Therapeutic Tools for Christians Dealing with Trauma and Grief
Collective shock and grief can lead to a myriad of emotions - fear, anxiety, anger, numbness, self-recrimination, disgust, despair or something else. The type of emotions that you experience will be affected by your personality and past life experiences and relationships.
We can experience trauma directly ourselves or vicariously through hearing the trauma of others. When we experience either direct trauma or vicarious trauma our mind and bodies can go into an acute stress responses:
- Fight (aggressive response to threat)
- Flight (retreat from threat)
- Freeze (inability to move or act)
- Fawn (trying to please to avoid threat)
All of these four responses are God-given, helpful responses, when used well. However, because of the strength of the emotions attached to them, and because of their proclivity to hang around long after they have been useful, they can also lead us in unhelpful directions. We therefore encourage you to always seek to draw your strongest emotions into a fifth “F” response - the response of Faith.
The Faith Response recognises that emotions in themselves are not wrong, what is important is how we act in them. While it might be tempting to push our emotions down, the Faith Response recognises what we are feeling and chooses to notice how we are responding.
When we allow ourselves to feel things, the Faith Response asks Jesus to come and minister to us. This is an act of Faith that Jesus loves us and wants to meet with the “real” us, and not just the version of us we would like to be. Learning the Faith Response enables us to grow as people, becoming whole and healthy human beings.
The way that Jesus ministers to us can take many forms. Here is one suggestion for how you can open yourself up to be ministered to by Jesus:
Pause right now. Check in on yourself if you are dealing with the traumatic emotions in unhelpful ways: food, pornography, scrolling the internet/social media/news, alcohol, drugs, work etc… Choose to break this automatic response and choose to come to the Lord instead.
Sit somewhere comfortable. (If sitting is hard for you, then go for a walk somewhere you feel you can connect with Jesus.) There is a theory called bi-lateral stimulation where doing a physical activity which engages both your left and right sides of your body can help process trauma because it gets your left brain to talk to your right brain (simplified explanation!) - so walking can be helpful bi-lateral stimulation, walking and talking to Jesus at the same time is even better! You may want to have a worship song on or do something to create an environment where you are going to find it easy to be alert to Jesus.
Breathe deeply and ask the Holy Spirit to come. Recognise Jesus as Lord even if you don’t feel it at that particular moment. Keep doing this until you feel yourself starting to breathe and experience the moment differently.
Ask Jesus to help you understand what it is you are actually feeling: sadness, anger, disgust, despair, fear, anxiety?
Recognise, name and own that emotion by verbalising it in some way e.g. "I am feeling sad. I am sad." As you begin to recognise and “own” the emotions that you are feeling, it is incredibly helpful to begin to invite Jesus to “hear” your emotions. Please understand that Jesus doesn’t come to “fix” the emotions, but to hear them and lead you on a journey into them and through them. It might be helpful for you to think about yourself telling him what it is that you are feeling, or to visualise yourself physically giving him that emotion as an item.
Depending on the emotions you are experiencing and on your personality, once you have identified, owned and allowed Jesus to minister to your emotions, start to turn that into prayer:
Anger could be a fight response - Shout against injustice, ask God to break strongholds of the enemy, intercede for the victory of good over evil.
If you are fearful or anxious - Repeat over and over the first few lines of the Lord’s prayer, ask the Holy Spirit to fill your heart, thoughts and body,
Numbness could be a freeze response - ask the Holy Spirit to give you words. If you have no words of your own you can pray in tongues or weeping and groaning.
Use the Psalms - The expanse of emotions covered and affirmed in this book is miraculous. Look through the book and find ones that speak to you and for you. Then dwell on particular phrases and ask God to soak it into your soul or use them as prayers.
Turn towards other believers in grief and sorrow - as a church, as a community. As embodied believers, Jesus calls us as his church to be a family: brothers and sisters who pray for and with each other.
If you work through your grief, pain and trauma in this way, or a way similar to this, then you will not only be able to process your own pain and grief but you will be able to respond helpfully when you encounter others who are experiencing difficulty - without feeling overwhelmed by their emotions or wanting to rescue them (a response that is more about your own unprocessed emotions than theirs). Sometimes trauma and grief become complex and unmanageable and in that case we encourage you that contacting your GP is a really healthy course of action alongside these guidelines. It is not unfaithful to the Lord to seek medical support.
As we learn the Faith Response, Jesus invites us to become the pastor in our sphere of influence - in our workplace, our home, our small group. We don’t need to be sorted to do this. We choose to be wounded healers; to be people who are walking with a limp but still able to minister hope and life to others. Ask God to help you be a non-anxious presence for others, so that they can tell you anything and still feel safe.
If you get stuck, we have details of a few helpful Christian organisations and individuals who can provide you with additional help; please just contact us.
This article was written by Lesley Thompson, she is Senior Pastor of Croydon Vineyard Church and a qualified integrative therapist.