Episode 57 - Spiritual Trauma

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for those of you who've experienced trauma of any kind this might be a particularly triggering episode for you to listen to so take care consider the things that you need to do before you listen to this to keep yourself safe and remember that you don't have to listen to this and you don't have to continue listening to this if you have trauma it may be useful for you to listen to this episode with somebody who knows about your story so that if anything gets stirred up that you have a safe place to talk about it most people who listen to the liturgist podcast are people who are interested in spiritual conversation but maybe not fully at home in the religious contexts that they come from for some this is simply because they've outgrown the small-mindedness of their tribe there's this poem by the Sufi mystic Hafiz that one of the lines it says the great religions are the ships poets the lifeboats every sane person I know has jumped overboard I think that's very funny but there's also people who have jumped ship in some way or another not simply because of growth in Hope faith or love but simply out of the need to survive let's face it the most beautiful and awful human endeavors are often done in the name of God in the name of God countless hungry people have been fed the poor have been clothed the hopeless have been comforted but also in the name of God blood has been shed the poor have been taken advantage of in the name of God oppression racism patriarchy and every kind of abuse imaginable has thrived and a lot of us are people who have experienced both sides of this blade many of us have found comfort in our faith but also despair we found both shelter and a storm the evil perpetuated in the name of God is often the darkest sort of evil because the most perverse things are always a perversion of the most beautiful one of the most disturbing stories I've ever heard was of this father who wouldn't molest his daughter at night while singing worship songs how many of our stories probably don't sound as extreme as this spiritual trauma or abuse on any level it's incredibly damaging and it hurts so much because these sort of things reach us on an existential level the results of a perverse spirituality a perverse spiritual community or authority is often a deep and sometimes unseen trauma that results in existential shame about who we are who God is how many of us have faced some sort of spiritual abuse or trauma in our lives the stories are everywhere but they're also often hidden we haven't been able to find any legitimate studies on this subject to find like real numbers of how many people suffer this sort of trauma but in an informal Twitter survey we asked how many of you the litter gists have suffered some form of spiritual trauma or abuse and more than two out of three of you said that you had but these stories are not ones we usually want to talk about you don't want to pull up the past and feel that pain again we don't want to admit how much it really hurts today's episode we'll be speaking with some brilliant people and it will be presented in three acts first is recognizing and understanding spiritual trauma the second will be healing from spiritual trauma and the third will be creating safe spiritual space for others we think this will be a very important episode for a lot of you so please do listen with an open mind and open heart and welcome to the liturgist podcast when I was approximately nine years old the church that I had grown up in this small southern town pulled my parents and a young single mother up onto the stage one Sunday night and proclaimed they were having a stoning service now I didn't know what this man I knew about the stories of Stephen being stoned and there was great fear at points that someone was going to literally start throwing rocks they didn't throw rocks though they threw something much more potent their words for the next hour I got to hear supposed friends and family stand up and say terrible things about my family because they had had to skip church one Sunday to do some much-needed work on our home and about this young mother because the only job she could find was at a convenience store which required her to sell cigarettes and alcohol now in the end my family came through this okay although we were greatly scarred in the process but to this day I don't know what happened to that young mother who came to this church because she was hurting and alone and instead of finding a group who loved her and cared for her she found simply judgment and condemnation [Music] I grew up Southern Baptist in the state of Mississippi and I have a lot of stories I could share about spiritual trauma but the most the most traumatic one to me and really the one that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back was when I was 19 and visiting my mother as a college freshman at the time and I had recently gotten my nose pierced and upon arriving to her church I took out the nose ring because I knew it was not gonna be well-received but a deacon had seen me before I got a chance to do that and told the pastor and as I was sitting on the front row waiting for church to begin the choir was filling in the loft and the pastor comes storming down the aisle and literally grabs me by the back of my neck and drags me down the aisle in front of everyone into the foyer where he essentially excommunicated me from the church yelling and screaming and raving he told me I was an abomination to the Lord and that I could not return until I publicly repented in front of the whole congregation parents convinced me to go to Bible Camp when I was 9 and we were told that it was seven times hotter than the Earth's molten core [Music] you know to hold our hands over you know campfire in the evenings and to feel what it would be feel like to feel fire on our bodies for the rest of eternity they're showing pictures of Satan great white throne with flames underneath you know on Sunday school we were shown movies like a thief in the night when I was 13 the Christian school I went to took me to a play where they showed people being dragged off the stage people that weren't taking up in the rapture and then a real gun was used to shoot them offstage so I hallucinations started by the time I was 12 chapter one recognizing and understanding spiritual trauma yes this is Reverend Carol Howard married but you can call me Carol Carol Howard Merritt is an award-winning author speaker and minister who speaks and writes on the topic of ministering and a new generation random strangers if you told them that you're a minister usually you get a really big earful either that or nobody wants to talk to you it's one or the other you know like trapped for the rest of the night or you know Carol's newest book is called healing spiritual wounds so we thought she'd be a great person to talk to about today's subject I grew up Southern Baptist mainly my parents got the Holy Ghost in the midst of that as they say and started going to kind of a charismatic mega church my father was a brilliant man he worked for NASA he was an artist he was a lot of things but he was also pretty violent in our home many times he was compelled by this idea that he should be the authority in the home and that my mom and my brother and sister ought to submit and so I think you know it was the 70s the world wasn't working that way anymore wives were starting to to work outside of the home and and kids we were sort of expected to rebel in our culture and I think he just had a very difficult time dealing with that the more the religious pressure was on him to be this authoritarian dictator at home he just got more and more violent it was really difficult because he would often quote verses as he was violent and telling us that we must submit and that he was the authority in her home [Music] so as he was dying I was realizing how much the violence in the trauma that I was growing up with was so intertwined with the spiritual violence it felt more than just domestic violence it it felt really like there was a spiritual issue I needed to deal with we're gonna hear a lot more from Carroll in this episode but we'd like to introduce you to another person this is Hilary hi I'm Hilary McBride so we're talking about trauma and we're here with Hilary McBride and she's legit so unlike me science mind has absolutely no scientific publications whatsoever Hilary's like like a credentialed psychotherapist in Vancouver Canada and a PhD candidate in counseling psychology at UBC so if her opinion is what we like to call educated and inform and not highly Google curators to have her on the program all right to get us started could we maybe talk about a definition of terms here what exactly are we talking about we're talking about trauma there's lots of different kinds of trauma I want to be really clear that trauma is is something that could be different for everybody it's a construct that we used to cover a wide variety of experiences and events and something that may be traumatic for me may not be traumatic for you I think there are things that we we find disruptive in our lives and people it's not unusual for people to say oh my god I went to the store and they didn't have my shoes it was totally traumatic for me and I want to distinguish that from the kind of trauma that we're talking about which is when your your system though the human organism is overwhelmed and starts to operate in a different way than they normally do when they're at rest the human organism as far as I understand it is wired to survive and so when there's a threat to our survival and our threat to our survival is determined in a variety of ways which I'll tell you about in a second that a threat to our survival causes our brain body system to do some some things that it doesn't normally do we get nervous system activation that would move us into trying to resolve the trauma or stop it or perhaps get away from it and then if none of those things work then then we actually shut down the definition of trauma that I like to use when I'm working with people is something that comes from a mentor and clinical trainer of mine which is trauma is a negative and unexpected event and leaves a person feeling confused overwhelmed and powerless and that's different than the definition of a traumatic event that we use in our diagnostic manual or DSM which talks about an event which which we see or experience our self that threatens our life because what we know is that for kids for children in particular there could be something that is extraordinarily traumatizing for them but doesn't actually threaten their life or somebody else's but have the same kind of trauma response so there's lots of kinds of trauma but not all of them would go on to create PTSD not all of them would go on to create acute stress disorder or complex PTSD but I would still consider those legitimate and valid forms of trauma if they were negative and unexpected and left us feeling confused overwhelmed and powerless alright so that was Hilary so we've heard from Carole and then Hillary and we've got one more friend to introduce you to here well my name now which is different than on my book miss Teresa Pasquale Mateos Teresa Pasquale Mateos is clinical director of reco intensive a trauma and addiction outpatient treatment program near Delray Beach Florida she is also a yoga instructor and meditation and retreat facilitator who brings mindfulness and healing into her work for social justice well thanks for joining us today Theresa are there any differences between like just regular trauma and religious trauma or are they similar and how are they different in your experience it is so interconnected between it may be trauma that's being imposed by the family it's also trauma that's being imposed by the community and then there's this overarching narrative that the God of all things is also the ultimate abusive parents over which all of this this universe of abuse is being created and so it's it's really hard for people to extract themselves from that it's really hard to write a new story outside of that [Music] I also think just the nature of how insular religious communities are the more abusive the more insular they are this makes it very difficult they're very uncultured to a very particular kind of way of being language context culture and people spend their whole lives in that and so one of the other unique facets is one leaving creates this simultaneous inability to know who you are as a person outside of that context and this deep sense of loss and grief regardless of how painful the community was for you to be a part of there's a there's also a deep loss at every level oftentimes of people's families but even if they still are connected to their families just of that entire network and community system because even at its worst even in a dysfunctional way it was a system of support and of bonding and of some kind of nurturing and so for people to come outside of that and essentially be in a world that's highly individualistic that doesn't function that way it's very hard to recreate again a story of Who am i outside of this [Music] it's not for people to understand sometimes I remember going through the deconstruction of my faith and I was walking through it with a friend of mine we're having lunch regularly and we were talking about it and he had never experienced any of those sorts of doubts or existential angst or any sort of like loss of faith like that to him it seemed like in it and at one point he even told me like is this just like a cool thing now with people like you're just doubting it seems like this is kind of the cool young you know progressive Christian thing to have doubt or something it's like it to some people it looks like it's just kind of I'm just in stee and that people don't they haven't gone through it don't understand how how traumatic it can be yeah even aside from people being mean to you or like being cruel in the middle of it just the experience it's a it's a real experience of loss and unless you've experienced it sometimes you you really don't know how deep that can be and part of the impetus to write and talk about this for me was because people were it was being so trivialized you know it would've them being acknowledged as trauma for people they weren't able to acknowledge it as trauma even for themselves which stagnates your ability to heal if you can't name what it is you're feeling yeah and then this sort of the wider community just in general whether you're talking about secular world and even you know the therapy context of people not having any awareness so that this is a thing or how to treat it but then also in religious context of people you know I've seen a lot of people be really flippant faith leaders supposed it progressive faith leaders be real flippant about the sort of spiritual but not religious in the kind of same way that you were talking about you know oh people are just doing it because they don't care or they just really don't want to do the work to be in faith community and my response to that is don't you understand that actually people that Lee have to leave spaces that are abusive or that are violent to a perception of God is actually not because of a lack of belief or faith or hunting and yearning the divine but it's actually because of a deep yearning if people didn't care they would just stay inside those systems and and allow them to be whatever they are but but it's actually a deep sense of caring and a deep sense of yearning that that sends people out from places that that aren't able to spiritually support where they're at and where they're going and that are harmful to them or other people and that is not because they don't want community either you know this idea that people just don't want to do the work the people I know that I've had to leave faith communities are doing more hard work than many people inside of them I've noticed that one of the problems that people who start to suffer from some form of religious trauma face is that dismissal like people that Mock the idea of triggers or you know they say that you know you can't be hurt by the church really you're just failing to forgive we have all these language gates designed to block people from a journey of healing to conform and repress and Theresa I wonder if you might take us through you know some of those warning signs people might see in their life on the other side of trauma that they may be kind of ignoring or misdiagnosing because of this insular social pressure mm-hmm it also looks looks different while somebody's still in the community or when they say left while people are still in the community oftentimes it can represent a severe low self-esteem massive depression so if you're in a space that doesn't validate who you are or how you believe or whatever's going on internally then you start to feel like you're the bad thing you're the wrong thing inside of that context and both for people that are still inside and outside often kind of as you describe the way that people talk to other people there's a lot of abusing of spiritualize language right so for you you know you just need forgiveness on your heart or I'm praying in the spirit that you will be lifted from this questioning you know it's always also that's the overarching idea that God that what leaders are saying or peers are saying is coming from God and that what that person is experiencing is not and so it's this feeling that I must be the bad thing and so people will potentially start cutting behaviors self-harm behaviors of some kind to kind of just mediate the stress and the low self esteem as it continues if people aren't unable to get out of that unhealthy environment many people will get suicidal whether they actually make any attempts or not they'll have this feeling of just I wish I just wasn't around this sort of sense of both being part of this community but also be feeling really isolated and and beginning to isolate inside themselves and sometimes just isolate in general from the community for people that have left already that space and are exploring oftentimes there's a loss of meaning so the ability to know what means anything or what has value because you have to rebuild a system of understanding outside of everything that you have learned before people have a really hard time kind of identifying what do I believe what do I believe in what matters to me anymore people have a very hard time of identifying who they are in the world what am i what am I supposed to do if my you know in that community my calling was was a hundred percent about that community Who am I outside of that similarly people as a result can often feel depression they can feel isolated because now they're in a world that doesn't look like where they came from and even though that world might have been harmful at least the community was already embedded and so you don't have to go out and seek community in this new way in this new world that you don't quite understand and don't quite necessarily feel like you belong to so people can become really isolated what also can happen is like any kind of abusive family situation which this is sort of a form of in spiritual and religious trauma people will often recreate the abuse in relationship with someone else so I've heard everything from I found a therapist but I found one that was actually harmful for me because I didn't know this you know I was I was guiding myself towards the signs of the same kind of person as that community was for me and so I didn't see the signs that they were harmful or people will end up in harmful partnered relationships or friendship relationships that actually mirror the abusiveness of that environment some of some of our friends that grew up in particularly controlling religious environments we've had conversation about like what's the difference between that and a cult did I grow up in a cult [Music] [Laughter] you know like what how do you define a cult how do people what what's the difference between you know a super controlling pastor in a Pentecostal church and a more typically thought of cult well honestly when you come down to look at the dynamics and if you were going to do a checklist of all the components that are entailed in a cult there's very little difference honestly in how what they do and how they impact people except the semantics of ones that have been visibly raised up and called publicly you know this is a cult yeah other than that what actually happens inside of inside of a highly controlling religious church environment and what happens inside of a cult system is really very it's almost identical oh well that's what we thought I mean I will say I think and in my past research one of the the big indicators of a cult versus I guess maybe just a fundamentalist religious sect will be the demotion of the family unit so an attempt to almost in an Orwellian way weaken or loosen the bonds of family to strengthen and hiren studythe community the truth is so many fundamentalist church environments do that by the syrup centering of this this unhealthy abusive God centric focus and the ideals that come down from the unhealthy abuse of God that it creates a lot of those same dynamics in many settings because of the fact that you know listening to your child or listening to your brother even when they're hurting even when they tell you that they're being abused emotionally physically sexually whatever whatever gamut of things most often what happens is that the church system the leaders get and the structures of the community get prioritized over the voice the needs and the reality for that person even in your own family system yeah I mean I've I've heard pastors that are closer to me than I care to admit relationally and historically say things like don't let your gay adult child come home for Christmas if they're living in sin because by doing so you'll approve of their lifestyle that god that's tearing apart a family I mean that's weakening family bonds it there's all sorts of examples that I've heard of people within sort of fundamentalist but but more mainstream sounding Christian camps than then you wouldn't call it a cult because he'd say you know the Pentecostal or whatever I'd call it a cult but but most people don't because it is Christianity it's acceptable by most Christians as a sect of Christianity but the way it's practiced it really gets cult II which is so dangerous you know because if you make something seem palatable then you can get away with a whole lot more you don't have the same kind of focus or critique on you but the level of harm that gets done and the huge factor in maintaining cults is that if anybody goes outside of the bounds of what the cult approves or agrees then they get shunned you know and so not letting your gay son come home for Christmas as part of that shunning you know your sister leaves the church community and then you don't talk for ten years because you really aren't supposed to talk to somebody who's falling away from the faith anymore that's that's all cult-like behavior [Music] my own spiritual trauma came frequently paired with emotional abuse from my fundamentalist pastor who was also my dad one of the many forms of that spiritual abuse that was and is common in my family and the church I grew up in was a social ostracizing in a private condescension toward anyone who posed a threat to their faith and those threats were seen everywhere and they were the works of Satan in their minds I grew up in an environment where dissent disobedience or disbelief often meant the loss of family and community once during a conversation where my dad was pointing out Satan's role in my uncle's marital problems I expressed that I don't believe in a literal supernatural being called Satan the color drained from my dad's face and his eyes grew wide his lips shook as he responded you're going to be seeing him really soon let's go back to Hilary what happens when we go through a trauma that leaves us or that creates in us during the trauma this feeling of being confused overwhelmed and powerless and if stuck is something that I like to understand through Porges the lens of Portus polyvagal theory so Steven Porges is a neurobiologist who looks at how the vagus nerve so polyvagal multiple vagus how this specific nerve when we experience trauma gets activated and does different things to our body polyvagal theory looks at what's called the phylogenetic hierarchy of stress response so of an evolutionary model of stress response where we lose function in our most highly of brain structures first we also try and access them first but when they don't work we move to lower and lower and kind of older if you will brain structures we've got this level of response that happens and if if we're able to access the first level of stress response the highest and highest level or most evolved level the social connection or the one branch or the ventral vagus nerve response then we would try and connect with someone and if they responded to us maybe you would feel overwhelmed but it wouldn't leave us feeling like we couldn't keep on going like let's just say what if he was in the room with me and you charged at me I might say stop right all of the nerves that run into my larynx and my face would get activated as a way of helping me connect with you socially and if you responded maybe it would be confusing and overwhelming in the moment about why you lunged at me but perhaps that might have a different kind of response for me or an impact on me than if you kept at me and my social connection branch of my fate vagus nerve my ventral vagal branch didn't work so then maybe my body is gonna go into the other branch of the ventral vagus nerve the fight or flight or freeze respond or helps us fight back on how that goes if the fight or flight branch doesn't work we move into the dorsal vagal branch which is the backside of the vagus nerve and that in a way to keep us alive actually gets our body to shut down so depending on what level of response was used and how the person experienced it they might be able to say oh gosh that was really scary that someone charged at me but I'm able to retain a belief that I could tell them to say to stop I could tell them no and that I would be okay whereas if they've tried to keep themselves safe and something hasn't worked it could lead to feeling even more and more traumatized but when we're going through something that's really traumatizing our brain I'm gonna use that word kind of just in general to refer to the whole whole cranial package our brain assesses all of the sensory information around us we're noticing the color the time of day the temperature the light through the trees the smells in the room smells are a big one and all of that stuff because it's processed in our limbic system in the same part of our brain that processes emotional intensity and does our memory processing all of those things get started together the emotions the sensory information and packaged together in a way that they get stored and linked inextricably so if later something happens that triggers something in that package everything comes back a good example of that would be well if I'm if I'm walking through the woods and I'm noticing it's a beautiful calm sunny day and there's a particular green of the trees because it's April I I smelled the smell of some of the different grasses and then I hear a rustling in the bushes maybe my fight-or-flight response is gonna get activated or my freeze response I'm gonna be assessing what's happening my migdal our response is telling me there might be danger here check out what's going on and then if there's a threat then perhaps my body's gonna get so overwhelmed that I'm not gonna be focusing on oh wow look at the color of the leaves and the trees or what a beautiful sunny day or what am I going to be talking about you know with my friends next week all of a sudden your brain has moved from being highly cognitive and intellectual and considering different pieces of information into a more of a subcortical state where all of the parts of your brain that are responsible for capturing information about what's around you those are going to become activated and stored together with the fear in the moment so let's just say I get out of the forest and you know there was a bear chasing me but I got away perhaps I might think cognitively wow that was really really really scary but wow I'm gosh I'm so glad that it's over maybe my conscious brain is telling me that that it's okay but other parts of my brain might not have caught up they might still be storing that information in such a way that it could protect me if I was in a dangerous situation again so let's just say it's been a few months and I thought oh that was so scary I've told a few friends wow I couldn't believe it I thought there that was nuts then I'm hiking again and some are smell in the air it's in their time of day I happen to be wearing a sweatshirt that touches my neck in the same way that the sweater that I was wearing that day many months ago was touching my neck and I hear a breeze run through the trees because of how that information of the initial trauma is stored in my brain all of the fear associated with the initial trauma is going to come back up because those subcortical structures of my brain are thinking not thinking but they're reacting to the current environment in the same way as if the thing that happened before is happening again now it may be something that seems counterproductive because what's what's the point in getting all worked up if there's no bear there but we call that the false positive response which is that when you've your body and your brain are wired in such a way that they're gonna respond to what could be a threat because from the evolutionary perspective it's more advantageous for you to respond to a potential threat with all of the activation needed to keep you safe and then go oh wow okay that's not a threat good I'm safe then to just play it cool and go that's probably nothing and then get eaten by bear so our body is wired to take all of that information that is associated with the primary trauma and code it in such a way that whenever we're in an environment or any kind of sensory information even internal proprioceptive information so the position of our muscles relative to our spine the way that our eyes are positioned and where we're looking all of that stuff can actually trigger up the trauma so there's a client that I used to work with who was in the grocery store and had was just buying groceries and then all of a sudden passed out and had no no conscious awareness of what had happened and as we we talked about it we did a little bit at work and we're starting to unpack some of the sensory stuff we realized together after doing some processing that her brain had connected the smell of the man's breath behind her in line with the smell of the man's breath who was assaulted her and she had been immediately have urged nudged shoved into dorsal vagal responsive feigning death but her body had completely shut down but she didn't consciously notice the smell it was her body underneath her conscious awareness that took control because the memory of that smell was associated with the initial sexual assault we just had a conversation with some yoga teacher who who was also a therapist who was talking about the body-mind connection of trauma and I had mentioned to her that it often happens to my wife especially when she's like stretching her hips mm-hmm she'll hit like a pocket and just becomes very emotional yes yes just stretching not thinking about but this stretching out her hips and and yoga teacher said that this is a very common thing for women muscles something along that lines you think absolutely that's something that I come across all the time and there was actually specific kinds of trauma therapy that have been designed to treat body memory of trauma that people don't have any conscious memory of so it's helping the body titrate between some move back and forth between the intense kind of sensation and rest as a way of helping the body learn and I use that term kind of with air quotes learn that that the trauma is over and helping helping the body catch up to speed with the cortex the neocortex of our brain that knows there's nothing funky going on here this just I'm just stretching my hip but there's two particular kinds of trauma based therapies actually there's more than that body based trauma therapies somatic experiencing is one of them and hikami based therapies and all sorts of other body based therapies that look at helping people who have no conscious memory of a trauma move through it and that can be really important because people especially people who have complex trauma people who have significant dissociative components of their parry traumatic experience so during the trauma they lost conscious awareness their body will store that memory even if they're conscious brain doesn't and people can often feel well even more powerless and frustrated thinking why why can't I look in a certain direction why can't I move my neck in a certain way without becoming totally immobilized and so it helps people move through and resolve and process a trauma without even using language very much at all oh wow he's crazy yeah it's helpful for people to know no I've just noticed that since uh my motorcycle accident if I tilt my head back too far mm-hmm Oh like starting to have a panic attack hmm yeah in my incredibly pragmatic way of being I just don't tilt my head back and don't worry about it but it's interesting to think in fact because I don't have any memory of the accident itself mm-hmm and it's funny to think that perhaps perhaps that wonderful lizard brain of mine remembers more about the pavement and my neocortex I'm so fond of we have different kinds of memory right so the one that we most often talk about would be our explicit or our declarative memory the things that we can consciously recall that have timespan stamps that have descriptive information related to them that might even have a little bit of emotion to them but we have an entirely different subsection of memories our procedural memory which has nothing necessarily to do with our neocortex and it's how our body stores sensory information in order to keep us safe so there's studies of people who have damage to their cortex and just specific neural anatomical structures where they can't remember consciously they don't have explicit or declarative memory but when that person encounters someone who has been mean to them in the past their body actually will turn away without them even understanding so in one research study that I'm talking about there is an individual who body changed directions and he was like why don't I just turn around because he had gotten close to a person who in the study had been told to be kind of disrespectful to him so he had no conscious memory of the things that the individual said to him or what the context was but his body would kind of freeze and then he would turn directions I read a similar account about a man who was they did a pretty prolonged research on he had a form of encephalitis in his brain tissue it damaged some of his memory structures and so he lost the ability to form explicit memory that she he'd go for walks and his wife was so frustrated because it was they were afraid he would get lost right and when they've told him you can't go for a walk he couldn't remember he's not supposed to go for a walk right that didn't land but what it found was the experience of walking with his wife had trained his procedural memory how to get home that's right so in his mind he would go for a walk with no goal or guidance and end up at his house mm-hmm and even if you went with him and let him lead as he was on the street to go home he couldn't tell you where he was going or why but as soon as he walked in he'd walked in and start making food so it's it's really remarkable we we have this self image of our conscious mind having the majority of influence on our actions and our believes in our behavior we learn about ourselves the less that seems to be true yeah that's completely I think it helps us feel like we're in control because part of trauma is actually feeling out of control and there's something that I encounter quite regularly in people who unpack the neurobiology of trauma and their trauma treatment is there's so much more going on than I even knew and well that's relieving because I'm not I'm not broken or I'm not weak or there's a reason why I can't just get over this it's also pretty scary that there's all sorts of stuff going on that I don't even know about and any of those systems could kick in at any time and my conscious and my intellectual brain just goes offline just like that well it's so sad that as a culture we tend to be very dismissive of triggers mm-hmm I've so often heard the idea of triggers being a snowflake phenomenon but we're talking about is a feature of the human mind body system that is older than language and frankly has preserved the species in extremely harsh environments this is my own opinion as a as a clinician as an academic as a person who who considers myself to be spiritual and to have feelings and experiences of God as well I think of every trauma as being spiritual every single kind of trauma a person could experience is spiritual it changes our understanding of how the world works of what it means to exist of if we are safe if we can be a part of a community if we can trust that community if our body is working the way we want it to and I think of spirituality I really like McNees definition which is it's a it's a dimension or a core to humans that seek to discover meaning purpose and connections with others with self and ultimately with God so how could a trauma not affect our spirituality when our spirituality is about the essence of being human about what it means to to exist and to be in this world and to feel like we're safe or not [Music] chapter 2 healing from spiritual trouble for me personally great pain professional counselors have been just such a lifesaver in many ways and given me tools and a new language for dealing with trauma finding people that accept me not contingent upon my spiritual beliefs or my adherence to Christian norms has been a huge step towards healing for me in other seasons of my life another helpful thing has been really to take God out of the box if you will take religion out of the box again to explore new settings and new environments to grow deeper in my faith and my understanding of who God is and my place in his kingdom here on earth so some seasons has looked like being a part of really Orthodox churches other seasons it's been house churches and then other seasons still I've experienced ever really as stepping away from organized religion all together Nature has been a great healer Sunday morning hikes with my kids and my husband have given me the space I've needed oftentimes to process my experiences and to make room for God to bring healing I was raised in the Midwest in a very conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran household growing up I was taught that the father is the head of the household and answers to God for the responsibility of the family God holds an umbrella that the father is protected under and the father holds an umbrella that his family is protected under straight from dad's umbrella and reap the consequences one earth-shaking day my counselor skipped the typical reflected questions and made her first and probably only direct statement to me she said there is no umbrella life happens good and bad things come whether you are under and briella or not this changed my life forever kind of skimming our email INBOX talking to people at events and touring like we do and hearing people's stories what I've noticed is so often there is a trauma either little tea or big tea so either they had questions and their faith community rejected them because of that which because we're social species a total or near total collapse of your social web is incredibly stress inducing event or they had an event in their life that was traumatic the failure of a spiritual mentor that was very significant or you know I had an email this week from someone who said that they were raped by a spiritual leader Wow and miscarried child her words and that was like a very similar to an email I've gotten a week and a half before that and and what I've noticed comes out of these these events whether they're big t little T his then comes a question all these that I hear these truly truly terrible I cry reading the union's right this didn't happen to me and I weep reading the emails and then they say why does God feel so distant yeah and so I'm always trying to tell them you've had this incredibly significant event that happened in your life that you you really should seek professional assistance and in processing and dealing with and it's okay and probably necessary to set this God question aside for the moment because if you're dissociating from memories and dissociating from social experiences in your life neurologically understand God to be kind of an amalgam between a feeling and an experience and believers brains and so when you're having your emotional process he's so altered by trauma well of course God is going to seem distant but it's so interesting how they after these events they often engage our work and they start trying to do the intellectual work processing back to some form of theology but in the meantime so much of their brain is saying I am scared and hurt and confused but it's happening below the language capacity they approach that I take to working with trauma as well as my my academic approach would be a biopsychosocial and I would add in their spiritual as well looking at how trauma affects every part of our lives our body including our neurobiology how we think how we feel about ourselves how we relate to other people how we interpret other people's interactions with us and then meaning-making what is suffering mean what is pain mean am I alone so I try and look at it from all angles then provide depending on where the person's at provide treatment at each of those levels for people it's really important to understand the neurobiological implications of trauma and unlike many other kinds of talk therapy trauma activates different parts of the brain and is stored differently than regular con and that people work through so it's important to be able to understand that so that we don't create more harm in working with people who have trauma there are some serious implications of being unqualified and working with trauma because you can create more symptoms more pain more trauma trauma on top of trauma and so there's a significant ethical expectation that that working with trauma demands an understanding of the brain as well as the brain body system then when people feel like they've got a handle on their symptoms and they're not having flashbacks and they're not dissociate Ignazio mean they feel like their body is settling the trauma isn't as active then we move into saying so how are we gonna deal with the fact that something really awful happened to you but the way that trauma is stored in the brain body system means that our meaning-making neuro anatomical structures essentially are offline while the trauma is being activated either peri trauma sub during the trauma or after when when we're processing the trauma and so until the trauma has been deemed to be over by the brain body system not the conscious mind but by the subcortical structures of our brain only then can we start to move into meaning-making and the social and relational implications of things hmm and then I like to help people come up with some sort of way of moving through like suffering what is suffering in this world mean and how do we start to put life back together after trauma but the short answer would be I take an approach to the whole body and the whole body and person and whole body and person and system together usually in that order I would love to hear more about what you're saying with consciousness-raising but when you also talked about working with trauma mm-hmm what does that mean and how does that bleed into normal life we're just having dinner with somebody and if you're a listening compassionate person you will often have moments where things really get real yeah and drama comes up and you're talking about working with trauma versus what where are those lines between where this is like you know this is getting to a space where this probably should move to to a therapist ring yeah more professional rather than just dealing with and talking about things on a human level yeah that gets emotional that everybody has trauma and part of relationship is learning how to talk about such things and and what processing through things with people that you love and then you're going through things with so where are those lines where you like this this is where it's moving into kind of dangerous territory for your brain yeah I'm so glad you asked that question I actually just earlier this week was invited to do a four-hour workshop on this specific question so there's obviously a lot here how do we how do we keep people safe while also respecting the vulnerability of a disclosure of trauma of helping people feel like we're not shutting them down when they share about their trauma and we're really listening but it's not moving into the space of doing therapeutic processing when people are starting to get physiologically activated that's a really good cue that is probably moving into some territory that's connected to the trauma and what's helpful to note is that when trauma occurs it's stored in such a way that it doesn't get the timestamp that other memories do where a brain knows that it's over and are conscious and intellectual brain like our neocortex would know if we were self reflective the trauma is over but our body operates in such a way that the trauma may still be going on so when people talk about it it can be moved very quickly into their brain body system feeling like the trauma is happening again in that moment they can become physiologically aroused and I don't mean sexually aroused I mean they're sympathetic nervous system is activated so heart racing pupils dilating short of breath hot in certain areas of cold in certain areas of their body racing thoughts feeling overwhelmed with emotions but if people are having a hard time staying in the present moment while they're talking about something then it's a pretty good sign that it's moving into a reacts perience atrani [Music] it's helpful for people to note as well that even in therapy most most therapists who have advanced clinical training in the neurobiology of trauma will not get people to tell the details of their trauma over and over again there is some evidence that in a kind of exposure therapy edna foa's done a lot of research in that area we now know that people who are asked to expose themselves to the worst details of the trauma over and over and over again can have increased symptoms and more physiological and psychological consequences emerge so it's important for people to note that even in therapy we're not asking people to tell the details of their trauma most of the time we're working through it in in ways that are much deeper than the language centers of our brain so if you find that you're curious about someone's experience and you're asking details that's probably something better left for therapy if in therapy at all or if people are there they're almost compulsively telling this story that could be them actually re-enacting it or re experiencing it so having someone talk about the impact of an event on their life is so important for meaning making and for healing saying wow this is really hard I felt so alone it feels really good to tell you tell you that I went through something really hard that would be totally different than if somebody is actually if you get the sense that they're there kind of in it again they're telling it and it's almost like their brain body system is reliving it in that moment as they're talking about it they may have a difficult time actually forming words because of where trauma is stored relative to our linguistic centers so I think we have to be really careful about saying this is so important I'm so glad you told me thank you for sharing you're safe with me I believe you but then not getting so curious ourselves or noticing when somebody is kind of getting stuck replaying the story but that's a different kind of work so when that when you rap against that wall what would you recommend to a normal person that is in a conversation where they seem it seems like it's starting to go there because it's awkward to say like don't tell me that tell that to a therapist yeah but how can you gracefully kind of lead them into safer space yeah it's really good to take a one down position so I I don't know how to help you in a way that's gonna keep you safe is there much better thing to say then don't tell me that it's too much for me we don't want the person to feel alone or like they are a burden for us but it's fair to have healthy boundaries and acknowledge to the person who's disclosing I I don't know how to support you in a way that's going to keep you well and what I think would be really useful is if you could talk to someone who had skills and training to help you move through this and I'm happy to support you to do that would it be useful for us to find someone for you to talk to you could I help you in that way could I Drive you to the first appointment do you want to call me after and let me know how it went but what I know about trauma is that it's it's a big deal and that we've got to be really careful just in the same way that if you had a headache I wouldn't give you brain surgery I don't want to go somewhere where I could actually make things worse for you but I want to honor your you're telling me the story and let you know that I love you and care for you and and I want to support you in a way that that I actually can without making things worse that's really good all of our interpersonal interactions can be extremely significant in resolving trauma in the field of interpersonal neurobiology we know that that relationships are a very very powerful tool for creating effect regulation for helping people feel like they are settled like they're safe I contact tone of voice is someone's physical presence all of those things can actually create significant neuroanatomical change when they're done well and relationship can can be one of the best tools for healing trauma when it's done right not surprisingly then interpersonal trauma is very very very difficult to treat because like I was saying before with all of the components of trauma that are stored in our brain if it's not just the colour of the sky and the leaves and the trees but it is someone who I trusted stored in that package of trauma memories is I can't be safe with people anymore that then getting to a place where there could be resolution of trauma with a therapist with a family member could be extremely difficult because the thing that the brain is wired to look out for is people who want to be close people who want you to trust them again so there are significant implications of how interpersonal trauma affects us compared to I don't want to minimize this in any way but you know an earthquake or a car accident or something which we can say okay the car is out there and as long as I'm not in the car I'm gonna be okay but when the thing that has hurt shoes was a trust relationship how do you move forward like Mike was saying we are social creatures who are designed to function in a social network our identity our safety our survival is predicated on having people that we can trust and if that is the source of Violation how do we move forward how do we exist but again that also tells us that being safe for people could help their brain unlearn that they're not allowed to be safe anymore not surprising one of the first phases of trauma therapy is safety and stabilization and sometimes that takes years for a person to actually trust a therapist and then processing can go really quick after that but safety when a person has been taught not to ever feel safe means that the relationships are an important part in the trauma healing but may come differently than we expect them to for me part of how I've handled some of the trauma in my life and pain has been less and I'm as I'm hearing you talk about the relational trust issues and stuff will not turn this into it a session but I've gone through a lot of it alone but I feel like still effectively alone and there are theological and philosophical and spiritual practice work mm-hmm that have vastly improved and and brought healing yeah to my life yeah mentioning and yeah I just wanted to say it with you on the line in case you want needed to offer any caveats to it because I I think finding professional therapy is of course incredibly important for so many people but I don't think professional therapy is fundamental to humanity it's it's something that has grown and and become very valuable but there are some fundamental ways of living as a human being and thinking as a human being loving as a human being processing that also can can find healing in the way I mean and and hopefully if if our faith is worth much if religion is worth anything a healthy spirituality does some of this work as well both relationally in community and individually yeah I think that that therapy honestly I don't think we need it if we were all healthy people it's this kind of it's been co-opted as a business and people get specific training and working in specific things but if we had healthy communities and we were healthy people I don't think we need it as therapeutic interactions would be existing between all of us all the time but if you look at how our culture and our context is changing we have less and less time to sit with people as they process we become more and more uncomfortable with our own pain and so our own pain gets triggered by somebody else's pain and we don't know how to sit with them so we send them off into a small room with somebody who they pay money to to listen to them I should say that it's a little bit different when we're doing advanced clinical work in trauma because that would be kind of like saying we don't need surgery if we were all healthy wouldn't we wouldn't need surgery maybe that's true but it's good to have medical professionals around to know how to extract you know a bullet from somebody's stomach but I think that if we had healthier relationships this need to go off and find somebody else to listen to you wouldn't be as high but there's a lot of shame with sharing our our experiences of pain with other people and other people don't know how to listen and we don't know how to practice authenticity with each other and so we pretty much just walk around doing ayat stuff all the time but I think you're right that there's lots of ways to exist and to be healthy and to heal without using therapy and there's lots of people who are trying those things who could also benefit from therapy so I don't think it's to say that therapy is the way or that it isn't but I think therapy is the result of some breakdowns in human functioning and human interpersonal interactions that necessitate a private and confidential space where people can talk with someone who's trained yeah I mean I think you could make the argument that like almost nothing in the modern human experience is intrinsic or endemic to the human organism for most of our current evolutionary anthropological state of development we didn't even have language much less culture or agriculture or Google or whatever so you know I view thira P as a memetic technology that exists within a larger cultural social emotional infrastructure it is a it is a tool built to help treat brain states that occur in the psychosocial construct that we've built in our culture great in the same way that like insulin pumps are a medical device we've used to treat a nutritional issue endemic to the way we do agriculture like you could say well if we just ate differently we wouldn't need many people wouldn't need insulin which is true but it's also true that if we went back to a true Paleolithic form of eating the vast majority of humans on the planet would starve so I think in the context in which the human organism exists today therapy is a consistently useful technology yeah I think when I listen to you say that I think about how how useful it is because there are some things that exist today that didn't but I also think therapy has been extracted from healthy didactic and interpersonal relationships and so now exists outside of those so I don't know if it has evolved as a as a profession and as a set of skills training because it it needed to or because it disappeared from situations and interactions where it would have previously existed so it's shifted the location I guess I've just seen people that you know have a lot of therapy and they're still just playing the same very octave ego games and I've seen people that have experienced very painful things have had no therapy but have somehow been healed and walked through it and I think it goes kind of back to where you started with therapy is your tool its if you go into therapy as like you're looking for a savior to fix you hmm you're using that tool and sort of an unhealthy Hey I think it's agree that it's a very effective tool but it's your tool right it's it's part of your journey and your life so that's that's what I guess I just didn't want it to make it come across also that people should have some sort of obligation or shame if they're moving towards health but it's not therapy centric whatever it's a tool it's a helpful one but it's it's your tool yeah yeah it is my tool you're right and it I'm so aware that not all therapy is equal and not all therapists are the same and there's so many different therapeutic orientations and someone can walk in to see me and I can be treating them i thou but they want a behavioral approach and I might not do that and so it may not work for them so it's not about therapy in general I think there's what is the presenting issue what are the empirically valid treatments that we know out that person are they ready for change is the fit good are they so those changes going to be supported by their by their community but I would ask you the same question about a medical issue if somebody had a medical trauma when would you suggest that medical intervention is appropriate and what would you say it's appropriate for them to try and heal on their own and what combination of those things would people use I think that there is still pervasive stigma around therapy and the vulnerability associated with it and there might be some people like I mentioned before who would be really responsive to a very specific kind of therapy with a specific therapist and maybe some people who could get to those places sooner with a therapist and there are other people where it would create more issues in their life so we want to look at the psychosocial challenges that people have in their life if we look at it from a biomechanical model we realize how much stigma that exists in seeking support around those specific issues and how pervasive in faith communities is this idea if you just pray enough or if you take other approaches and you try and do it on your own that there's some more nobility to that so instead of saying instead of saying that therapy is the thing that cures people I would say God heals and God uses lots of different ways and God is love and love heals and there are lots of different ways for people to experience and seek healing but when we create rigidity against accessing certain kinds of healing that that's an important thing to look at there are lots of people who I've said I'm not rent a friend I'm not your friend who you can come to and talk to about problems in your life without actually going to deep places and so there's lots of people I've said I don't think you need therapy and I don't think you need it at this time and if you feel like there's some reason why you want to keep coming back let's look at some of the behavioral solutions around helping you secure a network of people who can meet those needs but I want for you to have real friendships not just to pay me to listen to you there's way more that we can do here so you're not just a therapist Teresa you're also a yoga instructor I am did those two disciplines relate into how you approach coping with and treating trauma yes they do yoga in my own healing from my trauma I found yoga and what it did for me that psychotherapy hadn't done and even my spiritual my religious upbringing hadn't done was embody a way to hold my spirituality and also a way to connect to the suffering from my trauma that have was locked in my body in a way that I couldn't identify more than just kind of knowing that something was being let go something was being liberated and so being able to be embodied in my healing was really important and that led to studying Buddhist meditation which led me to also the Christian contemplative practice and I always say that those three together were really powerful tools for my healing really powerful spiritual practices and disciplines and so for me I always say yoga starts with breaths and I also think healing starts with breath because everything gets dysregulated in our body when we feel like we are in danger and so our body gets disoriented it either stops altogether or becomes sped up like hyperventilation and so for me when I work with clients the very preliminary thing that I always do and even when I do retreats or workshops or anything really I always start with the breath practice because I believe we have to settle down what the body is doing that might not be regulated before we can work on any of the things that are happening in the mind one of my favorite books that's come out recently as a book called the body keeps the score it relates to all the ways that we store trauma you know in in our physical bodies you know we tend to think of the brain as this seat of ourselves right and then our body is just a support system that transports and protects the brain but that's that's not it's not that accurate so certainly like you know our consciousness emerges from the brain especially than the neocortex but our brain is is basically you wrap a dinner napkin thick neocortex around the brain and that's like our human reasoning faculty and then kind of inside of that is a mammal brain about the size of your fist we call the limbic system and that's what we think of our feelings kind of originating from then that wraps around like a frog's brain or an alligators brain and the hind brain and down the brainstem then there's there's a nerve that runs from the brain to the 100 million neurons in your gut right and what's interesting is if you sever the nerve between you know the brain in your head and the brain and the gut the brain in the gut will continue to function just fine without any oversight from the primary brain it turns out that that nerve signal one of its main functions is to transmit anxiety between the two brains so if you get anxious in your head and worried you'll have a similar set of neurotransmitters released in your gut and you might have cramping or bloating or diarrhea right you'll you'll have physical symptoms from this anxiety because the neurons in your GI tract are mirroring the neurons in your brain in the same way if your gut gets anxiety which it can on its own if it thinks that there's something that doesn't belong in the gut it will start to flush the gut right and calves up like irritable bowel syndrome where you have a very nervous gut that's constantly trying to get rid of everything is in there but when it's doing that it will actually transmit that anxiety up to the the brain in your head who will then mirror the anxiety of the gut so when you that was a long intro to get to this next point some research is saying that it's PAH that our posture and indeed practices like yoga by moving and tightening and loosening and relaxing and freeing the tissue in the GI tract can then affect the responsiveness of those neurons and therefore change the chemistry of the brain and this could help us understand why practices like yoga are so powerful because the the rest of our body's systems and tissues have stored trauma related to events think about the way you tighten your shoulders in your core when you're nervous if you're nervous all the time all that constant tension will will change the way some of your body systems function and just because you kind of work things out cognitively upstairs in your brain doesn't mean the rest of the body has caught up or been reconditioned and so that's where these practices come in to help the entire body I guess you could say this would be a metaphor but to let the body grieve as much as the brain has [Music] yeah this is a real shortcoming of so much Western practiced spirituality to sort of ignore the physicality aspect of what we tend to make such an intellectual practice and then sometimes an emotional practice of our spirituality whether it's it's teaching and worship and such I've rarely come across any sort of Western practiced Christianity that incorporates much physicality into spiritual practice yeah for me at least I see that as a huge shortcoming I mean it's a shortcoming of Western science and medicine how we treat parts of the body rather than an interconnected mind-body system and then a short a shortcoming additionally of Western spirituality and Western Christian contemplatively disconnected itself from embodiment unlike Eastern practices that engage the body and the mind and the spirit as all one part of who you are as a spiritual being and what needs to be engaged in the fullness of your spirituality we've largely disconnected those places and siloed at the parts of who we are I also would connect that disembodiment with a lack of connection to social justice and activism in the world that happens often with this sort of siloed individualist Christian contemplatively in our physical selves so why would it provoke us to be embodied in the world [Music] so for someone who they're just broken right they've just they've just been broken by a faith community or a significant spiritual figure in their life how do they start to move forward well I think it starts with very basic steps of people trying to figure out who they are what do I want what do I love what am i passionate about beginning to build a sense of self that isn't reliant on that person or community that held so much of their identity before just from basic things like what is something I might enjoy to do you know what is something I really love what are things I remember bringing me joy that didn't have to necessarily do with that space in place and being able to kind of feel safe and secure again that's why I say I always start everything I do with simple breathing practices because sometimes it literally is about what's still stored in your body to be able to regulate stress in the body through something as simple as breath begins to allow somebody to feel in moments where they start to panic again feel that I am safe in this moment you know that I can calm down in this moment that the the things that terrified me are not here right now and then over time for people the work becomes about what is my meaning-making system you know and people land on various and very continuum you know of spectrum so people are atheist people are agnostic people create a spiritual discipline that's outside of what organized religion or maybe they return to some form of their faith tradition but maybe it looks it looks different the community looks different but whatever that is we all need meaning making in our life so the cultivation of what that meaning making system is for us is really a critical part of that full sort of return to a place of wholeness again for people [Music] I hear a movement to what you're saying that can that's applicable and and I think it's important for people to remember that people are going to need to focus on different things at different times and focusing on me is not a negatively selfish thing mm-hmm especially at certain times that's the most loving and selfless say whatever you want to use the words thing would to actually be like pay attention to what your own heart is saying and that's that's how you can become loving and fully alive and keep moving forward well yeah there's this metaphor of the oxygen mask right so there's the planes going down to be able to help someone else you have to put on your own oxygen mask first otherwise you're not going to be able to assist the person next to you so this idea that our healing process is necessary for whatever it is we're going to do in the world to serve anyone else at a point further I mean you think about that kind of Austin mask idea which by the way I would put my mask on and take three or four deep breaths to verify yes before turning with great assurance knowing I could help people for at least 15 minutes now that my oxygen supply is secured I would make sure anyone within arm's reach was good to go but you know if that idea was really hard for me at first when I left my Baptist faith of my youth you know when I got to the Lotus and the mud and in your book Theresa I felt like you were like spying on me I mean it was creepy yeah I think a lot of people will identify with those steps could we actually list them out I know it won't really do justice to all that is in the book but at least it will be a good teaser for people step one recognize the hurt inconsistencies or wrongdoing in your faith system or with the persons within your faith system step 2 begin to question step 3 seek outside input step 4 leave your spiritual home and/or faith of Morrigan step 5 begin your home pilgrimage into the spiritual desert or as I called it my spiritual run away phase step six enter the anger stage of grief and loss which can also be accompanied with some kind of spiritual or philosophical nihilism step 7 explore other ideas beliefs and opportunities step 8 begin to reintegrate meaning values and beliefs in some way for yourself whether that is a mix of different ideas philosophies and belief systems or whether it is by joining a new community group or tradition step 9 begin to trust in individual and communal relationships again step 10 move toward a non-dual consciousness or the middle way and away from absolutes step 11 enlightenment game over you win one thing I loved that you talked about was the way that there's this progression of moves basically including a period of Exile it's like right in in the path you laid out but then I also love that you pointed out that in this process there can always be a wild card there can always be things that happen as you're healing that hurt you again and that may push you back to previous points in the process and I don't know how universal this this process is I know it is certainly with 100% accuracy to survive my spiritual journey over the last few years but I was just curious like where where you came up with that guide and how you talk people through a new trauma that while they're in the process of healing you know obviously steps and stages and processes always have there's always anomaly is not everything always fits everyone perfectly but this seemed to encompass the most constant process that I saw people go through and also kind of what my aspiration was for how people could continue to move through a healing process as they went forward and then the issue with though that whole wild card is that I mean just like anything in life we are working our way towards something and pain erupts back through into our lives and that shows up in so many different ways you know it can be again it can be in like the formation of an unhealthy relationship that shows up and mimics the pain and the suffering that came out of that community it can be you know public shaming around the process that the person is going through from that old context or old relationships things that are reminiscent of the old world and that old life can pop up in in surprising ways for people I think for for people to be able to know when that that's not a failure in the process I think for trauma healing as a whole it's not a failure to be triggered by things you people can be triggered by things you know even in my own trauma having healed from my PTSD it doesn't mean that there aren't moments in my life where something will trigger old memories and reminders and I still have to go through my own process to kind of recalibrate and settle because often harmful religious systems are built on a process of shaming I really wanted to create a way for people to see their way through it and also not to feel shame or blame for themselves when they fall down again because that's just something that's gonna happen and then you just work from wherever you are so it may be let me remember to breathe today let me remember to pause and know that I'm safe in this moment let me remember you know something that I love and go and do that take care of myself [Music] as I was growing up and as I was trying to heal from these spiritual wounds I had to separate this notion of being abused from this notion of of God I think that's another really difficult thing when we take these these certain epistles that talk about Jesus being the head of the church and fathers being the head of the household it ties that that closely into patriarchy and so for me I had to begin to unravel that you know I had to unravel God from the abuse that happened to us I had to unravel this idea of patriarchy as being a god-ordained notion and I had to understand God a lot differently [Music] well yeah I mean even in the nailed Testament I mean there's so many passages about God disciplining those or correcting those that he loves or who he delights or the importance of God's judgments among his chosen people the biblical narrative is is full of that kind of imagery and Langley Road of Correction the rod of yeah exactly and I've just talked to so many people who they start to have a conversation with me about you no doubt in God or doubting their faith and as you start to ask more questions they'll almost mention as an aside that they've had you know some really traumatic experience with their fathers or or if not their father than some very significant mentor and because of the way the patriarchal influence on Church culture that that figures is overwhelmingly likely to be a man at least among the people I have talked to and it's so interesting how we tend to not connect that linkage and and just say well I'm just having these doubts as opposed to realizing there's actually a much deeper more significant emotional loss or hurt than delaying the situation my father was an engineer and so if I wanted to borrow the car I had to talk to him in graphs you know had to explain everything with a number and statistics and graphs and data and in that's how he understood things and I think there are just certain people who are wired in a certain way and for me the spiritual life was how I was wired an early Reema memory for me was when I was in my bedroom and I began to hear my parents down the hall and I began to hear their voices rising and I was kind of standing at the the edge of my bedroom trying to hear if there was any dishes being thrown yet or what was going on and I'm being completely scared and trying to figure out exactly how I was going to get out of there I was too young to move in with a friend I was scared of the child protection services that they would take me away from home if I if I called them I was scared my neighbor would call Child Protective Services I had gone to the church for help I had told them what was going on and they told me that my father was the head of the house and that I just needed to bear through the abuse yeah it that happens a lot [Music] so there I was in my room and I just remember sitting on my bed completely freaked out because I felt like there was no way out and yet I was able to kind of breathe in this piece and I sensed God surrounding me there was just something that happened in that moment it was very palpable a very kind of palpable experience my body just settled and I became aware of God surrounding me and I realized that you know the only way out of this situation was to have the courage that I was able to find through religion there are certain people who look at the world and they can't imagine looking at it without a paintbrush and there are certain people who look at the world and they can't imagine looking at it without numbers and there are certain people who look at the world and see science all around I'm just one of those people who see it through a spiritual lens and I tried to get away from it but it just kept drawing me back [Music] what would you say to someone who last week or last month has been told you just need to submit to this person's authority because they're the head of the household is in an abusive situation one out of every four women in our country faces domestic violence and so it's extremely important for pastors and for theologians to think about how our theology affects that how it's playing into that and I think if I'm talking when I am talking to women who are facing domestic violence situations and when they've been told by the church that they need to stay in them the church is just wrong that's just not what God wants for them these myths of domestic violence within the church like if the woman would just be nicer or if the woman would just submit if the woman would just behave then the husband wouldn't be so abusive that's just one and oftentimes we're told that within the church especially in churches that believe in this authoritarian role of the husband well if you would just submit then he wouldn't get so violent and that's just not true so I would hopefully be able to walk alongside her tell her that that's not what God wants for her domestic violence happens to people across the board no matter what sort of religion or non religion they're a part of but people who are able to get out of domestic violence situations are typically people who have a community that surrounds them a loving community that surrounds them so if they're not able to leave that situation I would encourage them to find a community that can surround them with love and a community that's more healthy [Music] there are many ways in which we can be trapped into an abusive situations when it comes to the church or when it comes to our religion oftentimes people are trapped not being able to embrace their sexual orientation oftentimes people are trapped because they feel lesser than because there went women sometimes people are trapped in difficult situations in marriages because they feel like the man should have authority over them if you're in a situation where you feel trapped and this sort of abusive relationship I just want to say to you that God loves you that God has made you in the image of God that you are powerful that you are beautiful and that you have everything within you to be able to leave that sort of abusive relationship and I encourage you to find a healthy group of people that will remind you on a daily hourly minute-by-minute basis that God loves you from the bottom of your toes to the top of your head and God wants you to be loved fully fully and beautifully held by God if you enjoy the liturgist podcast but would like to go deeper if you'd like to learn more and talk to others going through a journey in appreciating the world equally through science through art and through faith we'd like to invite you to subscribe to this program on patreon patreon is a site designed for people to 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appeared on this episode at the five-dollar level on patreon and of course some people also subscribe at the $20 a month tier which probably for right now gets back in that donation mindset but we do have some additional time to talk and discuss things about the program with people at the twenty dollar level and occasionally some in-person meetups as well so if you're interested in learning more about subscribing to the additional resources we make available to our patrons simply go to the liturgist comm and click on the join us button in the upper right hand corner to find out more chapter three creating safe spiritual space for others let's go back to our conversation with Teresa you had this great great segment towards the back third of the book about how to identify false gurus versus like genuine wisdom teachers I went to a period where I came back to some appreciation of the divine on the other side of a very very steep Nile as and I was incredibly skeptical of absolutely anyone who taught about spiritual belief and practice I didn't discriminate to me literally anyone I just thought was was a charlatan if they were talking about spiritual practice even after I'd had this very powerful divine experience and so you you actually lower the stakes a little bit by throwing out some warning signs to look out for in false gurus people who are maybe out for ego validation or financial gain as opposed to helping other people along their journey and I wonder if you might share some of those with us sure and and I preface this by saying it felt really important to off people for people a guide because of how often people would leave unhealthy systems without kind of like leaving an unhealthy family system without knowing what a healthy parent looks like and so they they'll end up either like you said totally avoiding relationality or or sometimes spaces that could be helpful also very often will end up finding another kind of false community you know led by a false teacher that will harm them again because you don't always have that inner discernment available yet as you're going through your own healing process so I mean you name some of them one is you know what are they charging you know for their spiritual services right so I understand people do workshops and retreats and and there's their space for the economics that is necessary but what are they actually asking from you what are they taking from you also what are they requiring of you so do you get to retain who you are as a person are they asking you to give up those things are they crossing boundaries in terms of emotional boundaries physical boundaries invading in your life in ways that are unhealthy are they people that really are all about being on the stage or at the front of the room I mean one of the examples I give is a yoga teacher you know so it's not necessarily like a megachurch situation it's just it's anyone that really is in love with the idea of being a center stage in front of everyone offering spiritual platitudes when you get down to the root of it are often very simplistic and and not and don't offer people a sense of spiritual development or transformation that happens within themselves it's very much centered around them being in the spotlight and having the focal point on them and and focusing on whatever they say as as the primary function of the way that everything works in that community in that context and that spirituality yeah so I mean those are just a handful of things but I really think it's important for people to be able to start to cultivate that inner discernment of when somebody is healthy that's a teacher and there are a nice so the opposite of the false guru I call the wisdom teachers so there are people out there that are that are intentionally trying to offer people space and place to grow inside of themselves that aren't trying to take from them too much or take their identity or force them on a very specific path that's of this teachers own making there are good teachers out there and I also highlight how to find those I just was I was in some Twitter banter last night and this morning about the idea of spiritual authority you know my my take is that those two words don't go together very well authority because I think when authoritarianism gets involved and religion it's sort of the carrot in the stick it's this very powerful cocktail of manipulation that people can use to control others to whatever ends and I don't know when you see Jesus sort of any of the real great spiritual teachers in my opinion you don't see people that exercise authority over other people if they when used to see Jesus talks about him emptying himself of power and serving the servant of all how do you see the idea of authority and and is that kind of a word that when you're counseling people or talking to people about their spiritual communities and journeys that sort of a red flag word for you or how do you see that word concept playing into healthy spiritual development yeah I think I definitely I agree I think authority and spirituality which usually is authority and religion but can be in other spaces too is dangerous for the evolution of the spiritual self I mean because if there's an external Authority that's equally human to you that is over your own spiritual process then that's not really that doesn't really allow for the transformation of the self and it also usually creates and builds these unhealthy religious hierarchical systems because if you have authority just like any system that has Authority then you have to build in all of these levels of hierarchy and and who has what level of authority over community and over persons and so the more authority is a focal point often the more systemic communities become the more all-encompassing the power of one or a handful of small individuals it becomes very toxic very quickly and that's also where real violations and abuses go unspoken unseen silenced because of those systems of power become can become so abusive so quickly and I just think there's a danger in general for the idea that ultimate authority in our own spiritual process in this world you know that that humans with fali ability reading text written by humans with Fowley ability are then making determinants about absolutes that that is always dangerous and so I do think that in many ways that's kind of an oxymoron you know a spiritual authority of me is an oxymoron and it's especially dangerous for people that have been through spiritual trauma because the greatest necessity is to be able to have autonomy over over your spiritual journey that that real teachers are able to guide and support and companion people and offer new information or new perspectives on information that allow people to open and go deeper in their own spiritual process that that's really that's the guidance of a real teacher and really what the word guru is meant to be is a companioning mentor that helps support you through your own process but not take over the process and so to me anything that that highlights Authority is trying to take over your spiritual process and I started ministry when I was still in my 20s and so I'm like a twenty-something pastor thinking oh yeah like I've really got all the power and you know I never imagined myself in the way that they would always present it like you know here's this person and people will let you do whatever you want and I thought oh please but sometimes it's just hard to to remember that some people not everybody does think of you in in these very powerful positions and that's really difficult to to realize because you know on the day-to-day basis most people don't really care if I'm a pastor they think it's it's a little bit odd but there are certain people who really see the pastor as a representation of God so just keeping that in mind and realizing that we can't be God certainly there's no way to do that but we might have some our people might be attaching some power or significance to us that we don't understand and we can't grasp so always be aware of that but also as the person who may be hurt you know realizing that the the pastor or the priest or the youth group leader is horribly human and if we can begin to really separate that person from who God is just as I had to do that with my father that's an extremely important part of being able to fuel those moods oftentimes all here church leaders who will respond to someone who has said well I've been abused or I've been hurt or I've been wounded by the church they often get very defensive of the institution or the church and quickly they begin to say either well I'm sure it didn't really happen that way or they start gaslighting the victim you know we just can't do that as spiritual leaders we have to take responsibility for the harm that's been caused to be able to say I'm sorry and to be able to listen to that story and bless that person and their pain and their frustration and and be able to help reconcile and forgive each other I think that issue about that you talked about with people on the pedestals as an insightful one because you know I grew up in circles where yeah usually the man of God was sort of this really lofty figure and was supposed to be the example for everybody spiritually and so when they would crash and burn which most of them inevitably do it seems like in the world I grew up and it was usually it's like the sexual sins that are the ones that are the unforgivable right for the church and because of that it forces this strange lofty view that hurts so bad it hurts people so bad when we find out they're human beings with genitals and sex drives and and issues and whatever great I think how we treat people when they fall and when they fail has something to do if what will happen in the future is well I think you create this system like I remember you know a big a big church leader that I knew personally that had fallen he had this big controversy that happened with meth and gay prostitution and massages or something it like it was just devastating to all the people at the church so many people it was just this such painful thing and I was like why did he have to be so in the closet with who he was and what he was going through that had to get to like the full-on prostitution and meth scene it's that just like fester in this closet of you can't acknowledge who you are and what's going on in your life really during the whole process of ministry because you're on the on the pedestal and then it just creates this further and further divide and then it all crashes and burns everybody gets hurt and I just I wonder like if we can find ways of when people fall from their ideals and from our ideals of them how we treat them and how we interact with the whole scenario of what happened it's it's important for that moment for that particular person but I think it also is important for moving into the future of next time if a person feels a certain way or they're having issues and having problems in their marriage having problems with whatever are we creating an environment where they can be human beings do we have churches and structures and authorities systems of all the way people that make the rules if it what we expect to people that allow human beings to have these positions and I think how we react to people when we find out they're human beings are some of the most important times of what happens for the future of people that go through similar situations and I've just seen that so much where you create this double life I was in Christian music for a long time and I see the people that they all live one way behind the camera and then once the Instagram photos come out like everybody put away the glass of wine everybody pretend here thing else and and it creates this sort of double life and then that builds and builds and builds and then you have this idea of the men and women of God and then when you've beat behind the curtain it all comes crashing down and everybody's hurt so I just wonder what we can do before it all comes crashing down just sort of minimize that divide and accept the humanity of our leaders yeah it's so sad isn't it it's just such a sad story I remember when I first started as a minister and I would hear about some sort of sex scandal that would happen and I was like oh I gotta hear all the details you know I wanted all the gossip I wanted to hear exactly what happened and then about the third time happened I was just like oh no not again because it's the details are always different but it always seems to be the same story you know in in all of a sudden you begin to realize how tragic it is for everyone involved and so I guess just having compassion you know having compassion on our church leaders realizing they're not perfect having compassion when they slip up and having compassion on you know these these double lives it just makes me sad I mean there there is a certain sort of occupational mask that you have to put on because you're a professional but at the same time you know having to hide as you come out of the liquor store or whatever it's just really really sad there's a beautiful book called the hidden wholeness is it Parker Palmer Palmer wrote about it and talking about these masks that we wear and it just seems like every minister or church leader needs to read that because we are constantly lured into becoming somebody we're not in lying for a crowd or lying for an audience or even lying our congregation and I think we deserve better and so that's sort of a relationship that that both of us have to go into pastors and congregations congregations need to realize that ministers are going to make mistake we're not going to have perfect credit scores we're gonna curse on on social media every once in a while and we're just gonna mess up you know so so there needs to be a little leeway in that situation but also you know pastors need to be real we don't need to be lying to people about what we believe in who we are and I don't mean to you know put particularly someone who's like had to stay in the closet for the last couple decades or something like that I don't mean to make light or you know make this sound like it's a trivial thing that you're just lying but what I am trying to say is can we create healthier communities where we're more honest with one another both about our desires and our hopes and our dreams and also about the times when we just mess up I mean I know that in my work I travel all the time I'm on stage all the time and people have this image that I have it together but when I travel and I get on the road open up Yelp I look at places I know I shouldn't be looking and the next thing I know I've got a slice of pepperoni pizza and sometimes I'll go from one airport concourse to another and I'll get pizza in both Kahn and you know it's it's you're afraid to admit that you have this problem but I mean it's hot I [Music] mean that that that is a real story that I literally recently on the trip got a pizza do different courses we accept you bike we don't judge you we love you and God loves you come up with a restoration plan I think so I think so isn't it weird like you don't need a restoration plan unless it's sacred like somebody's like yeah I've been to gluttonous let's just stop the podcast for a couple months we're gonna get you restored it is it is interesting how we we really do stigmatize certain behaviors more than others and I've seen some research that says the social response to a traumatic event helps shape the way an individual perceives that event as trauma so in some ways the stigma we place around sexuality can actually cause the trauma of victim experiences to be even deeper and even more dramatic that's not unique to sex and sexuality we see that in victims of domestic abuse who feel like it's their fault you know if you've had that narrative well if you would just submit this would it be a problem and so now the person the person is double traumatized they're traumatized by the event and then by the social response we have to move past that in every Church in every denomination in every gathering of people it's not reflective of a God who loves it's not reflective of a people seeking to serve others or be like Christ it's shame and its domination it's controlling and it has to stop all right let's get back to Hilary any space that's creating any sort of sense of belonging and any sort of social fabric it's involving human beings which means there's gonna be some casualties of war just with human beings being together you know but how do you create a space as as leaders and dreamers and organizers of spaces of spaces and spiritual spaces that is less likely to create trauma and that is a safer space for people to be able to process and walk through pain and confusion and all the things that can quickly put people on the outs how can you create an environment in a culture and a leadership that minimizes yeah that's such an important question my understanding of that would be informed by a phrase that a Clinical Instructor of mine a trauma therapist who trained me something he said in my training which was that hurt people hurt people and as out of our hurt and whether our hurt is something that we're aware of or not something that was done to us something that we continue to perpetuate in our life or other people's lives but but my understanding is that when people are healthy and well that they'll be they'll be bumping up against other people but that we'll be able to resolve it well and take responsibility so I think people in leadership need to take ownership of their own hurt and do investigations into what is causing their hurts and perhaps where their blind spots are and encourage people that they are leading to do the same and to be able to have a conversation with vulnerability and authenticity about the essential nature of taking responsibility of our hurt and how that might impact other people being trauma-informed is a really important component so looking for what systems do to cultivate trauma or then to create silence around trauma or stigma around it and having open conversations that are informed about what happens when we're hurt and what kinds of things we do think people who don't understand trauma might take a person's trauma response personally oh you were over at my house and then you just had to leave you got all upset then you left and you don't care about me and perhaps women understand through a trauma lens that wow maybe that person was triggered by what we were watching on TV and the fact that they got up and left wasn't about me that was about something that was so overwhelming for them but their body actually moved them out of the space that we were in together being trauma-informed taking responsibility for hurt and modeling that in a position of leadership a church that I'm attending right now the pastor is incredible at this I he regularly stands at the front of the congregation and apologizes for things that he did wrong that might have hurt people and to have a person in leadership model taking responsibility for how he's hurt other people impacts the culture of taking responsibility and has said to that congregation we are a group of people who care more about understanding and creating safety than about protecting our egos [Music] I heard this liturgy that Eastern Orthodox Church does once a year where everybody everybody in the congregation goes to everybody and repents and offers forgiveness just like including the priests and everybody goes around and offers mercy and Shalom to everybody and I'm sorry if I've done anything to you know like as sort of part of the liturgy I always thought that was pretty profound it's beautiful having something like that we're just forgiveness an acknowledgment that we all will create pain and for each other and trying to make it right as just kind of part of the fabric of of the community itself I think there's something really beautiful about that this is something that I I take quite seriously especially in my work with couples around sex and sex therapy but Martin boobers idea of I thou and I it [Music] Martin Buber was a phenomenologist and existential philosopher who who spoke about our relationships with other people and how that is central to the existence of us as humans and to her felt experience of being human and he divided the experience of being human into two modes if you will there would be ayat an i thou and i I it is about us interacting with other people in such a way that they become objects or it's to us people or things that we just use for our satisfaction for our sense of gratification or to get our needs met so I could be using a friend of mine as an it if I'm constantly just asking her to to be the sounding board without ever really thinking about how my response or how my disclosures affect her or we could treat the earth as an it this this thing that just kind of provides us land where we can drive our cars and get oil and litter instead of treating other people and things and the earth and nature and animals like I thou and I thou would be boobers concept of a connection of spiritual connection of seeing the fullness and the wholeness of the other person and advocating for that and fostering that and relating to a person as if they are a spiritual being not unsimilar to the light in me recognizes the light in you acknowledging that every interaction isn't just this thing that we can use to get our needs met but is a space that we enter into as a way of existing together and Boober would say that that I thou is is the relationship we have with those around us which points at the ultimate i thou which is the experience of relationship of being fully seen and known and experiencing of something bigger than us of God I think we we create problems in our life when our interactions with our environment and with those around us become restricted to ayat including people who are suffering how can we just use Oh someone's gonna listen okay I mean to tell them everything about us without assessing is the center of propria time is this or something is there something that maybe isn't safe for the other person about me telling them about my trauma I would to integrate what we've been talking about today would be to say our ability to do I adore I though and how we can be self-aware and have to notice which of those modes of interaction we're in we might lose that awareness when we're activated sufficiently that our body brain system has said just do it just go it's happening again so people who are in their trumman reenacting their trauma might lose the ability to be I Dow and might consequently do I it without even knowing it but I think that to create healthy communities we need to faster I vow relationships with people the inconvenient thing about I our relationships is that they take time and they take presence and they take authenticity and vulnerability and actually existing and that beautiful and magical and often confusing space of really just being being with people and appreciating Worth and value and the things around us so there are barriers to I thou and trauma response might be one of them but I wonder about how it would impact our communities if we modeled i thou and if we encouraged i thou and that i thou as being symbolic of our spirituality and a relationship and experience and feelings about god i feel like i you just you just gave me a lot of synthesis Wow i mean holy cow and i don't mean that in an ayat that one [Laughter] man can i can i keep going for a minute please yes I think that when ultimately when we're when we are creating trauma in another person's life there's an inevitability of us creating an i it relationship with them i mean rape is a prime example of that where we know that it's not about mutually satisfying and fulfilling sexual encounters it's about someone using the other person in an active power and control if trauma is related to i it and treating the world and treating other people like it's that we can use for our gratification and pleasure or emotional release or whatever it is then I believe that there can be something healing and restorative in the eye though in seeing a person and helping a person feel human again in validating their value their essence they matter and in therapy ultimately what I believe is yes the advanced clinical training I have in specific therapeutic interventions that's all good and well but if I don't do that with an eyebrow at the heart of my relationship with the person that I'm supporting then I could be just perpetuating the trauma including wanting people to perform healing if if I feel like my worth is tied up in a person's symptom reduction then they become an ayat to me and it doesn't free them into being wherever they're at in their journey of healing so we as a community can create an I it with somebody by wanting their their trauma healing to exist on a timeline which dehumanizes them which minimizes what they need in order to heal from the trauma so part of creating a culture a community Teaneck relationship was just healing I think is built on the foundation of our relationship I see you you're not alone you matter here your voice matters here you are valuable even if I don't agree with you even if this goes differently than I want it to but I'm in control of my own affect and my own identity enough that I'm okay with you being you even if that means that you're gonna be hurting for a very long time you're free to be hurting for a long time if you need to because I'm not gonna further traumatize you by demanding that you heal in a way that's convenient for me a phrase that one of my clinical supervisors uses a lot and for those therapists who listen to this they might recognize this as a signature phrase from the AED P but the key phrase is about undoing aloneness that therapy is about undoing aloneness is about undoing the powerlessness and about undoing the confusion of the trauma giving people power back giving people value back and helping them feel in the context of relationship but they matter and they're seen but they're known and that the trauma is over [Music] I hate to do this to you but I have talked it is some of my absolute heroes in the world of science and in the world of the spiritual as part of co-hosting this podcast but this was by far my favorite conversation we have ever had thank you for taking so much time to talk to us today there was not a minute that wasn't illuminating in this entire segment I feel I feel touched hearing you say that that that is I really really really respect the work that the two of you do and I feel like you're doing something incredibly significant and I want to encourage you and and I just I feel really touched yeah my body feels warm just listening to to you say that Mike it's it's it's very very special to join together with people who have passion to see people heal and to know that we do it differently but we're all on this journey of helping to see restoration in people's lives it's very powerful when what the two of you were doing well thank you so much Hillary this really was amazing Wow so fun thank you for yeah it's gonna help a lot of people listening I really appreciate the work that you guys are doing we hope this episode on spiritual trauma has been enlightening and helpful if you'd like to see additional resources for processing or coping with trauma or if you'd like to join in a conversation about this episode with other listeners visit the liturgist comm slash podcast and find the episode on spiritual trauma you can connect with us on twitter at the liturgist or on facebook at facebook.com slash the liturgist we'd like to thank Greg nor Dean Cory Pig and Madison Chandler for their contributions and helping produce this episode thanks to Derek Walker for some graphic design the music you heard on this episode was younger and on earth which is Tyler Chester and I Michael Ganga and I science Mike have been your hosts and of course as always thanks so much to our patrons who make this show possible so much love to every one of you thanks for listening everyone you [Music] k