Tag: trauma

Praying for the Death of our Enemies

When an evil leader destroys countless innocent people, does Christian ethics allow me to pray for their death?

If I strive to love my neighbor as I love myself, is it ever right to pray for the death of an enemy?

As we bear distant witness to the continuing outrageous war that Vladimir Putin wages against the people of Ukraine, I’ve been thinking about the power of destruction and death that one person can control. The unprovoked war is approaching its first-year anniversary, and Putin’s military continues to ruin the nation, leveling so much to rubble. Schools, apartment buildings, power stations, airports, markets, train tracks, hospitals: all have been targets of Russian guns, bombs, missiles, and drone attacks aimed at killing civilians and demolishing infrastructure. Putin is hell-bent on destroying the very land he covets, and that seems like certain insanity.

He is the Destroyer. I keep praying that his own people would grow sick of him draining their resources to build weapons, rage against him conscripting their own young men to kill mothers, grandparents, and children in their name, and topple him from power. I seethe at the way the Russian Orthodox Church continually blesses the Putin regime and its leaders. He is a terror to the world, saying he is willing to launch nuclear weapons, and yet is afraid of his own inner circle.  Putin has become a singular threat to millions of exhausted, traumatized Ukrainian children who may not live to have a normal life. And still the Ukrainian people battle on, fighting the giant to their north who wants to destroy them. We send them money, weapons, food, as do European allies. And we watch.

I struggle with my hatred of a man I don’t know, whose behavior is so deadly to so many. He is just one man on a long list of megalomaniacal leaders throughout human history, consumed with their own importance, legacy, and dominance over others. But unlike the others, Putin controls a vast country historically tolerant of such power and he has innumerable weapons of mass destruction at his command. It’s a frightening combination.

I notice that each time this war comes to my mind, I pray for an end, and increasingly, I believe that end means Putin must die. No one seems able to end his ruinous rule, and while I pray for his victims, I pray for his death. I fool myself thinking that Jesus would understand. As a Jew under first century Roman occupation, Jesus grew up under an empire much like Russia’s. It was that same Roman empire that considered him a local threat. But my savior was willing to be killed by empire rather than meet force with force. His power was unfailingly one of love, the very model of the heart of God. It’s that power, the power of love, that I believe is what creates, enlivens, and enlightens the world.

I admit I still can’t puzzle this riddle out: what would Jesus say people of faith should do when faced with the unchecked evil of a dangerous dictator? This is the same question that Christians asked themselves during World War II when confronted with the reality of genocide by the Nazi German government. I have come to settle alongside the arguments, theology and ethics of a young Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He spent years working within his German Lutheran church to raise the alarm about the genocide, teaching, writing, traveling through Europe and finally to the United States, to gather support for the Allied resistance from our churches and our government. So many wanted him to remain in the US, safe from the war. But he returned.

And this young theologian returned to join a plot to assassinate Hitler. Yes, he wanted Hitler dead so many others could live. The plot failed, and in 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to prison, and then Flossenburg concentration camp. It was there where he was hanged on April 9th, 1945, just 3 weeks before the collapse of the Nazi regime and Hitler’s suicide.

Perhaps it is too broad a stroke to say that love compels the death of evil, but I think it does. It is love for the stranger, the vulnerable, the powerless, the innocent that compels us to forcefully resist evil human beings. History teaches repeatedly that evil is not some abstract force outside of us, some weird spiritual animated devil competing with God, tempting us to step outside God’s path. Evil is human power turned inward, consumed by the self, feeding on hatred, aggression, and power to destroy other living things. We see it in American school shootings, car jackings, domestic violence, child abuse, murders, domestic terrorism. We see it in Putin’s violence.

I think of these things when I pray in Jesus’ name. For the end of Putin’s power, one way or another. For evil to be cast down. For war and violence everywhere to end, for love to win, for justice to be for all living things. For God’s kingdom to come. God help me.

(Published in MN SW Media / Savage Pacer 1/28/23)

Gender Control & Body Shame: The Purity Movement

Nothing makes me sadder than the way a part of the Christian family, the conservative evangelical community, has shamed women for their gender, leadership and sexuality. In the 1990’s, a bizarre, controlling movement spread in churches to have young women be told that sexual purity was their responsibility alone;  that young men were so weak that they couldn’t control their sex drive. Girls were trained to pledge their “purity” until marriage at the cost of their integrity and sense of self. Girls were indoctrinated to such a degree that their sexual expression was wrapped in shame, guilt and fear to traumatic degree.

I hope that any woman for whom this story is a personal one will seek care with a good, skilled mental health therapist who has religious training and deep background. I work with such women.

Want to learn more about the way women have been shamed and controlled by this movement? Listen to this recent Fresh Air broadcast in which Teri Gross interviews the author of the new book, “Pure.” https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/09/18/649070416?showDate=2018-09-18

 

Video You Should NOT Be Watching

Smart cellphones are everywhere, and ever since the advent of very high definition small lenses and amazing software, so are self-made video clips. Everything from stupid pet tricks to police high speed chases are there on YouTube, FaceBook, Instagram and any number of other social and media platforms.

But just because they are watch-able, doesn’t mean you should be watching them.

Today on the Minneapolis StarTribune website was posted a caught-on-tape — from one lane over — a high speed rear-end collision of a heavy dump truck hitting a line of cars stopped at a light in my neck of the cities. Now: I am, like many adults, the victim of a violent car crash, caused by a drunk driver. It was, in fact, the central trauma of my young life and while I have found significant healing from its effects, that event reshaped my life in profound ways. I have never expected driving to be perfectly safe. I worry about car accidents while trying each day to be a relaxed driver. I have to mentally work to trust that my family can make it home safely from the roads every day.

I saw that video come up on the site today. And though a part of me was curious, along with over half a million other viewers of the video were, I knew that another part of me would be re-traumatized seeing that clip. (And I bet you expected me to post a link to that very video: Nope, I’m not going to.) A great deal of traumatic experience is processed through our eyes and into our bodies in an instant. To run that clip was to reinforce a part of my brain I have worked so hard to heal. It is not worth days of increased anxiety, hyper-vigilance, or plain worry just as our young adult daughter starts her new job she has to drive to in St. Paul. So I didn’t watch. That was a choice of good self care.

I know that today, 9/11, there are those that are remembering by watching those twin towers fall again and again. Or recalling the heroes aboard the flight that crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania instead of Washington, DC. You don’t need to re-watch the video of that awful day to be a proud American.

Are there experiences in your life that have caused serious harm to you or loved ones that arise in videos, TV series or films? Pay attention. You may not need to participate in those visual experiences, even though they are many steps removed from you. Your emotional system has a life-long memory, and awakening the dragons of our past isn’t always the best medicine. As the old bible camp song goes, “Be careful little eyes what you see….”

 

Biblical Literalism is the Disaster

September came hard as massive hurricanes slammed into our nation’s Gulf coast. Like many, I found myself completely distracted and immersed in the round-the-clock news coverage of the damage. When it comes to bearing witness to destruction, we seem unable to look away. While the information does soothe our need to know and connect with important people and places in our lives, too much information can damage our emotional balance. We must turn and turn again to the present of our own life, and help as we can with donated blood, money and specific resources to relief agencies. This is how communities recover; this is how we can help.

Yet we are meaning-making beings. We naturally tell stories of what happens in the world so we might order and understand what can feel like chaotic circumstances. Some of those stories involve theology, or talking about God. Preachers pounding out prayers, sermons, articles and social media comments, as they do. Believers repeating them. And some of these God stories make me sad and upset.

Despite centuries of passionate and careful study of the Biblical texts by both Jewish and Christian scholars, research that helps readers understand how this big library of old stories, poems, hymns, histories, letters and Jesus narratives is put together into a single volume, there are still those who read the Bible as if it were dictated word for word by Jesus himself to a single scribe somewhere. They pull verses and stories out of their original context, ignore the subtleties of language, form, history, and culture and proclaim the words as current truths about God.

This literalism has led one strain of popular theology to declare that hurricanes, earthquakes and destruction of land and people as evidence God’s wrath. This way of reading scripture has harmed untold numbers of people who have sought comfort, direction and help from God in times of disaster. This perspective takes as a starting point the way that the people of Israel, over 3,500 years ago, made sense of their own suffering.

The Jewish people are descendants of a tribe of people who believed they were God’s chosen nation. The only way those ancient people could reconcile that closeness to God and their suffering was to tell the story that both good and evil come from God. That included natural disasters, physical and mental disease, and war with neighboring tribes. Suffering? That must be God’s punishment. It made sense three millennia ago. It makes no sense now.

Jesus came fifteen centuries later and challenged that older way of thinking. If you read through the different versions of his story in the New Testament, you will read how he frequently challenged that theology. In several healing stories, people wanted Jesus to tell them who was to blame for someone’s suffering: a tower fell and killed several men; a child was born blind; a man was lame from birth. Part of his healing ritual was to tell the suffering that not only were their sins forgiven – the old way of thinking – but to “get up and walk.” There are dozens of these stories of Jesus’ compassion and healing, most of whom he heals without a judgmental word; just a command, and a touch.

Christians can disagree about much, but to continue to use meaning making from 3,500 years ago to talk about contemporary disasters and suffering is irresponsible and useless. Historic storms? They are a result of our complex dynamic atmosphere, now threatened by human environmental pollution and ocean warming. Earthquakes? Science has long ago discovered the massive pressures of our earth’s crust’s plates moving over time. These are scientific stories of meaning we can trust.

Is God our creator? Oh yes. But to assume that God’s action in the world is toward destruction is to fail to look at Jesus. Jesus’ life and death was a song of praise to a God of love and mercy, of healing and hope, of struggle for the sake of this difficult human family. If you’re hearing anything else from your church or religious media in these difficult days of natural disasters, wars and rumors of war, you’re not hearing the Good News.

 

(Published first in the Savage PACER 9.16.2017)

13 Reasons Why NOT

13 Reasons Why is a video series available on Netflix. If you’ve been told you NEED to watch this drama in order to understand teens now, I want to argue the opposite. I don’t believe that watching this series is necessary in order to understand teen cultures. Many viewers make this series sound as if it is presented as a documentary; it is not. It is a sensationalized, emotionally wrought fictional presentation of hours and hours of teen suffering and feels voyeuristic in its brutal and graphic portrayal of suicide. I managed to watch about 15 seconds of that scene and was so repulsed I turned it off.

Fictional, video streaming accounts of high school are not the way that our youth  their own experience their lives. Parts of it, yes. Intense, highly edited with a powerful sound track? No. What this series does, I’m afraid, is double down on the visual trauma our youth are exposed to regularly. And we wonder why they are anxious, depressed, afraid and suicidal in greater and greater numbers?

If parents or counselors are curious, then watch a half hour or so. You won’t need any more exposure than that. I suggest it is completely unsuited for anyone, never mind teens. Watchers of any age are participating in reinforcing trauma. As a pastoral counselor and family therapist, I see the effects of too much trauma exposure daily. It’s very difficult to heal.

Racism and Trauma

For decades, family therapists and other mental health professionals and researchers have believed that trauma in one generation can be expressed in the genetic code and passed as psychological suffering and vulnerability in following generations. This fact has been demonstrated in animal studies for years, but few human trials have followed.

A research team at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, studying the DNA and mental health of survivors of World War II Nazi atrocities and their children, have newly demonstrated genetic changes in the children of these survivors. The Guardian article of August 21, 2015 describes the changes in a specific gene sequence associated with the regulation of stress hormones. What therapists have seen in their practices has begun to be proven in the laboratory: when emotional and mental trauma happens to us in our early life, it can change our genes, and those changes can be passed down to our children.

It helps to explain the increased mental health issues in children of Holocaust survivors, victims of political terror, accidental trauma, severe poverty, famine and the progeny of African slaves in the United States. This “epigenetic inheritance” can linger for generations and effect the culture, as it has done in the Jewish communities around the world after 1945.

The continuing hurt, vulnerability, anger and rage expressed in Native American tribes and African American communities in the United States against the majority white population can be understood as both cry for justice in the present, and a echo of generational trauma that was endured for nearly 300 years on our nation’s shores.

We have a responsibility as a nation to be struggling to heal the racial injustice and majority privilege that still stains our daily interactions. And therapists need to recognize the layers of trauma that their clients of color may bring to their offices, seeking healing for individual pain that may have been generations in the making.

UPDATE: Here is the link to the mouse study with traumatic epigenetic changes in following generations : Nature Neuroscience, Volume 17, Number 1, January 2014:
https://tinyurl.com/y7zblcwe

Trauma leaves its mark on immune system genes – health – 06 May 2010 – New Scientist

I have often thought that trauma changes the body’s response to the environment.This research confirms my personal experience that PTSD can predispose one for cancer, particularly those of the lymph system, the body’s center of immunity.

My continuing hope is that future discoveries can lead sufferers to more rapid resolution of PTSD symptoms, and thereby saving their body from expressing DNA changes.

Trauma leaves its mark on immune system genes – health – 06 May 2010 – New Scientist

Helplessness = Trauma

I have been thinking about my, and our, experience of helplessness in the face of the Gulf oil disaster. About what it feels like in our bodies to be continuously exposed to experiences in the world that we can’t control but which have large, perhaps even life changing effects on our lives.

In the last 50 years or so, psychology as a science has become increasingly wise about experiences that wound the soul. The kind of happenings that lock up a part of our brains, quite literally, from easy connection to the rest of our inner experience and cause us to emotionally get stuck in the memory. We call these experiences traumas. Trauma with a capital T.

In the current mental health definition of post-traumatic stress syndrome, a person witnesses or experiences something life-threatening, shocking, and horrific, but with one key experiential ingredient : they feel powerless.

Powerlessness is what seems to turn a terrible experience into a Trauma; the inability to respond. Being able to do something in the midst of a rape, or fire, shooting or car accident seems to be the way that human beings help themselves mentally manage the horrors of life.

In all of human history, with the exception of the last decade, the way that human beings were exposed to the darkest part of life was that they lived it. Civil war, tornado, forest fire, genocide, death in childbirth were all experiences limited to the people who lived them in the Now. The average person may have heard about a battlefield massacre hundreds of miles off weeks after it was all done; the sinking of the Titanic days after the ship sat at the bottom of the ocean. The physical distance and the oral or written account were buffers from the sense of immediacy of pain. And while illness, death, disease, and war came very close to everyone, the human struggle had a local feel.

I am concerned for us in the age of constant media exposure. Not only do we hear about the devastation of Haiti or Guatemala after earthquake, we are taken there by professional as well as citizen video, blog, radio, television and internet streams. Rivers of emotional information, rushing at us day and night, eliciting in most of us sense of chronic helplessness. We are being exposed to suffering not in the scale of a single lifespan, but on a world-wide scale, a level most of us can’t possible sustain. And the only way that most of us have of being less helpless, of sending money, is a weak antidote to the larger emotional burden the river of news places on us.

When we watch the oil wash up on the unique marshlands at the mouth of the Mississippi, or see a dead dolphin or pelican laying on the beaches of northern Florida, we layer yet another experience of helplessness on our brains. Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq. Over and over. It’s trauma, with a small t.

Will we all become a species so accustomed to the experience that we will adopt what is called a “learned helplessness,” where sooner or later nothing moves us any more, and we emotionally disconnect from the needs and suffering of others?

What do you do to limit the exposure you and your family have to trauma you can’t fix, suffering you can’t stop, horror you can’t control? How can you spare yourself and your children from emotional wounds of trauma caused by round-the-clock media?

Helplessness & Haiti

It’s been over two weeks since the earthquake devastated the people of Haiti.

Tens of thousands have died, including people you may know. And along with a desire to help, and a deepening sense of helplessness as we watch that impoverish nation respond, I am struck by a familiar conflict, or perhaps it is an observation about human life.

I continue to wonder how my life can go on in its normal way while massive, untold despair, suffering and death occurs around me. It’s the same experience those who suffer grief describe: how does the world continue on its way while my life seems to have stopped?

I struggle with a low-grade angst; not a guilt exactly, but close to it. As if I have witnessed a massive car crash from the safety of my own vehicle and go careening by, with just a glance in my rear view mirror. I continue on, glad it wasn’t me in that car, confident someone more capable is responding.

I believe this soft anguish reflects this existential truth: we are single human beings. We are separate from one another at birth, and will die that way. In between, we live daily life as multiple connections. When connections are broken, by suffering we cannot solve, or death we cannot stop, we are brought up short by the truth of our singleness of self.

What is grief but the crashing in of this solitude, and the choice to risk connecting again?

Kyrie eleison.    Lord, have mercy.

Secondary Trauma

Lord, have mercy.

We have endured another mass shooting in our nation, this time on a military base. It will take time to sort out the details of this horrible crime, but we are impatient to know: was this an act of terrorism? The shooter is a Muslim, and some have reported that he shouted to Allah as he fired his weapons. There will be a good deal to learn of this man in the weeks ahead.

Of great interest to me: he is a psychiatrist who worked with soldiers suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Mental health professionals of all kinds who regularly work with trauma survivors often find that hour after hour of listening to people recount horror is traumatizing. Without regular and systematic debriefing of their own work, therapists lose their own resilience and begin to suffer a secondary PTSD. They begin to show symptoms of chronic anxiety, restlessness, easy startle reflex, difficulty sleeping, intrusive images of trauma, and hypervigilance in the same way soldiers returning from battle can.

I wonder if this doctor, whose healing work helped soldiers return to their lives after battle, was waging a private battle of his own with nightmares, fears and overwhelming anxiety. Would he have been able or willing to share that suffering with others in the military? How are these fears linked to his natural anxieties about being deployed to the battle zone? Are there systems in place to have therapists working in PTSD debrief and consult with others about their cases and experiences?

Helping others recover mental health is not work for the faint of heart and mind. The very best healers understand that they are naturally effected by what they hear, and need help for their own pain. Perhaps this tragedy will highlight the continuing true costs of war: that the horrors of destroying others in battle don’t stop at a nation’s border. War is hell, and it exacts a toll far wider than we can imagine.

Oh God: hear our prayer.