VISANOTE Spirituality and Trauma

Trauma and Spirituality
Introduction for VisaNotes

1. INNATE SELF: (The Original Substance), interacts with the material world, i.e. the environment.

2. COVENANT OF IDEAS/BELIEFS/SOME KIND OF ORDERED SYSTEM.

a. Our ideas about ourselves are formed mostly through our interaction with the world (i.e. home, school, work, military, church, organizations.
b. They are formed gradually.
c. We believe that change occurs in a gradual incremental process. We operate under the illusion that an omnipotent force guarantees our invulnerabilities to sudden overwhelming change…BUT

3. TRAUMA is an abrupt, huge, violent change that shatters the illusion of invulnerability.

4. NEW IDEAS CREATE A BROKEN COVENANT. When trauma occurs our ideas about ourselves are disrupted and new ideas must be formed if we are to integrate the trauma.

5. ENVIRONMENTALLY BOUND. If new ideas are not integrated with the deeper feeling of a broken covenant, the new ideas will be environmentally bound and subject to further significant disruptions.

6. METAPHYSICAL GOAL: HOPE AND MEANING. The innate self is cognizant of a greater covenant. The greater covenant is the symbol of hope—that there is purpose and meaning regardless of the horror.

Chaplain OJ Di Iulio/Residential Trauma Stabilization Program (RSTP), (VAMHCS), Perry Point, MD

The question of suffering is not if we will suffer but when will we suffer? “In this life, we will suffer” (John 16:33). To begin our conversation on suffering I thought it best to look at a concise definition of the term by reformed theologian and author J. I. Packer.

“There is an umbrella-word that we use to cover the countless variety of situations that have this character, namely suffering. Suffering…may conveniently be defined as getting what you do not want while wanting what you do not get. This definition covers all forms of loss, hurt, pain, grief, and weakness–all experiences of rejection, injustice, disappointment, discouragement, frustration, and being the butt of others’ hatred, ridicule, cruelty, callousness, anger, and ill-treatment–plus all exposure to foul, sickening, and nightmarish things that make you want to scream, run, or even die…Ease is for heaven, not earth. Life on earth is fundamentally out of shape and out-of-order by reason of sin…So strains, pains, disappointments, traumas, and frustrations of all sorts await us in the future, just as they have overtaken us already in the past” Packer, Rediscovering Holiness, pp. 249, 254).

A Vietnam veteran diagnosed with PTSD recently shared with me his guilt feelings for killing. His worldview was a classic example of how many veterans blame the country, the government, or the weapon of choice (M-16) as justification for their actions. But these are the means by which a soldier facilitates the killing not the reasons for it. A person’s reason governs his choices and ultimately forms his worldview. Not the other way around. We are told in Romans 12:1-2 that one’s worldview is renewed (changed, shaped) by the Word of God. See more…VisaNote, The Addiction Tree, under resources.