By Bob Luidens, Congregational Care & Health Ministry member
Many if not most of us are experiencing significant stress and trauma at this time. That unarguable reality requires us, I believe, to ask how the stress and trauma are affecting us now and what their long-term impact may be well into the future. In that light, I have found myself reflecting on an exchange I had some years ago with Dr. Smith, a friend and former therapist of mine.
I was sitting in Dr. Smith’s office, having just spent more than an hour spelling out in gut-wrenching detail the immobilizing symptoms I had been experiencing for all too many weeks in the context of my ministerial responsibilities. Those symptoms included, among others, a degrading of my ability to stay focused, an increasing tendency to be overly reactive in relatively benign settings, and a nightly struggle to benefit from anything close to a deep sleep.
Feeling overwhelmed by these disorienting struggles, I had called Dr. Smith, a clinical psychologist who was also a fellow clergyperson. He saw me the next afternoon. During that first hour he listened carefully, gently inviting me to detail both what I had been experiencing in ministry, as well as how those experiences were taking their toll. Once I had spun out as much as I had energy to share with him, he quietly posed the question/statement: “You know, don’t you, Bob, that you have PTSD?”
My response, betraying how totally unprepared I was for his diagnostic suggestion, was to say, “I was born in Iraq, but I never served there.” I knew about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), given the realities of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. With increasing numbers of servicewomen and men returning from deployment in those besieged lands, PTSD was becoming more and more recognized as a widely occurring reality for tens of thousands of victims. I understood PTSD to be a mental and emotional disorder that is caused by the experience of trauma, such as inevitably occurs in warfare. In fact I had engaged in pastoral care with more than one individual who was battling the deteriorative effects of PTSD, including disturbing thoughts and feelings, mental and physical distress, and unsettling fight-or-flight hypersensitivity.
Now with Dr. Smith, I was confronted with a jarring declaration. In a calm but insistent manner, he explained to me that what I had just described to him in the previous hour demanded, in his estimation, an unarguable diagnosis of PTSD. When I responded that I had been born in Iraq (to missionary parents), but I had never served there (as if that were enough to negate his diagnosis), he made it clear that trauma of any number of variations has the capacity to give rise to the disorder in question.
Moreover, what Dr. Smith made crystal clear to me over the course of many subsequent sessions is that once one has PTSD, one always has PTSD. And he explained in plain language that in order to lessen the disorientation that accompanies PTSD, one should make appropriate effort to distance oneself—to the extent possible—from stressors, whatever those may be in one’s life circumstances. But, he noted, when—not if—new stressors assault the patient, s/he will inevitably begin once again to experience the symptoms of PTSD. That hard but plain truth has proved to be enormously helpful to me ever since. Whenever I have occasionally begun to re-experience PTSD-oriented symptoms, the recognition of those symptoms has helped me then to make choices either to distance myself, if possible, from the causative stressors, or at least to do that which might help to temper their impact on me. Absent that distancing or tempering, the PTSD will—and always will—immobilize me again.
Why the overly personal story detailed above? Well, I am increasingly wondering whether what we as a world, nation, state, community, church fellowship, families, and individuals are all experiencing at this point in time is significant trauma. Given the confluence of all that has been unfolding over just the past year alone—an uncontrolled pandemic, fractured political and social order, economic turmoil, a growing recognition of systemic injustices, educational routines upended, the loss of in-person fellowship—there are now, in my estimation, growing numbers of us who are experiencing trauma. Whether or not any of us may be facing desperate circumstances in our lives, few if any of us are escaping the fragmenting impact of stress. To the contrary, I sadly wonder whether many of us may find ourselves vulnerable to the life churning effects of these dynamics both now and moving forward, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.
If I am correct about this—and I admittedly hope I am not—there may be consequential factors that then must be taken into our personal and corporate consideration. If indeed many of us may well be victims of PTSD-related dynamics, then both our present and our future come into play. Today it may be enormously important for each of us to be attentive to the ways in which we may be experiencing the kinds of symptoms I detailed to my insightful therapist. Though we may likely display symptoms in different ways, it is important and beneficial to name our condition. Though admitting that one has PTSD-related dynamics does not banish the disorder, naming it enables one to make choices that will help one to thrive in spite of it. Doing so has been enormously helpful to me ever since my first conversation with Dr. Smith.
But beyond the present, there is the future for which to plan. I wonder whether the following scenario may lie just over our current horizon. Once the pandemic has been corralled by widespread vaccination, we will begin to return to more “normal” activities. We will join together for corporate worship, in-person schooling and workplace, attendance at concerts, backyard parties, and family reunions. And that will be wonderful! However… I wonder whether we may return to these and fail to do so with sober awareness that many of us are not well. My sincere worry is that our return may be superficially joy-filled and healthy, only to discover—if we’re attentive to our deeper realities—that things may not feel right. We may wonder why we are experiencing these undesirable symptoms while at the same time feeling so much joy. I believe it is important to acknowledge that one or another variant of PTSD is now our emotional and psychological reality, and may well carry over into our future.
My concern—actually, my hope—is that today we will do the necessary work of careful self-examination and awareness, so we will be able to do the restorative work of healing self-care that tomorrow will demand of us. I sincerely pray that we, especially within the community of the Body of Christ, can come to spiritual grips with our new reality. Failure to do so may yield a future that is as disorienting—disordering—as is the present.
I invite us each and all to engage the unsettling realities I’m wondering about above. I sincerely look forward to doing so with many of my Hope Church sisters and brothers moving forward. I believe we can, by God’s grace, move restoratively from the present into the future. I trust we can do so if and when we honestly acknowledge the trials of our current trauma, and then begin to explore the many and varied ways to make healthy choices—emotionally, spiritually, and physically.