Trauma & Biblical Counseling
Though it is nothing new, lately I have seen some social media battles concerning Trauma-based counseling vs Biblical Counseling. To get into all the particulars of the differences would take a book-length treatment. I want to offer a few introductory thoughts about this debate, seeing that over the past thirty-five years in pastoral ministry, I have had to wrestle with these issues in actual counseling situations.
Because these are introductory thoughts, I will oversimplify the debate so that both sides are upset with me. These are general characterizations of approaches that I have encountered, so many hostages will be left to fortune, as it is said.
Trauma-based counseling essentially sees everything negative that has happened to me as “trauma.” Because The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel Van Der Kolk), you are now hard-wired by your trauma so that you can’t help what you feel and do. For some, this also means that you are not morally responsible for the choices you make because “the trauma made me do it.”
Trauma-based counseling takes life events seriously. It also takes the fact that we are fully embodied creatures seriously. We are not merely brains stuck inside a body so that if we only get the right information, everything will be alright. However, trauma-based counseling often goes too far in relieving the victim of moral agency. They promise some type of relief, but not really redemption. Symptoms will be treated for the rest of your life, but you will always be defined somehow and in some way by your trauma. Furthermore, you never lose moral agency and are thus responsible for the choices you make. The sins you commit can’t be blamed on anyone but yourself, no matter how you have been traumatized in the past.
Enter the Biblical counselor. There are those in the biblical counseling world who, for all intents and purposes, minimize the effects of real trauma. What the victim needs to do is forgive the perpetrator and repent of any ill feelings toward him/her. Forgive and forget. Move on. That’s in the past. It can’t be undone. Get over it. It is easy for the victim to understand forgiveness as “get over it.”
Biblical counseling takes the need for forgiveness seriously. The Scriptures command that we forgive or we won’t be forgiven. We must not desire to take vengeance on our enemies, so we need to repent of any ill feelings. Our feelings don’t determine truth, so we need to do the right thing no matter how we feel. However, in what I have seen in some biblical counseling is that forgiveness, while a vital tool in the health of the victim, is the only tool used in the medical kit for the restoration to health of the victim. That is, the focus remains on the sin of the other person and only marginally on the needs of the victim’s healing.
(Have I made everyone upset with my generalizations?)
We have the ugly twin sisters of “Trauma is everything” and “Trauma is nothing;” “Feelings are everything” and “Feelings are nothing;” “Your past is everything” and “Your past is nothing.”
Dealing with the human soul (“psyche”) is not simple. Sometimes there are simple answers to some problems. Do this. Don’t do this. Easy as that. You need to get out of your comfort zone in your feelings and do the right thing. (I have some things to say about this in my soon-to-be-published book on the theme of discipline in Proverbs.) At other times, the problems are much more complex. When you are dealing with souls that have been damaged by deep evil, simple solutions won’t work. Dealing with a paper cut and a quadruple by-pass are not the same thing.
What is trauma? That’s a good question. I don’t want to define “trauma” specifically because there is a spectrum. I believe we need to deal with ourselves and others in terms of any events or relationships that shaped the way you feel and think about God, others, and the world around you in a distorted fashion that need to be corrected through the renewing of your mind (cf. Rom 12:2). I believe the Scriptures are sufficient for healing, but not by merely quoting verses or giving “fix it and forget it” type counsel.
Our minds need to be renewed. When we read “mind,” our thoughts go directly to thoughts. That is not wrong, but the mind is not merely the center of intellection. Renewing your mind is not only about sticking the right propositions in your head. Your mind is not your brain (though the two are closely associated). Scripturally, the mind is closely associated with the heart. The emphasis is on the way you think and why you think that way, but our thinking is not separate, for instance, from our emotions. Feelings/Emotions are a part of our thinking process and influence our decisions. Your mind incorporates your loves, desires, loyalties, and even “mental muscle memories.”
“Mental muscle memories” are like your body’s muscle memories. If you are learning to play golf, you want your muscles to remember the right swing pattern each time. As you practice that pattern over and over again, your body remembers. The mind does the same thing.
Our minds are trained in our relationships, how others speak and treat us, and vice versa. Just as we develop our language skills from being spoken to so that we can respond and relate, so words and actions train our minds in how to think and respond to relationships. We learn the “language” of relationships through our relationships, especially when we are children. Language is more than a series of sounds. Language is fundamental to a culture, a way of living with other people. The language we learn shapes the way we think and feel about God, others, and the world around us.
For example (and this isn’t trauma), if you had a brother who hit you in the back of the head every time he passed you, you would develop an expectation and prepare to defend yourself in some type of fight or flight way to respond. This is a playful example, but you are being trained by how your brother treats you. This relationship may translate into how you relate to others. You may always be nervous about people coming up on you from behind. This shapes the way you feel. You tense up because you think you are about to be swatted in the head. Other people probably have no intention of whacking you on the back of the head, but because you’ve been whacked on the head so much, you tend to expect it. Your feelings aren’t always in line with reality (though your brother’s actions may save you from being sucker punched by some thug. There is a bright side!) However, your feelings are real, and they have some justification.
When someone is sexually abused, physically beaten, yelled at, or berated, especially in childhood, their minds are trained to feel certain things in situations and believe that they should expect people to relate to them in the way their abuser did. They live with shame, guilt, anger, etc., ingrained in their minds. Their minds have been trained just as if they were learning to speak a language. This is what was “spoken” to them, so this is the language that they have learned to understand and speak.
If there is a perpetrator in the scenario, granting forgiveness is a necessary part of the healing. But when someone has been wounded deeply and “learned the language” of abuse, healing through the renewal of the mind takes time and effort. Healing from a rash, uncharacteristic, unkind word is not the same thing as healing from years of abuse. Sexual abuse, for example, wounds a soul in a way that is not even close to a person stealing five dollars from you. Sexual sin joins you to the other person in a soul-destroying way (1 Cor 6:16).
If in a fit of anger you slash a person with a knife, asking for forgiveness is necessary, but the wound needs attention and will take time to heal. So it is with serious sins.
Sins have different levels of gravity. Some cause much more damage than others. My bad attitude shouldn’t be equated in consequence to me physically abusing someone. Are they both sin and condemnable before God? Yes. Do they have the same effects? No. Restoration to heal will take time for the more serious sin. Deep wounds require more than an aspirin and a small bandage.
When dealing with different sins in the Law, God required different actions for different sins to achieve justice and, therefore, a peaceful relationship. Not every sin required the same act of restitution for forgiveness and reconciliation. (See Exodus 21–23.) This is, at least, a recognition that not all sins carry the same weight and, therefore, consequences.
Because many in our culture have made feelings the determiner of all truth, many in the biblical counseling world have gone to the opposite extreme and rejected the place of feelings/emotions. Feelings aren’t the final arbiter of truth, but our emotions are a God-given aspect of our being to which we should pay attention. Feelings are real, and they need to be dealt with, not dismissed. There are reasons people feel what they are feeling. This doesn’t mean that a person’s feelings are always justified in every situation. Nevertheless, they are real and need to be taken seriously. Once acknowledged, they then need to be anchored in reality. Not every person is your brother who hit you in the back of the head or the person who abused you. So, you don’t need to feel this way about yourself or everyone you encounter.
The shame, guilt, anger, and other feelings that come from sins committed against you, that spoke lies to you and taught you a language about who God is and who you are, need to be anchored in reality. God’s truth is reality. You need to learn his language. That person who abused you told you a lie through his/her actions. You need to be transformed by the renewing of your mind, appropriating God’s reality, his truth, to your feelings so that you can relate to him and others in a healthy manner.
Your parents’ divorce, your father saying what he said, your mother doing what she did, your family member doing that unspeakable thing to you told you a lie about God, yourself, and the world around you. The only way to healing is to believe God’s truth. You are not what that person said about you. You are what God says about you. You then live in that truth daily. God’s truth will heal your soul and “rewire” you. Your victimhood doesn’t define who you are. It is a lie. It should not define the rest of your life. The limit of your hope is not symptom management. Even though you can never change what happened, there is redemption. The process isn’t easy. Healing takes time. You don’t just “get over it.” However, you will be healed as you hear God’s words and learn his language.
Healing takes time and effort. Quite frankly, there are some who don’t want to do the long, difficult work for restoration. They are either quite comfortable in their victimhood and don’t want to change. (Though a poor name in my opinion, this is like the “battered wife syndrome” or “Stockholm syndrome.”) Then there are others who will live in denial that past has affected them and the way they relate to others. Still others won’t do the work because they are always looking for the quick fix. Healing, like the totality of our sanctification, takes time and effort; it’s like learning a whole new language and culture.
We can’t go to the extremes of our trauma being everything or our trauma being nothing. We can’t wallow in our trauma or forget about it and move on. We must recognize how we have been trained by it and be retrained—transformed by the renewing of our minds. We must recognize that our history and what is done in and to our bodies matter. However, our history doesn’t irrevocably determine our future. We can be changed. We can be healthy.
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