TRAUMA

10 Reasons Why Christians Need to be Talking about It

De: R. Denice Colson PhD

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Dr. Colson reveals ten reasons why Christians need to discuss trauma and its impact on people’s lives. She believes that trauma, especially in childhood, is one of the enemy’s main tools to block people from experiencing God’s grace, mercy, and love in their lives. It hardens people’s hearts to the idea that there could be a God, especially a loving God who cares about them and is for them. Suppose the enemy can get one person to deeply wound another through abuse, emotional neglect, addiction, or any other kind of adversity. In that case, he can step back and let the pain and bitterness change them, discoloring their view of God and plugging their ears to the call of the Holy Spirit. He can use it to isolate them in shame and fear, discouraging them from calling on God for help. If he can’t stop their salvation, he can limit their impact on others in the world and restrict their spiritual growth and participation in corporate worship or service.

In the book's first part, she outlines her top ten reasons for talking about trauma in churches, Christian schools, counseling ministries, and others. She supports each description with research and statistics. She outlines the impact of trauma in people’s lives, including their spirituality, view of God, self, and others. Each of the ten reasons also includes suggestions for taking action to address that specific outcome.
In the book’s second part, she discusses how to increase your ministry's trauma-informed care. Using professional guidelines for ethical and practical trauma care, she adapts the principles to Christian ministries that aren’t mental health centers. She gives examples for churches, schools, and small groups.

Dr. Colson also includes some information on her Christian-integrated trauma treatment model. Most counseling approaches focus on visible symptoms, like behavior, conscious beliefs, and feelings. The most common theory is, if you change your thoughts and beliefs, you will change your feelings and behavior. Trauma-created beliefs are more insidious, however. Because they grow out of the brain’s need to survive, they are difficult to change. Many people aren’t even aware of their negative beliefs until they begin to resolve the trauma. In addition, we have to go beyond symptoms and treat the wounded identity. When we don’t treat the soul, just the mind and body, we play Whack-a-Mole with symptoms and never remove the root.

Building on her years of experience in counseling trauma survivors and the available research, she began developing a Christian-integrated trauma recovery model in 2013. She designed this model for use in churches, Christian counseling, and professional counseling offices. She believes that God has called the global church to be the preeminent hospital for wounded souls. A place they can come to receive comfort, and have their emotional and psychological wounds bound up, assuaged, healed, restored, and redeemed.

In Galatians 6:1-3, Paul wrote, “Dear brothers and sisters, if another believer is overcome by some sin, you who are godly should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path. And be careful not to fall into the same temptation yourself. 2 Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ. 3 If you think you are too important to help someone, you are only fooling yourself. You are not that important.” It’s time the church acknowledge the rampant disease of trauma and begin to offer more specific help. Talking about it is a start. Just recognizing that 2/3rds of people in our congregations have some form of childhood trauma, and almost half have trauma from divorce in adulthood. Of course, people have also experienced accidents, cancer, sexual harassment, the death of a loved one, or even the death of a child. We have to encourage honest self-reflection, not just on our sin but also on the wounds we have received from others while in our most vulnerable states.