The Stuck Spots of Spiritual Trauma: Introduction

When I released my memoir, Me Among the Stars, the week of Elliot’s birthday this past May, I felt like some part of the grief and trauma journey was completed. The death of my son forever altered me, and I spent the first six years of aftershock recovering from grief, loss, and some post-traumatic stress. The parallel loss and renewal of faith brought about a new awareness of life for me, but at the cost of many, many inner deaths. Publishing the story was an important mourning ritual. I hold that book, and I hold in my hands the precious life of my son and the unrelenting gravity of a God who didn’t let me float away, even as I railed and kicked against him. 

With the death of my son incorporated into my life story, Jesus has brought me to a precipice of a related but different journey that will likely take the rest of my life. The image I had created of him was ground to dust when Elliot died. He didn’t leave me; there simply was no framework to see him like I once did. Gradually, I’ve come to see his face again, but in many ways, I am still stuck. I am stuck on how to define, live out, and share my faith. I have faith in Jesus, but I could not explain to you what that means as I once could. This doesn’t discourage or frighten me. But it is worth exploring.

Many people of faith get stuck. An event or series of events alters everything they thought to be true, and it can seem there is no way through. This is the point at which some people leave their faith. But I think the way through is to face it, to hold Jesus’ hand and walk together head-on into all those stuck spots. For me, they’re not problems to be solved; they are more like paths to be followed. 

I have many stuck spots of spiritual trauma. Maintaining joy and hope in light of the suffering in the world; the nature of the Bible and how God means for us to use it; the real meaning of prayer and what we should expect from it–these are just a few of my stuck spots!  But in the following three blog posts, I will take time to observe the three stuck spots I wrestle with currently: hearing God’s voice, engaging with the Christian community, and sharing the gospel. 

But first, I want to explain what I mean by spiritual trauma. The topic of “deconstructing” faith is trendy these days. I’ve seen workshops offered on Facebook ads with titles like “Healing from religious trauma.” Many books, blogs, and podcasts share the experiences of individuals, usually Christians (but I’ve read accounts from other religions), who had negative experiences in church, felt brainwashed and controlled and then left that environment and usually their religion too. They refer to their experiences as “religious trauma,” which it might have been. 

But the intellectual deconstruction of the Christian faith that has led many to proclaim their DISbelief in everything Christian is another topic. I’m not necessarily talking about being raised in a legalistic church that left a bad taste in your mouth for religion. I’m not referring to the experience of some friends of mine who now call themselves agnostic or atheist because their negative experiences with Christianity caused them to lump Jesus into their pain. These experiences are real and deserve to be discussed, but that is not the scope of my current topic. 

When I speak of spiritual trauma, I’m referring to an incident or series of incidents that made God himself experientially the perpetrator of pain. Or if not the perpetrator of pain, at least someone who did not protect from harm. I say experientially because the reality may be different than the experience. However, as finite beings living in one place and time, inhabiting one body and one consciousness, reality and experience are equal, at least at the moment. Time can give a bigger picture and a broader perspective. But at the moment of trauma, the experience IS reality.

When Elliot first died, I absolutely felt that God himself had tricked me, lied to me, and done the very thing he promised not to do. I hated him. I had felt him so strongly leading up to Elliot’s death that to jump to disbelieving in him seemed unrealistic. Perhaps maintaining a belief in God was vital for me as a bereaved parent because I had to believe my Elliot was somewhere. Additionally, the evidence for a Creator so vastly outweighs evidence to the contrary that I’ve never been able to take the claims of atheism seriously. So, the only thing I was left with was what St. John of the Cross first termed “the dark night of the soul.” 

In my work developing courses for foster parents, I read and research many sources in order to best develop content that helps foster parents lovingly come alongside children who’ve endured nightmarish trauma. Recently, the following description of trauma in one of my sources caught my attention:

From Help for Billy by Heather Forbes:

“Childhood trauma happens at both the emotional and psychological level, and it becomes defined by the child’s perception of the event. Any situation or event that leaves a child feeling overwhelmed and alone needs to be considered trauma.” 

Trauma IS a person’s experience of it, not necessarily the event itself.

Using this quote from Forbes against a backdrop of spiritual inner experiences is not meant in any way to compare my experience with or to minimize the unthinkable events and effects of abuse and trauma on children. I have led a charmed life of interesting experiences, a relatively full wallet, a full belly, and safe relationships. Children and adults who’ve experienced and witnessed violence, deprivation of their physical and emotional needs, have been sexually, physically, and verbally abused have endured trauma both in perception and in reality. Those victims deserve every resource of love and safety to slowly walk on the road of healing, and some wounds can’t be fully healed on this side of eternity. I do not compare my inner spiritual trauma with their lived trauma. 

Rather, I want to shed light and validation on the inner child who is wounded in those who’ve endured spiritual trauma. Christian responses to spiritual trauma tend to be set in certainty. Well-meaning fixes like, But God never left you! Just read it in the Bible! do not always help, and sometimes harm. The Christian community has swept spiritual trauma under the rug, perhaps with the best of intentions or simply a lack of understanding. 

If the perceived perpetrator of traumatic events is God, then we can’t call it anything other than what it is. It is trauma to the soul. The tools of healing must be in the same realm as we would treat any other type of trauma: time, relationship, and safety. 

I consider myself unthinkably lucky to have had the luxury of time in my healing process. My husband, my parents and parents-in-law, sisters and brothers, and dear friends have encouraged and supported me to take time to be with my son at the cemetery, hole up in my room to cry, take my laptop to coffee shops to write out the whirlwind of lament inside me. Because of the sacrifice of others, I’ve had time.

I’ve had relationship. I know it’s hard to know what to say when someone you love has lost a child. It’s perhaps harder to know what to say when that someone has also lost their faith. There’s such a desire to help, to fix, to mend! But the best mending is a simple, steadfast presence, not any formula. I reflect on the past six years, and I see all the faces of friends and family who’ve simply been there. 

The last ingredient on the slow road of healing has sometimes been more difficult to find, and this may be at the root of my stuck spots. Safety. 

I felt so incredibly safe in God‘s promises to me. I felt held and cradled while I cradled Elliot in my womb. With every scare, every toilet filled with blood, every emergency in the hospital where the nurses and doctors came running, every question in my mind as to what life with Elliot would be like, there was nothing but a sweet reassurance from my heavenly father.

Then, one unthinkable moment came: the moment that my fighter of a son could not fight any longer, all the safety turned to powerlessness, hopelessness, and frantic panic. The panic seeped inside me toward my center because I had no one to run from, no one to run to, and I could do nothing.

Heather Forbes says that trauma is compounded when the victim of trauma feels trapped, powerless, forgotten, abandoned, helpless, or hopeless. I felt all those things, but all of it in relation to God. 

So perhaps this is why stuck spots of spiritual trauma remain. I have had time, I have had relationships, but the experiential attack that left me so helpless still leaves me feeling unsafe, if I’m honest. I think this is where it’s hard to continue moving forward for anyone who has been traumatized within your soul. If we once felt safe with God before, and that safety was pulled out from under us, how and why should we trust and feel safe again?

I will not attempt to answer that question. This series of articles is simply an observation of my own stuck spots on the long road after spiritual trauma. I once felt like an aberration, the classic Enneagram Four who thinks she’s so unique no one can understand her!

Well, perhaps the prophet Jeremiah was a Four as well because, in the book of Lamentations, he recounts the wide range of rolling thoughts and emotions that surround his experiential trauma from God. Listen to Jeremiah’s words in Lamentations 2:5:

“The Lord has become like an enemy.”

This, this is it. I’m trying to explain it for those who have not experienced spiritual trauma and trying to validate it for those who have. It is more than doubting God’s plan or existence. It’s more than disillusionment with organized religion. It is more than struggling with unanswered prayer. It is more than a season of spiritual dryness.

It is the experiential reversal of who God is. The God, who was the most trustworthy ally, suddenly becomes like an enemy.

Now, why would God, in all his wisdom, have allowed the ages of the shaping of the Bible to include this sad book of lament and human blame toward himself? I believe it’s because he knew we’d need it. He knew that living in this life, trying to wrap our small understanding around his incomprehensible nature, would leave many of us at a crossroads of inner spiritual darkness. Perhaps it is not feeling that God is like an enemy, but in some ways feeling void of his presence or doubting all the spiritual truths you’ve been taught at church. I think God knew we’d face these kinds of crossroads in our lives. I think he wanted us to know that our faith is not failing at these moments. We are not aberrations, as I once felt. We are in the good company of Jeremiah, of David, of Jonah, of Thomas. 

Unfortunately, Christians tend to feel awkward with negative feelings or lack of feeling toward God. Our churches are rightly places of celebration, victory, and hope. We need these beautiful reminders in order to push forward through the struggles in life! Yet, we can’t celebrate at the expense of someone who is mourning. We can’t shout victory at the expense of someone who has lost everything. We can’t proclaim hope at the expense of someone who feels hopeless.

Sadly, there are believers who’ve walked away from the Christian community and keep their faith in guarded, private spaces, never to step foot in a place of Christian fellowship again. Others have lumped all their faith in with their spiritual trauma and turned a corner away from Christianity at all. I really believe part of these effects are due to a misguided association of dark seasons of faith with sin or theological error. 

Think of it this way. Most of us who are parents can look at the “problems” our children encounter and know, from our older and wiser perspective, that their problems are fleeting and relatively minor. If one of my daughters bemoans the fact that her former best friend is now best friends with someone else, I might be tempted to minimize her pain with fluffy words like, “Oh, then you don’t need her for a friend anyway,” or, “You will make a new friend!”

But to my daughter, this is a dark, dark season. She can’t look ahead five or ten years. She can’t have any perspective other than what she has. So, as a loving parent, I meet her where she’s at, cradling her in her aching, not promising far-off somedays but joining her in the hard moments of the present. 

Perhaps if, as believers, as churches, as followers of Jesus, we just sat down by Jonah under his wilted bush, where the sun beats down on him, and he wants to die, maybe he would find the strength to stand up and take courage. I know when people have just listened to me or just sat with me, I have found more strength than when they try to fix me.

So, along with sharing my own stuck spots, I would like to hear yours. I want to listen. I hope to create a space for other sojourners to share when they’ve endured spiritual trauma/the dark night of the soul. I would love to hear and sit with you in the ways you moved through it, as well as the spots where you are still stuck. I would love to know what happened to you, what event or series of events occurred in your story, and where you’re at in your story today. I think if we continue to share and sit with one another, we can fight the darkness and find light again. The light of Jesus is there, even in the dark, but it’s easier to see when we are together. 

In this article and in the following three, you’ll see a space to comment directly to me in response to some questions about your experience. Please note if I can use your words and a pseudonym in any articles or other future publications. I can’t wait to listen to your story.

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In the form below, I would love to hear about your experiences. A message you leave in this form is private and will only be seen by me; it is not public or visible anywhere else. Please note that I may use your words in other articles and/or books, with a pseudonym. By commenting, you are granting permission for such usage. I may also contact you to ask follow-up questions.

Question: What event or events happened to you that left you feeling like Jeremiah: “The Lord has become like an enemy.”? Or, if not an “enemy”, per se, that God was absent, distant, or altogether different than how you’d previously perceived him? If you’d like, share where you are at in the long road after spiritual trauma.