Over the last twenty years, our American culture has created a culture of obsession over trauma. This could be a result of publications such as The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, which explores the lasting effect on health that traumatic experiences can have. Or it could be the fact that average life has become relatively easy in recent years, so we don’t have a good perspective of real difficulty. Or it could be the explosion of social media and the speed at which we can share our troubles and receive an immense amount of soothing empathy from strangers. This has been a helpful shift insofar as the “stiff upper lip” generation had the appearance of toughness but often hid life-altering hurts which then manifested in spreading pain to others. With all the talk about trauma, large and small scale, public and private, Christians need to know how to sift through information to find truth and healing.
In Christian circles it can be very easy to dismiss less dramatic trauma and the completely brain-altering effects that it has on a person. Many Christians do not know how to think about their wounds because they have been told to “forgive and forget” without being guided through the healing process that must take place alongside forgiveness. While this topic is immense, I want to offer a few ways to think about personal trauma.
First, if someone has sinned against you in a way that left deep, lasting wounds, you should seek help and counsel. You should always forgive those who sin against you, but sometimes the damage to your heart and mind needs healing. You need help seeing the ways that their sin will alter your view of yourself and God. You need someone to help you see the lies about God that your wound might tempt you to believe. You need someone who will give you the truth, who will remind you of your value as an image bearer of God, who will show you how to forgive and heal instead of how to feign forgiveness but slowly resent the one who promises and commands it. Such counsel will pull you out of the mud and move you forward towards forgiveness and freedom. Beware of counselors who merely allow you to rehash your difficulties constantly, complain about everything that has happened to you, and bathe in self-pity.
Second, if you have trauma that is not dealt with, you can become very bitter. Maybe you grew up with a father who came home drunk every day and yelled at your mother. His actions have left deep wounds on how you see the world. There is no sin in honestly telling a professional counselor or a pastor about your wounds and finding someone to speak healing truth to you. But if you are replaying the traumatic, hurtful events of your childhood in your mind, always growing addicted to the pain they caused, and doing nothing to heal and forgive, you are feeding bitterness. Bitterness will only make you sicker and meaner. Bitterness will stop you from being able to live fully in the joy of the Lord.
Third, it is easy to create idols out of trauma. We can obsess over our wounds and create entire identities out of their trauma. I have seen hundreds of social media accounts where the only content is their personal trauma. Those kinds of accounts or methods of managing trauma become like sinking sand for the soul. Someone hurt them, so they replay it over and over and over again, making it so much a part of themselves that they don’t know who they are without it. This is even a step beyond bitterness: this is a worship of their trauma. They are using their trauma to bring them attention and possibly wealth if their social media following grows large enough. They think that the best way to handle their trauma is to invite the whole world to see it. They hope that someone will see their trauma and tell them they are so strong and brave. They tell themselves all sorts of lies. They are not looking for healing: they are bowing to an idol and want you to bow with them. They want you to fellowship with them in their bitterness. They want to tell you their story so that you will share in their self-pity. You can see this because they are unwilling to do the real healing work of admitting that their wound is turning into gangrene.
If you have experienced trauma, whether it was very big or seemingly small, I want to point you to the story of Joseph in Genesis 37. When Joseph was only a teenager, his angry brothers threw him into a pit to die. They took his clothes and covered them in goat’s blood to convince their father he had been killed by a wild animal. They lied about him.
Joseph’s oldest brother took compassion on him and pulled him out of the pit, only to sell him into slavery. His owners brought him to Egypt and sold him to Potiphar. Potiphar’s wife tried to force herself on him sexually; when he refused, she lied to her husband, saying Joseph had tried to molest her. He was thrown into jail, where he met some fellow prisoners and helped them get out of jail. Although they had promised to help him too, they forgot about him. It was years before he was finally able to get out of jail by interpreting the Pharaoh’s dreams.
If any man could list his trauma, it was Joseph. He experienced physical trauma, emotional trauma, abuse, and betrayal, and most of it was at the hands of his own family. But a few years later, when a famine was rampaging through the land, Joseph’s brothers came to Egypt to find food. Joseph was in charge of all the food distribution because he had wisely saved food for seven years in order to prepare for the famine. After several interactions with his brothers where they did not recognize him, he finally revealed his identity to them. They were frightened. There was their brother whom they had severely abused now a man of great power and prestige. Joseph’s response to them is one of my favorite lines in all of Scripture. After he assures them that he will not take revenge on them he tells them, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Genesis 50:20).
Joseph could have spent his years in Egypt replaying the events of all that had occurred and grown in bitterness towards his brothers. He could have replayed his trauma to all around him, creating an identity in himself of the poor, abandoned one. He could have convinced himself that he deserved Potiphar’s wife. But Joseph wholeheartedly rejected the mire of trauma. Instead he trusted God and worked hard, and he was given positions of authority and power. When he saw his brothers, he did not say that there was no harm. There was harm, and he told them that he knew they meant it. His tears were genuine and flowing. But he could forgive his brothers because he believed that God is good. This is what true forgiveness is.
True forgiveness does not pretend like no harm was done; it does not pretend like there are no wounds to heal. True forgiveness does not ignore sin or pretend like sin is not as devastatingly detrimental as it is. True forgiveness does not wait for an apology. True forgiveness looks past the circumstance to God. True forgiveness believes that the actions of others don’t define our stories because God is greater than any trauma. True forgiveness looks at the terrible things that another has done and says, “It is okay, I can forgive you. I can heal from this because God is using even your sin to bring something good.”
Your hardest story is God’s greatest glory in you. God can use your deepest pain to create a beautiful story that can be your strongest testimony of His goodness. If you believe that, trauma will take no root of bitterness in you.
Lindsey Tollefson is a wife and homemaker in Moscow, ID. She is the author of “Psalms for Trials,” published by Canon Press.