature moves as it wreaks havoc among the living. Both the flesh and death share a connection to the devil, who comes to steal and kill (John 10:10). We can expect that trauma will be accompanied by spiritual battles full of accusations, guilt, shame, hopelessness, and lies about God’s care. This means that pastoral care is essential for those who have experienced trauma.

As one small entry point, we could say, “One thing we know is that whenever death comes close, especially by the wickedness of others, the devil’s accusations and lies will likely follow, with lies and accusations about both yourself and your Lord. Have you noticed that warfare?”

Four Common Features of Care

Trauma literature generally includes four discernible features of care: know the person, reclaim the body, retell the story, and offer help to live in the present. All four categories are natural to Scripture and offer a useful framework for us, even as we seek to fill each category with Christ-centered aims.

1. Know the person.

There are two basic movements in individual pastoral care: know the person and know Scripture, in that order. Whereas you can preach without knowing specifics about your hearers, you cannot do pastoral care without first knowing the person. Misunderstandings here will impede growth and discourage the person.

The case to know Scripture in pastoral care is obvious. Know the person is more intuitive or perhaps assumed. Of course we want to know people. How can we help if we don’t understand a person’s actual struggle? But since know the person is a fuzzy category that often doesn’t appear in theological textbooks or receive emphasis in seminary curriculums, our knowledge of the person can be haphazard and unguided. Trauma can have complex consequences, so skills in knowing people are critical.

You could begin here: “Please, try to tell me about how your past is affecting your life today.” The present can be a way to move into the past. Small steps. When you know and care for the person in the present, that person might feel safe enough to describe the disturbing fragments of the past. You invite the person to speak because your care requires that you know something about him or her. Even more profoundly, these questions and answers are often preliminary to the person being able to speak these fragments to God, who invites us to pour out our heart to him (Psalm 62:8).

Fear often leads the way. That is one obvious consequence of destructive acts. “I stood in great fear of the multitude, and the contempt of families terrified me, so that I kept silence, and did not go out of doors” (Job 31:34). Traumatized people live with what feels like three options: fight, flight, or freeze. The freeze response is connected to what is known as dissociation, a common feature of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dissociation yanks you into your past while you are in the present.

You can understand why trauma discussions talk about the importance of a safe place. If the brush with death came from a father or brother, a woman speaking with a pastor in his study — or even with a pastor and his spouse — could be more than enough to drag her back to past events. Without such knowledge, you could assume that a woman is quietly understanding and appreciating your encouragement, though really she is too frightened to say anything. To establish a safe space, you might say, “I am concerned that you could feel intimidated or outnumbered by even being here,” and then consider ideas for what might help.

Most pastoral care cases involve working through a prominent struggle: a conflict, a miserable boss, a distant child. Trauma, however, brings a kind of internal shattering in which multiple troubles live together. Along with fear comes almost every imaginable form of misery. Pain, chaos, panic, depression, anger, disfigured desires, guilt, shame, and discernment that seems unmoored given how past wickedness was justified by perpetrators — these are just some of what you will find. Notice that the word of Christ gives the only meaningful and healing answers to all of these. To begin disentangling this web, you might say, “Sometimes there are so many voices inside you that you don’t even know where to begin. Maybe you could begin by describing what is happening within you now.”

Trauma could present as anger. But if anger immediately drives you to James 4:1–3, you might miss what is most important. With trauma, anger is usually an expression of fear. The traumatized can be sinfully angry, like anyone else, but their anger is more often a means of protection. To miss this is to leave the person even more isolated.

Trauma could also present as withdrawal. When the words come, they are vague and not specific. The person seems distant. A natural question is, “How can I help you be here? For example, do you have any questions about the room?” (This is one way to invite the person into the present.)

Pastoral blunders come when we do not understand a person accurately. Your goal is to know a person in such a way that you can describe the person and even help him or her have words for the chaotic experiences that seem ineffable. As a way to love others, you could supplement your knowledge of PTSD by conferring with those in the church who have helped or experienced trauma; you could also read online stories or a book such as Darby Strickland’s Trauma: Caring for Survivors. You don’t need to have complete knowledge of a person before you can help. You can never know another person fully. But you can know the person accurately and identify those experiences that are most intense.

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