Trauma Made Me Do It

Last night I laid in a hot bath, bergamot and lavender and baking soda forming swirls like the image of earth and clouds from space. I meant to stay in just a few minutes but then Nate came in and read me, Poem Beginning & Ending With My Birth from the latest Poetry Magazine, and so I stayed six pages of poetry worth, which is better than a few minutes.

I’ve been inexplicably tired the past week, though a friend says, “Not inexplicably because you just released a book.” But, if I’m honest, the tiredness has been there for weeks, months, years. I remember with pinpoint accuracy when it began and hasn’t stopped. September 2015. The gamut of pain coming at us full throttle, irrevocably changing the chemistry of our bodies. Job security. Public safety. Church love. Social community. Friendship with my own body. Financial security. All of it gone in an instant. Five years later I keep testing to see if any of it has come back and it hasn’t, not really. I sometimes wonder: will I ever feel safe in my car again? Will I ever feel safe in church again? Will I ever find friendship with my body again? Will I ever have the kind of community I had before again? Can I go back? What would I have done differently? Everything? Nothing?

Writing a book essentially on the body did not make me more comfortable or content or empathetic toward my own. If anything, it has made me more inquisitive, curious, and not a little bit judgey toward my body. I am aware and awakened to how minute traumas affect cellular change in a way I wasn’t before. That sense of anxiety I carry with me walking into church for the past five years—that isn’t just my mind, that’s a real thing. That panic I feel at at stoplight now, actively telling myself I don’t need to lock my doors because I live in Flower Mound, Texas, one of the safest cities in America and not Denver anymore—that isn’t something I made up. The sense of dread I feel every time a period is late, the fear I feel toward the pregnancy tests we keep buying just in case—there’s something real going on inside me still, even if it isn’t a baby. The fear that even though we are both hard-working, resourceful, and successful workers, we will find ourselves destitute, 100k in the hole—I’m not making that up, that happened once and could happen again.

I mute words, phrases, whole accounts on social media, even seemingly harmless ones because even the mention of certain words causes elevated levels of fear. And fear is not a commodity I have the energy to endure these days. My capacity for fear used to be nearly boundless, I would risk without thought for cost. Not anymore. I count every cost, make mental spreadsheets of them, store them on the hard drive of my body where they keep reminding me not to trust people and church and leaders and politicians and friends and jobs and ideas and theology and family and a whole host of other entities, including, sometimes, God.

The old me (pre-five years ago) would have said, “Well you shouldn’t trust those things anyway, God is the only one you can trust.” But I realize now that wasn’t theological (even if it is), it was a protective armor I’d learned to put on because everyone I found trustworthy failed to be so. I learned this at ten and 15 and 25 and 30 and 35. You probably did too. Most of us do.

And when we do learn it, we begin to craft theology, best practice, leadership skills, discipleship methods, and ways of being that are formed more by the story we’ve lived than by the story God wants for us to live. We put ten-thousand boundaries in place of what it looks like to be a “Man of God,” a “Woman of God,” a wife, a husband, a friend, a teacher, a preacher, a leader, so we can clearly delineate who’s in and who’s out. I’ve done this. Good Lord, I’ve done this.

In Chapter Nine of Handle With Care I wrote,

In the past few years, as I’ve begun to understand the far-reaching effects of trauma on our bodies, I’ve simultaneously begun to accept God’s grace for the wayward slap [I gave my younger brother]. The point is: it wasn’t wayward. It wasn’t an anomaly. It was a physical response to an impossible situation in which both my brother and I were traumatized by the loss of our brother. Andrew’s death felt meaningless and intangible. He was there, robust, tall, full of life on a rainy April morning at 9am and then he just wasn’t on the same rainy April morning at 9:07am, his body lying in the middle of wet, black pavement just to the left of the yellow dotted lines. There is nothing to hold onto in the aftermath of a grief and instability like that; I suppose you have to touch what you can. I think, in hindsight—and not at all to excuse my sin of harming my brother—what I really wanted was to care about something real. Danny. The dog. I wanted to solidify something that was anything but firm and sure. I was touching what I could (albeit sinfully), and in that moment, it was the cheek of my other still-living brother.

Bessel Van Der Kolk talks about this. He mentioned once that simple and foundational things that our bodies always do—things eating and releasing toxins and using the bathroom—are all things that “go wrong when you get traumatized. The most elementary bodily functions go awry when you are terrified. So trauma treatment starts at the foundation of a body that can sleep, a body that can rest, a body that feels safe, a body that can move [sic].”In the wake of trauma, our bodies misfire, mis-function, and mis-move. Over the years, I’ve come to see that the slap my body reflexively generated was a moment of both great sin and great suffering happening at the same time. 

Great sin and great suffering. Great sin and great suffering. Reminding myself of this helps me to look at the past five years, past ten years, past twenty, and, on a good day, the next twenty, and know there have been and will be ten-thousand things born of great sin and great suffering. The sum total of all the traumatic things in my life (sexual abuse at a young age, a paranoid and angry father, a scared and controlling mother, the death of my brother, the divorce of my parents, being forced to testify in court against one of them, more and more, on through the events of the past five years), is borne on this body, the one I have now, and I am doing my best to sort through it with eyes of faith and gentle hands and empathy for its story.

When I was in my early twenties I knew a person who made a sacrifice, one which honored their family. I was standing nearby and overheard a respected leader say to this person, “What an honorable and obedient person,” and to their parents, “You must be so proud.” I wept in my bed that night because only a few nights earlier I’d been handed papers by a stranger who said the words, “You’ve been served,” and I was to show up in a court soon, to do the opposite of honor my parents. My life looked nothing like my friend’s. They slept secure each night, in a warm and ample home, where their finances were cared for and their siblings alive and their parents still married and their body still all theirs. Obedient? I thought. Honorable? I wept.

I didn’t understand that they had traumas too. That a paper-cut could be just as painful as an amputation to one who had never felt pain or loss like this before.

I always think about the words of Paul to the Galatians when I think about trauma these days: “From now on, let no one cause me trouble, because I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.” I don’t know exactly what Paul meant here, but the Message envisions it like this: “Quite frankly, I don’t want to be bothered anymore by these disputes. I have far more important things to do—the serious living of this faith. I bear in my body scars from my service to Jesus,” and it makes me giggle a little bit, adds a bit of levity to the very seriousness of scars and the bodies which bear them.

“Leave me alone,” he's saying, “Stop bothering me with your petty arguments. My body has been irrevocably changed and marked by my commitment to keep living in a world in which I have been harmed and will be harmed. And I keep serving Jesus through it all.” Twitter would cancel Paul so fast if he was alive today and said that. Why? Because it sounds like an excuse. Trauma made me do it.

But trauma did make him do it. Most specifically, the body God gave him, and the world and environment in which he put him in, and the sufferings he endured—these all informed the words and actions Paul took. And because he was inspired by the Holy Spirit to write those words—I take a some comfort from that.

The Spirit is patient with our foibles and failures and fears and the things we just can’t endure just one day more, and comforts us in them. Our Father is understanding of our mistrust, our inability to believe he gives good gifts—he knows that about us. And our Savior is intricately acquainted with our grief, knows our sorrows, is a man of them. This doesn’t fix our trauma, any of it, but for me, it makes it a little easier to bear in this world.

I bear on my body the marks of doing my best to serve Christ, with the information I have at any given moment, informed though it is by my own suffering and the tiny glimpses of hope I sense swirling over the form of this messy earth. You do too. We all do too. And are we messing it up royally? Yes. And are we getting it right sometimes? Yes. Thank God, yes.