- Headline-Induced Anxiety? Don’t Despair! (9/20/16)
- Homelessness: Overcoming Individual and Community Pain (6/29/16)
- Conquer Fallout of Identity Theft (6/21/16)
- Breaking Free from Maternal Depression (5/12/16)
- Can We Feel -- and BE -- Safe from Crime? (4/15/16)
- Selflessness Repels Frailty and Aging (1/8/16)1
- Transforming Generation Stress to Generation Joy (9/22/15)
Ending Trauma's Emotional and Physical Pain
When my daughter and her college study-abroad group returned from Nepal just days before the first earthquake in April, I received many iterations of these questions: "Aren't you grateful they're home safe?" and "Can you imagine if they were there when it happened?" These questions spurred me to think deeply about the short- and long-term physical impacts -- on individuals, families, communities and environments -- of events that people find traumatic.
Even more, I can't help thinking about how the people affected can best be helped.
Certainly, money, supplies, expertise and person-power will continue to be essential. Additionally, following similar events in history, we've seen there can be deep and long-lasting emotional and mental scars to face...and that these can lead to physical pain. Psychology experts say trauma can cause people to feel paranoid or fearful of additional trauma, hopeless about the present and future, and isolated from other individuals and community. And, there's concern that these emotional and physical impacts may last a lifetime.
Yet, we often hear about people who not only rise above, but actually thrive, in the face of adversity.
And, finding ways to surmount these challenges is increasingly important. In the US alone, 70 percent of adults have experienced something officially classified as a traumatic event at least once in their lives, and 60 to 80 percent of those are expected to develop what's diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, according to www.healmyptsd.com.
So, how do we go about ending the long-term or life-long pains that can result from trauma? Psychology experts widely recognize that mental and physical relief, recovery and healing is possible, that it's better to identify and treat these needs sooner rather than later, and that incorporating spiritually-based solutions can play a powerful role.
In an interview with Sun Smith-Foret, a clinical therapist practicing in St. Louis, Missouri for more than 20 years, I learned about one approach that's working -- an approach focused on deep, meaningful changes in thought and expectation. Smith-Foret says, "The more experience I accumulate, the more I totally believe that healing can happen, even in the most severe situations."
That's exactly what Smith-Foret's patients experience. She says, "Many of the patients I work with are trying to overcome some kind of emotional trauma. A traumatized person, especially one gripped with shame, needs an atmosphere of trust, and a witness who is non-judgmental. Then they can feel true to themselves, less self-hating, and have mental space to heal. They often discover that their emotions have a stranglehold on them. But when they step away from persistent reenactment of the traumatic event or its aftermath, and stop being an ongoing participant in the emotions of fear, dread or hopelessness, their thinking and situation shifts. There's an end to emotional and physical pain."
Smith-Foret shared this example. "Recently, I worked with a woman who, many years later, was still dealing with the emotional effects of childhood sexual abuse, so much so that she'd been unable to hold down a job. By releasing a sense of emotional injury, shame, guilt, worthlessness, dread of the future, and futility in life -- ending an emotional battle -- she is now peaceful with her life, active in her religious practice, and serves as a caretaker for family members."
Thinking back on what psychologists typically label as a traumatic event in my own life, family and friends offered compassion, and helped me focus on the good already present in my life, as well as on positive expectations for the future. Some people surmised that I found new levels of personal inner strength. While psychological treatments often center around refocusing human thinking and finding new strength within ourselves, I felt inspired and propelled by a higher power than my own. I clung to this verse from Romans, "For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God...."
I also found inspiration from the example set by a woman who experienced more than her fair share of suffering and sorrow, and who's now considered by Smithsonian to be one of the 100 most significant people in U.S. history -- 19th century theologian Mary Baker Eddy. She says in her book Science and Health, "As human thought changes from one stage to another of conscious pain and painlessness, sorrow and joy, -- from fear to hope and from faith to understanding, -- the visible manifestation will at last be man governed by Soul [God], not by material sense [the human experience alone]."
Those ideas were and are the key for me. I trusted that nothing could ever separate me from God -- from His power, protection, care, goodness, compassion and love. So I couldn't allow myself to feel isolated from the people who loved me or the wonderful life around me. I didn't believe that God would bring both good and evil -- only good! -- and I chose not to be sentenced to a life of paranoia or hopelessness. As the Bible verse suggested, I consistently focused on joy rather than sorrow, and on hope more than fear -- knowing they came from a source more powerful, reliable and permanent than me or any person.
Any one of us can rise above -- and thrive -- in the face of adversity when we step away from being stuck in a trauma state of mind, and instead gravitate closer to the influence, protection and provision of the Divine.
Respond to this blog
Posting a comment requires a subscription.