Category Archives: Trauma and Recovery

Trigger Warnings in Education: Some Reminiscences and Suggestions from a Survivor

The NY Times, the New Republic, and a slew of feminist blogs have recently been debating whether it’s appropriate for educators to put trigger warnings about potentially traumatic material on their syllabus. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has taken the tack that students should expect to be challenged and disquieted by new ideas in the classroom, not shielded from the upsetting facts of life. It’s hard not to see a gendered value system behind this attitude, in which students’ dispassionate intellect (male) reins in their emotional reactions (female) so they can “properly” analyze horrific topics.

Jacqui Shine’s xoJane piece “What We Talk About When We Talk About Trigger Warnings” should be everybody’s starting point for required reading. Shine myth-busts the nasty stereotypes about survivors that recirculate like a bad penny whenever the topic comes up. I’ll post a short excerpt below, then share some personal memories and suggestions based on my time in academia.

Shine writes:

…Among the assumptions that come up and go unchecked are that trauma survivors are the ones asking for trigger warnings to be broadly applied in the first place and that, whether or not they are, asking for consideration means that there’s an imminent threat of a culture war-style takeover by a cabal of survivors who want to curtail our civil liberties or the exchange of ideas or the free expression of artists. (Honestly, it escaped my notice that we’re living in a world that slavishly caters to the needs of trauma survivors. If someone had told me, I would have made a point of enjoying it more!)

I’m also baffled by this assumption that trigger warnings are meant to prevent us from having to see or feel anything difficult–that the only way one responds to a trigger is by falling apart. Being triggered doesn’t mean you fall apart or are overcome by stereotypically feminized hysterics. Trauma responses can include a huge range of reactions, including physical symptoms like headaches, stomachaches, and heart palpitations and emotional ones, like anxiety or numbness. Sometimes being triggered looks like getting really quiet and sitting through something until you can get somewhere safe to take care of yourself. Sometimes it looks like someone going on as though nothing has happened at all and then having a really terrible nightmare that night.

Likewise, I’m not sure why a trigger warning has to imply censoring someone or stopping something. A “warning” is just that, and if you know what to expect–that you’re about to see something upsetting–you can plan in advance how you’ll handle it and how you’ll get through it. And we often warn people when they are about to see things that might be disturbing, whether we know them to be trauma survivors or not…

The following is just my personal perspective. I don’t make any claim for its universality. I completely support professors and students who have found that TWs make their classroom environment healthier. But I would hate to see the conversation start and end there, because the real issue is survivors’ right to an accessible education, not the merits of one particular access ramp. We need to experiment with a wide range of strategies for different situations.

Would TWs have improved my experience in academia? On what kind of material? I can’t imagine it, because I’m so different now, and my triggers in those days were more global than content-specific. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, every university should have “TW for bullshit and abuse of power” emblazoned above their entrance gates.

From early childhood to two years after I graduated law school, I was living in an abusive home. Currently, my life is fantastically psycho-free. Yet I find myself much more triggered by specific media content than I was then. I don’t know why.

I have a huge collection of horror fiction that I no longer read. More than half of the literary fiction that I pick up makes me feel gross inside because the author doesn’t seem to recognize how unhealthy his characters are, or that their deluded condition isn’t inevitable. I’m more quickly overstimulated by rapid-paced violent action in movies (though special effects have also become much more overpowering in the past two decades). With my feminist 3-D glasses on, I become dizzy watching romantic comedies because I see that the protagonists are nothing but stalkers and wounded childen. As for theology, once my favorite genre, a lot of it gives me a headache because I encounter chilly abstractions where empathy and personal narrative would be more relevant.

All of this is to say that it’s hard to imagine how TWs would have helped me in high school, college, or law school. I was too numbed-out to be triggered!

Seriously, though, I think I managed all right despite my raw mental state in those days because of two factors: I could predict (from the course topic or the book’s reputation) what kind of upsetting material a book might address, and I was smart enough to get decent grades despite not reading all of it. (Heck, I boycotted entire novels in senior year of high school because I didn’t approve of stream-of-consciousness–bite me, Andrey Bely!–and Mr. Everdell still passed me. Talk about being coddled.)

An example of successful trigger-management from my law school career: I chose to take an elective seminar called “Law and Politics of Pornography”. One of the required books consisted of scene-by-scene descriptions of numerous adult films, grouped thematically by chapter. I think this book, which was actually somewhat boring, was an excellent choice on the part of the professor, because it gave us a working knowledge of what these films depicted, in a format that wouldn’t overwhelm us sensorily. I’ve always feared mental contamination by images merging sex with violence. The author considerately grouped such films in the S&M chapter, which I pretty much skipped over. The chapter title was a sufficient TW for me.

Sensitive topics become show-stopping triggers because of surprise and sensory intensity. TWs developed to help people manage the unpredictable flood of data on the Internet. When I pick up a textbook on 20th-century history, I expect to come across pictures of Hiroshima victims and dead soldiers, and I’m mentally prepared. When I scroll down my Facebook wall, and those same images pop up between LOLcats and baby pictures, I’m triggered. I could be forced to see something horrible at any moment, from any quarter; there’s no refuge. This panicked conclusion shuts down the mind, making the viewer afraid to explore any media that isn’t completely predictable. Hmm, might the explosion of random, agitating images in every TV commercial break (sex! guns! speeding cars! insults! drunken frogs!) have some connection to America’s closed-minded and polarized politics?

Similarly, TWs on blogs perform the same function as book cover blurbs and reviews, a quick heads-up about content for readers who are unfamiliar with the author’s preoccupations. The sheer volume of writing by unknown authors on the Internet, far more than in your average bookstore, means that readers are taking a risk every time they navigate to a new page. And isn’t that what education is all about–guiding people to risk discovering new ideas, by giving them the tools to orient themselves in an unfamiliar place? So don’t waste my time with your free-speech arguments against TWs.

In the debate over
TWs, we need to distinguish between challenging ideas and overpowering experiences. The former are integral to education, the latter are not.

The very fact that we’re discussing triggers in academia is a radical, positive step. As I’ve said in my “Survivors in Church” posts, trauma awareness is an often-overlooked component of accessibility and diversity training. Finally, we’re acknowledging that students are not floating heads but affective human beings who feel personally implicated in the narratives they read in class.

However, a trauma-management tool borrowed from the Internet may not be as helpful in the classroom. Rather than telling students what they probably already know (“Romeo & Juliet: TW for suicide”), educators should watch out for unnecessarily traumatizing material in their curriculum choices. It’s the difference between posting a sign “Warning: Hazardous Waste” versus not dumping the damn thing in the first place. Which do you think is more effective?

Does this mean avoiding all painful topics? Certainly not. Teachers already balance such factors when important texts contain racist ideas or slurs. For example, schools assign Huckleberry Finn despite its controversial use of the N-word, because the value of learning about American racism outweighs the pain of hearing the slur. However, it would be irresponsible and unnecessary to re-enact scenes from Huck where one student would have to call another student “N-word”. Verbal abuse is not a legitimate teaching tool. That’s what I mean about challenging ideas versus overpowering experiences.

How might this work for other common triggers? Well, if you’re an English teacher choosing between two novels that both fit the course requirements, consider assigning the one without the graphic rape scene. Or assign the one where rape is presented in a context that facilitates critical discussion of rape culture, rather than one that gratuitously eroticizes the assault or minimizes its moral significance.

If you’re a history teacher, have a presumption in favor of low-stimulation media when studying violent events (e.g. written descriptions as opposed to videos). Show violent images sparingly to make a point that couldn’t be made otherwise. Don’t fall into “Operation Rescue” tactics of using bloody photos to shock students into paying attention. Pro-actively acknowledge the students’ need for self-care and normalize their feelings of distress instead of projecting an ideal of emotional detachment. Students who are allowed to empathize and grieve about atrocities will learn the moral lessons of history better than ones who dissociate in the name of objectivity.

Whatever your subject area, don’t radiate contempt for your students’ foundational beliefs and intellectual defenses. Why was I an aesthetic reactionary in high school, turning up my nose at Mallarmé and Ezra Pound? Because I was unconsciously triggered by chaos, be it moral relativism, absurdist art, or an undisciplined classroom. I couldn’t get perspective on this in an academic culture that assumed that all students were safe and complacent, and that the teachers’ job was to epater le bourgeois. My first-year Intro to Legal Thought professor spent our last day of class haranguing us for our cowardice. He’d been giving us bombs to smash the system, he raved, but we’d let them all fizzle out. But some of us come to education seeking a bomb shelter from our shell-shocked lives. We were already born in the ruins; we crave a vision of order and harmony, and the tools to build it.

TWs alone won’t make academia survivor-friendly, any more than campus speech codes ended racism. A deeper values-shift is needed. But anything that breaks the silence around trauma is a good start.

 

Survivors in Church: Insights from Disability Theology

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my therapist, “Will I ever get to the bottom of this pile of bad feelings, or is this my life?” I was going through another patch of nightmares and becoming frustrated. No new information was coming up; the incidents were way in the past, by now more thoroughly re-processed than Cheez Whiz.

I’d been operating with this image of my psyche as an overstuffed closet. As long as I was awake, I could keep holding the door shut, but every time I fell asleep, some junk would fall out. Eventually, though, wouldn’t I run out of old junk? Then I would have reclaimed my entire closet, to fill only with things from my fabulous new life!

But my therapist was like, “Nah, it doesn’t work that way.”

Some feelings will shift, she said; some memories will lose their charge, others will remain very painful but arise less often. However, PTSD is for many people a lifelong chronic condition. As Buddha said about suffering in general, the biggest thing I can do to ease my burden is to stop resisting it. Stop being surprised and frightened when it flares up again. Stop being angry at myself for not being “done” healing. There is no “done”.

I was thrilled!

It was a relief to stop blaming myself for my scars, and the survivor-introvert-Highly Sensitive Person in me loves predictability. But also, I was overjoyed that now I had a name for the liberal Christian indifference toward survivors, which I’d been awkwardly calling “normalcy privilege”.

Ableism.

On one level, the liberal church does a lot to ensure access for people with disabilities. Our parish, for instance, is one of the few congregations in the area with a sign language interpreter every Sunday. We’re undertaking a heroic capital campaign to add an elevator. The priest adapts the liturgy to say, “Those who are able, please stand”.

But as is usually the case in liberalism, the model is inclusion for the disabled, rather than disability as a standpoint for liberation theology. The latter, more radical posture would mean that the able-bodied/neurotypical people in charge would de-center their own experience, and invite the disabled to share what Christianity looks like in our lives.

For instance, where do we situate ourselves in the many gospel stories about Jesus healing mental and physical illnesses? (I’m treating the demon-possession stories as examples of mental illness because those were the manifested symptoms, but I don’t mean to imply the demons weren’t also real.) Liberal sermons about these stories are more likely to assume a non-disabled subject position for their audience. “We” are encouraged to emulate Jesus by healing others, or to overcome “our” prejudices about sharing fellowship with mentally challenged people. I will say that our church has made some progress beyond this narrow paradigm, through sermons about personal and family struggles with addiction, such as this beautiful meditation from lay preacher Vicki Ix at God Is Always More.

When we only talk about disability in the context of healing, that’s problematic in its own right. Of course those who feel afflicted want healing. Of course those who empathize with others’ affliction want to offer them something to hope for. But in reality, some conditions are incurable. While I don’t rule out miraculous divine cures, I feel that most of our energy should be directed toward overcoming obstacles to the disabled person’s functioning as an equal in our church, just as she is.

The pressure to manifest a spiritual happy ending can actually impair recovery. When there is healing, particularly for psychological conditions, it may not even be recognized by the non-afflicted, because they’ve been steeped in the ableist cultural narrative of triumphing over the disability rather than embracing it. For example, survivors who claim they’ve forgiven the abuser and released all angry feelings get more credit for being “healed” than survivors who have gone deep enough into recovery to feel righteous anger and finally love themselves.

Alongside the theology of healing, we need to develop theology that honors the disability as an genuine alternative way of being in the world. This is how some hearing-impaired people feel about Deaf culture. The autism community also includes many who want to celebrate their neurodiversity rather than eliminate it. In my recent post about survivors’ spiritual gifts, I suggested that the church could learn something unique from our trauma history and how we adapted to it.

The foregoing discussion owes much to Kelby Carlson’s essay “Crooked Healing“, which I found when Googling disability theology. Carlson, a music student and evangelical Christian, suggests that disability can be a vocation and a symbol of the universal human vulnerability that calls for God’s grace. Some quotes follow, but please read the whole thing here.

…It might seem strange to some that, as a lifelong person of faith, I would find the other’s desire for prayer to be so hard to respond to. Prayer is supposed to be an instrument of gratitude, intercession and doxology. But as a person with a disability, there is a shadow to the element of prayer cast over any interaction that directly involves my disability. As someone with a chronic (and, barring incredible medical advances, permanent) disability, this is a perennial problem I must navigate as a member of the church and aspiring theologian. On the face of it, this request for prayer seems harmless, even beneficent. But it is nearly always accompanied by an explanation: “I want you to be healed.”

But what is wrong with this? Doesn’t the Christian religion hold out hope of ultimate healing? Doesn’t God promise physical restoration to those who have faith in his righteousness? Don’t we, as people of God, long for the day “when there will be no mourning, nor death, nor crying, nor pain?” Insofar as this vision seeks to give a glimpse of a new creation, reconciled to God, where we are in full communion with each other and with Triune Being, than I can only heartily affirm such an idea. But lurking beneath such a portrait is something that is far more troubling. It is the erasure of the past, and the elimination of disability as a means of living well before God…

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…The project of constructing a theology of disability needs to steer between two unhelpful shoals. The first shoal is a kind of non-redemptive liberation theology. Liberation theology is generally conceived of as a project to free marginalized people from oppressive theological systems. Unfortunately it tends to ontologize whatever its marginalized category is—for example, conceiving of God as ontologically “black”, “female”, or “disabled”—and thus reconstituting the relationship between God and the world in such a way that God is eternally hostile to categories outside of that ontology. This way of conceiving of theology is unhelpful because it both goes beyond Scripture in adding to God’s attributes and refusing to stand under Scripture and acknowledge God’s desire for universal reconciliation. In this way much liberation theology is fundamentally “non-redemptive” because it collapses finite reality into infinitude. This is especially unhelpful for disability because it cannot acknowledge a progressive or redemptive goal into which disability might fall.

The opposite danger is to collapse disability into a grand narrative of sin in such a way that redemption of disability becomes redemption from disability. For those suffering with chronic disabilities, this means that their continuity of identity is effectively destroyed by an anomalous resurrection. Resurrection as conceived this way is not a renewal and transfiguration of an old creation, but an erasing of the old to make way for something completely new. This leaves those with lifelong disabilities left with no theological anchor by which they can live out their experience in relationship to God and the world…

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…There are few things more potentially useful to the disabled experience than the idea of vocation. Vocation places disability in a wider spectrum of the sacred calling. It implies that disabled people and their able-bodied counterparts are on equal spiritual footing. More than that, it suggests that disabled people can be seen as conduits for God’s grace and service rather than it only images of a broken creation in need of “fixing.”

This doctrine of vocation restores the image of God to the disabled. In response to the worry that disability is evidence of sin, one can reply precisely to the contrary. While brokenness itself is evidenced of a creation longing for release from bondage, an individual’s disability is, subversively, a venue for Christ to display his glory…

The theology of the cross is a particular way of doing theology that disabled people can uniquely understand. It is the theology that acknowledges the “visible” things of God: namely the cross of Christ and visible suffering as the premier way of “seeing” God. God’s grace is manifested, paradoxically, in that which appears weak and nonsensical. In this view, one cannot blithely skip over the cross as a simple means to God’s vindication and resurrection. This results in an anemic view of suffering: something that is meant only to be patiently endured in the hope that perhaps someday things will get better. In contrast, St. Paul offers a paradigm for understanding weakness and suffering that is directly consonant with the theology of the cross [the thorn in the flesh]…

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…The cross brings all ideas of human weakness into itself. Individually, the disabled can recognize the cross as the nexus of their relationship with Christ in his weakness, and realize that possessing a “thorn” is a means of grace in weakness rather than shame. Ecclesiologically, the disabled can be recognized as, in an important way, ikons of Christ’s redemptive suffering…

Have a blessed Good Friday, dear readers.

Survivors in Church: Our Spiritual Gifts

In this second post in my occasional series on abuse survivors in the church, I’d like to reflect on some of the spiritual gifts that have emerged through my recovery, and how the church could offer greater scope for them to be exercised.

It’s a delicate matter even to frame the issue this way. Our pain-avoidant culture is too hasty to point out the silver linings while we’re still shivering under the rain clouds. As soon as I try to appreciate my personal growth, I become afraid of giving listeners an opening to minimize the suffering that spurred it. Does the empty tomb erase the cross?

Those dear tokens of his passion/Still his dazzling body bears. The foundation story of our faith cannot be reduced to either shattering violence or undefeated love. The progressive church tends to skip over this gut-wrenching paradox, foregrounding the “functional” Jesus, the competent social justice activist and moral teacher with no visible wounds. But we survivors live between the cross-pieces of love and violence. The first gift we offer the church is the invitation to an honest exploration of that place.

The other gifts I will discuss below are drawn from my experience and the experiences of my friends in recovery. Naturally, not all survivors will interpret their journey in the same way.

Clarification of beliefs:

Because of my healing work, I appreciate how our beliefs can profoundly impact our lives, for good or ill. I have clearer critical thinking about where my beliefs come from, and tools to evaluate whether they are true and nourishing for me and my community.

All abuse involves some element of brainwashing. It severs the story-spinning brain from the distress signals given off by the body and the emotions. It deliberately instills confusion about whom to trust and who is to blame for the feelings of shame and disgust. This after-effect of trauma can be one of the most difficult to undo, because by definition, it is embedded below the conscious level.

The healing method I’ve found most helpful, Inner Bonding, directs me to look inward for the “false beliefs” that I’m still running in the background, and then to identify the life-giving truth with help from my Higher Power. For instance, a very common and influential false belief is, “I am unlovable unless I do X,” where X could be pleasing an authority figure, achieving something to prove one’s worth, or making sacrifices to serve others. The truth is that we are all beloved children of God, just as we are, and while there may still be good reasons to do X, earning our right to exist is not one of them.

Retraining people’s beliefs in a Godly and life-giving direction is theoretically the church’s distinctive mission. Isn’t that the plus-factor that differentiates “church” from a social club, charity, or activist group?

You would think so, but the liberal church is in a decades-long flight from sophisticated, evaluative conversations about belief. For years I defended the conservative position that “Christianity is the only true religion,” simply because it grated on my nerves (and scared me more than I realized) when liberals tossed off the platitude, “It doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’re a good person.” I knew from hard experience that beliefs have everything to do with discerning what is good and being able to act on that awareness. So I got a strong signal there that no one wanted to hear about my journey out of the psychological fog. I was looking for a community of sanity in which to detox from my crazy-making home. That just wasn’t the church’s priority.

Or perhaps liberals are saying that whatever else Christianity has to offer, its religious beliefs (e.g. a personal God, the atonement, Jesus’s miracles, the cross and resurrection) have no effect on helping you choose a life of compassion versus domination, or reality versus delusion. In that case, you folks are wasting my time.

I’m frustrated that I’ve had to do my belief-repair completely outside Christian channels, figuring out on my own how to bring in the Jesus piece. And I suspect that others in the church are anxious and adrift, picking up signals of discouragement from the progressive thought-leaders that their deepest questions have no answers, or that they would rupture the social harmony if they started demanding some.

This discouragement is unnecessary. The answers aren’t really so mysterious. They only seem so because of our proliferation of thoughts, those elaborate defenses stemming from unwillingness to feel our feelings and follow the Spirit into unknown territory. Jesus said, “Everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:8)

I’d like to give the church the gift of my testimony that this promise keeps proving itself in my experience.

Dependence on grace:

In the previous section, I mentioned the false belief that we have to earn our right to exist. It looks to me like most people in modern Western society struggle with this, because of individualism, capitalism, social mobility, and all the usual suspects. On top of that, members of marginalized groups also have to overcome internalized negative stereotypes about their identity (e.g. racism, homophobia).

For survivors of childhood abuse, the delusion of perpetual probation goes deep, because the very people who brought us into the world didn’t treat us as having inherent worth. In my house, we couldn’t say no to things that felt bad (unwelcome touch, exposure of private matters, rewriting of family history, isolation from friends), just because they felt bad. We had to give our abuser reasons why our proposed boundary was “right”. Safety depended on winning endless arguments, which isn’t really safety at all. We also learned that receiving love and kindness was conditional on not angering the person in charge — as though we actually had control over that.

The blessing is, once I understood that self-justification was an unwinnable set-up from my dysfunctional past, I had no choice but to depend completely on God’s unconditional love. Now I have a basis to achieve goals and serve others without the hindrance of anxiety about protecting my ego. (An ideal realized imperfectly thus far, of course!) Perhaps people who’ve always been able to please the relevant scorekeepers take longer to realize their need to quit the game.

I’d like to give the church the gift of encouragement that grace is really there for us and makes us feel wonderful when we rely on it.

Awareness of power dynamics:

Product liability law includes the concept of “predictable misuse”. In cases of alleged negligent design, it’s not enough for the manufacturer to show that the product should be safe when used as directed. The company also has to make it safe for other situations that can be reasonably anticipated. For instance, the intended use of a chair is for sitting, but it’s foreseeable that consumers will also stand on chairs to reach high shelves, so it might be a design defect if the chair seat collapses when stood upon.

Survivors are your theological product testers. We know better than to assume that everyone who hears a teaching will apply it with good intentions. We’re naturally hypervigilant to imagine scenarios where the teaching could be manipulated to oppress someone, or could unintentionally reinforce a listener’s self-harming false beliefs. Don’t dismiss us as paranoid. We can help make your church’s worldview nuanced and sturdy enough to withstand spiritual abusers.

Survivors make great deconstructionists. We’re sensitive to the subject position of the person speaking. We notice the kind of power imbalances that upset Jesus in Matthew 23, when he denounced the Pharisees for laying burdens on others that they didn’t bear themselves. Because we’ve been outsiders for so long, we can teach our fellow Christians not to mistake one privileged perspective for a universal norm. For instance, we can correct their naivete about institutions like the family, which the mainstream church narrative only describes in terms of safety and benevolence. Though it’s painful to shatter these illusions, only then can the church become a real refuge for domestic violence victims.

I’d like to give my church the gifts of worst-case-scenario foresight and political consciousness, so that our teachings and leadership structure are truly liberating for the most vulnerable among us.

Urgency of spiritual practice:

Survivors who pray, pray like our hair’s on fire. We don’t have the energy for religious busywork. To be worthwhile, church has to offer us strategies to get through each day. It has to supply the spiritual food of consolation, acceptance, and liberation to people who have long been famished.

Our honesty about our needs can push the church toward a healthier balance between local and remote service projects. Helping seems simpler when the beneficiaries are thousands of miles away. Creating change in our own backyard can be controversial, and we might receive uncomfortable feedback about the mixed effects of our interventions. It’s not “sexy” for a church to take care of its own members; it triggers American middle-class guilt about our privileges. But survivors just don’t care anymore about these ego defenses. It’s our turn to seek healing. If the church tells us to wait in line behind everyone else in the world, we’ll go elsewhere. Do you really want a church where the people who most desperately need Jesus become burned-out first?

I’d like to give my church the gifts of passion for God and acceptance of vulnerability.


The Questionable Value of an Abuser’s Back-Story

Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. The French proverb sums up the conventional story arc of healing and closure, encountered repeatedly in inspirational articles and literary novels that take on the difficult subject of abuse. The survivors in these stories are depicted as stuck in pain and anger from the past until they discover their perpetrator’s own trauma history and learn to empathize with her.

Victimized and vulnerable, we long for a God’s-eye view that reveals our senseless trauma to be only a small piece of a larger, meaningful pattern. How could that person’s emotional responses be so unlike mine? Where did her empathy wiring become unplugged? When she saw me as deserving of torment, who was she really seeing?

That’s why we seize on the fact, or speculate where no facts are available, that “the abuser was abused herself”. Traumatically bonded to the parent, and striving to contextualize positive memories of feeling cared for, the adult survivor imaginatively identifies with the “real” person inside her perpetrator, pictured as a wounded child like herself. This kicks the blame upstairs, to the parent’s parent or the creepy guy in the bushes, preserving the fantasy that but for some very bad luck, the abusive parent would have been the loving person that she really wanted to be.

However, this strategy impedes awareness that the abuser and the victim are not the same person, repeating the confusion of the original trauma. As Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Perera described in The Scapegoat Complex, an unhealthy parent will split off the rejected parts of her psyche and convince her child that those bad feelings and actions are really his. The incest survivor feels the shame that actually belongs to the perpetrator, and unfortunately, society (including mental health professionals) easily falls prey to the same error.

When I think of the part of me that is merged with my mother, the paranormal bond she always insisted we had, the images that come to mind are hidden damage and family curse. I hear Johnny Cash singing “I See a Darkness” (Many times we’ve shared our thoughts/But did you ever, ever notice/The kind of thoughts I got?) and “The Beast in Me” (who In the twinkling of an eye/Might have to be restrained).

The incest survivor who blogs at Speaking While the World Sleeps wrote a characteristically hard-hitting post in December 2013, about how “abusers as victims” makes survivors afraid of ourselves and stigmatized in society:

It’s a nice, simple explanation that makes people feel better about abuse. Clearly abuse is just self-contained. I’m also sure that it makes non-survivors feel better about themselves – certainly they would never abuse because they’re not like those tragic people.

What this does is assume that there is something in being a survivor that could turn us into abusers. That there is something inherently in us now that we have to fight against to not be abusive and those poor abusive dears who just weren’t strong enough gave into the darkness inside of them. It turns us survivors into ticking time bombs not to be trusted because at any minute there’s the chance that we could “turn.”…

…It flattens the lives of survivors because it reduces us to an “abuse narrative” rather than seeing us as people with unique stories and experiences. It says that everything we do is in relation to the abuse, and that our abusers actions are only in relation to their abuse. We have no lives, no experiences, no other events or circumstances that contribute to our lives. We are not human beings with choices, all our decisions instead revolve around are reactions to the abuse. It turns abusers into unthinking animals who are only able to respond on a base, emotional level, with no conscious thought at all. It assumes that abusers just “don’t know better.” It plays into my mother’s belief of the “whoops, accidentally sexually abused you!”

I think the simplicity of this reasoning allows for us to believe that abuse is self-contained, is separate from the “normal” people. It’s a line of behavior passed down from parent to child, and I feel like it allows non-survivors to believe that they are untainted by its stain – they hold no responsibility for it and they are safe from it.

For me, nobody has more credibility on this issue than Alice Miller. In my favorite book of hers, Banished Knowledge, she expounds on her core belief that abusive parents are indeed re-enacting some childhood trauma. Yet she is unique in her firm insistence that this fact creates no obligation for the survivor to feel any particular way — no compulsory forgiveness, no necessary sympathy, no minimizing or moral equivalence. We’ve spent more than enough time caretaking such parents. We had to empathize with them at our expense in order to survive. It’s our own inner child’s story that is awaiting a long-overdue hearing.

Just once I’d like to read a novel where a survivor decides to disengage from his family story. Instead of imaginatively bonding with his abuser through their common wounds, he accepts that their bond was never genuine or mutual, and learns to grieve this loss while reclaiming his future.

I guess I’ll have to write it myself.

 

Survivors in Church: Between Covenant and Choice

Survivors in Church: A Preamble

Welcome to the first post in a multi-part series about trauma survivors in the church. Topics will include common triggers in the church environment and their effects on survivors’ participation; how the church’s beliefs, particularly its picture of human nature, can either be healing or re-traumatizing; pastoral care for survivors; the challenges of authentic life in community; and the spiritual gifts of people with a trauma-informed perspective.

The Christian literature on this subject is remarkably sparse, if you’re looking for books that are informed by feminist values and modern psychology. The theological memoir Proverbs of Ashes by Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock stands nearly alone in the landscape. I learned a lot from this book, but I personally did not share the authors’ need to reject the Atonement altogether. The concept of redemptive sacrifice can be terribly misapplied, but in my opinion, the Crucifixion doesn’t have to be interpreted as only a spiritualization of child abuse, unless you believe that Jesus was not divine but just another human martyr. I do still recommend the book as a starting point. Sarah Over the Moon has been blogging its high points in this series.

The male gender presentation of Jesus is also not my personal trigger, and I don’t like to organize spiritual traits along a gender-binary axis (e.g. male=individualist, female=relational), so I’m not talking about “feminizing” the church’s image of God in Christ to make it more comfortable for survivors of male-on-female abuse. There are a lot of feminist spirituality books on that theme already, some more recognizably Christian than others.

In my view, patriarchy is just the most common manifestation of a more fundamental sin, our impulse to turn difference into domination and stigma. I love the Christ of the Gospels because he identified this root of evil and attacked it head-on with the greater power of egalitarian, non-dominating love.

So, to sum up, “Survivors in Church” will not be about revising our Christology. It’s about the reasons why survivors of relational trauma may find it difficult to be present in church while we’re healing, and what can be done about it.

Episode I: Between Covenant and Choice

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my baptismal vows.

Nothing feels as good to me, right now, as knowing I have a choice about who gets to be intimate with me. I don’t mean sex — that’s a different vow! I mean, who gets to be in my life; who has a claim on my energy, devotion, sacrifice; who knows my secrets and deserves candor about my feelings; who can expect me to stay present with them, even when it’s uncomfortable for me to face their needs, our difference of opinion, or their perception of my shortcomings.

My relational trauma was heavy on engulfment, surveillance, and brainwashing. To end the abuse, I had to rupture the most foundational and socially sanctified unchosen relationship, the mother-child bond. Having broken this taboo, I can’t take any other obligatory relationships between adults completely seriously. “You can’t guilt-trip me, I threw my own mother under the bus!” (Actually I jumped off the bus she was driving over a cliff, metaphorically speaking, but bad-daughter guilt isn’t rational.)

Recently I heard a beautiful sermon envisioning church as a community where all kinds of people, without stigma or hierarchy, could minister to each other’s needs and learn from each other’s unique perspectives — rich and poor, old and young, all genders and orientations and ethnicities, recovering addicts, the mentally ill, and so forth. That’s the Kingdom of God that I believe in.

So why was I triggered as well as inspired?

Because I don’t get to be the gatekeeper of this community. I am bound in a common life with people I haven’t vetted for emotional safety.

I talk a lot about wanting the church to be a viable “family of choice” for people who are estranged from their families of origin — as many LGBT folks are, for example. I like the “of choice” part, but I’m getting stuck on the “family” part.

Like marriage, the covenant of baptism could be described as a free choice to restrict my choices. I became a Christian as an adult, with absolutely no social or familial pressure to do so. That undertaking is not to be broken lightly. Like divorcing a spouse, separating from the body of Christ requires a better reason than “just to prove I can”.

Trust and autonomy issues are so common for survivors of relational trauma. For some it manifests as high turnover in romantic attachments, for others as difficulty sticking with a career or schooling. Sometimes I even feel trapped by my own commitment to myself to finish my novel, and my obligations to my imaginary characters! It’s not a stretch to surmise that the nones include many survivors who are scared to explore their faith in a communal setting, whatever their beliefs.

How can the church meet us where we are, and help us over the threshold?

ACTION ITEMS FOR THE CHURCH:

Be more respectful toward the unchurched. Stop scolding the unaffiliated for their supposed self-centeredness and unwillingness to work hard at relationships. Stop assuming their spirituality is shallow because it doesn’t take place within your four walls. Frankly, that reminds me of a boyfriend who called me frigid because I wouldn’t sleep with him.

Offer nourishment before demanding commitment. The church, as the embodiment of Christ, should be the first to pledge her love to the potential believer, rather than the other way around. The Bible teaches that God took the initiative with us. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Open communion — welcoming the baptized and unbaptized to the Eucharist on equal terms — is for me a profound symbol of this initiative. Several times in the gospels, people first accept nourishment from Jesus and then recognize him and follow him. “They knew him in the breaking of the bread.” They don’t have to sign a loyalty oath before they get fed.

Provide open, ongoing guidance about skillful communication. People need training in a method like NVC to discuss sensitive personal matters in a non-reactive way. At a minimum, all small-group leaders should be required to take such a class. Otherwise it’s like group therapy without a therapist. The more diverse the church, the greater the need for explicit guidance, because not everyone shares the same social cues.

Diversity outreach should start small and go slowly. Pick one issue at a time (e.g. mental health) and set up a working group with a few people who feel strong enough to educate each other out of their prejudices. Don’t lay the whole burden on the woman who mentions her sexual assault in a small group and some guy asks “What were you wearing?” because the church didn’t do Rape Myths 101 training.

In the church as a whole, the leadership should articulate clear minimum expectations for interpersonal behavior, so that no one feels pressured into being a caretaker for others’ trauma. As schools are already doing, offer bystander training to encourage communal intervention against bullying.