I don’t remember encountering the word “trauma” very often in my younger years, yet recently I seem to hear it all the time. What was once deemed a rare experience or one rarely talked about, has become a common experience and one talked about both openly and often. Where perhaps it was once defined so narrowly as to apply to almost nothing, today it may be in danger of being defined so widely that it becomes almost devoid of meaning.
I’m convinced that if we define the term well and apply it judiciously, it can help us learn to understand and come to terms with our own experiences. I’m convinced it can also help us extend love and care to other people through their experiences. Not all of us need to be experts in trauma care or recovery, but all of us would benefit from understanding the language of trauma and the way it manifests in those who have experienced it.
Dr. Steve Midgley has been both a psychiatrist and a pastor, though now he is Executive Director of Biblical Counseling UK. From all three perspectives, he has seen trauma. Particularly, he has seen how churches can help or hinder those who are grappling with the effects of trauma. His desire in his new book Understanding Trauma: A Biblical Introduction to Church Care is to help churches help people. “This book is not intended to be a trauma-recovery guide,” he says. “Nor is it designed to equip people for any kind of trauma counseling. Some Christians will want to develop the experience and skill to engage in care at that level, but for most of us our ambitions will be much more modest. We simply want to better understand people who have experienced trauma so that we can be good friends and can provide wise pastoral care. We want to know how to speak wisely and avoid clumsy missteps.”
To accomplish this, Midgley begins with a series of relatively brief chapters that define trauma and provide examples of it in the Scriptures. He also tells how churches can be helpful and unhelpful in their response to it.
With these opening chapters behind him, he looks at contemporary perspectives on trauma, focusing predominantly on Bessel van der Kolk’s perennial bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, a book that has done more than anyone or anything else to inform culture’s perspective on the subject. He also explains how trauma affects memory, the body, and relationships.
The third and final section of the book focuses on ways the local church can respond compassionately to those who have been traumatized by life’s difficulties. He talks about lament, beauty, hope, and care. He encourages the church to be both sensitive to trauma and faithful in caring for those who are dealing with its long and discouraging effects. He urges local churches to be a place of understanding, a place of compassion, a place where the Lord can bring the best kind of trauma recovery.
This book was extremely helpful to me as I considered people I know who have been traumatized by grief, pain, and abuse. It was helpful to me as I considered how I could better relate to these people and others like them, extending to them the comfort and grace of God. It was helpful to me as both a pastor and a church member, one who longs for his church to lovingly support the ones among us who are bearing heavy burdens and carrying sore wounds.
