Trauma and Suffering

“After trauma the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don’t. People who have not shared the traumatic experience cannot be trusted, because they can’t understand it. Sadly, this often includes spouses, children, and coworkers” The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, (p. 18).

I recently came across an article that used this quote approvingly as the author recommended that Biblical counselors read this book. I haven’t read the book, but I have read the quote and I have a couple of thoughts about how meaningless and therefore how wrong it is.

First, who doesn’t know about trauma? Because people are sinful and because God made the world to be the way it is, everyone experiences trauma. It is all different. Of course, a two-year-old who can’t have his brother’s toy truck isn’t experiencing the kind or level of trauma that a two-year-old whose mother is a heroin addict and a prostitute. But that’s only because we’re looking at it from a different vantage point. The two-year-old who can’t have the truck thinks he is experiencing severe trauma (notice the tantrum and crying). And because it is “normal” the other child may not think anything is askew at all. The point is that our sinfulness makes every event that doesn’t go our way, into a traumatic event. And, the world is hard. Everyone knows about and experiences trauma.

Then, the sentence that says, “People who have not shared the traumatic experience cannot be trusted, because they can’t understand it,” makes a bold statement that we’re all apparently supposed to believe and go on with. Of course, the book might actually explain it, even in great detail, but on the face of it it is expressing a lie. People don’t need to understand what someone else has gone through in order to be trusted. Where does that come from? That’s crazy.

It is true that no one can understand what I’ve gone through, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be trusted. This whole conversation is headed in a bad direction.

I’m pretty sure, based on the title of the book that the author is trying to help us to help other people. But no amount of talking will cause us to “understand” what someone else has gone through. And if understanding is the key to being trustworthy or (I assume) helpful, the no one can help, book or no book.

Here’s the thing. We are called to give others comfort (2 Cor 1:3-4), to guide them (Col 3:16), to restore them (Gal 6:1), to lead them (Col 3:16), encourage them (1 Thess 4:18), build them up in the Lord (1 Thess 5:11), and to shepherd people (1 Pet 5:2). We are to do it with lovingkindness, patience, self-control, peacefulness, and zeal. In the process, our goal is to glorify God, to please him, and to help the person we are helping to walk with God as he transforms them into his likeness through their suffering.

No one can understand another person, but God understands us. More, he has given this suffering, this trauma, to us for a reason. He wants us to run to him, to cling to him, to submit to him, to praise him and to use this hard experience to become more like Jesus. James tells us to rejoice in and because of our trials (Jas 1:3-4). Paul, in Romans tells us to glory in our suffering (Rom 5:3). And then in 2 Corinthians he tells us he exults and even boasts in his suffering (2 Cor 12:9). None of this means that we should take suffering lightly, or to think of it as not suffering at all. Jesus “suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps” (1 Pet 2:21). And through it all, he committed himself to the one who judges righteously (1 Pet 2:23). The writer to the Hebrews said that when Jesus was being killed, he had his eyes glued to the joy that was set before him (Heb 12:2). And this is the source, aim, and goal of comfort—to help one another, in the middle of suffering, come to the throne of God and receive his smile, and his grace, and his “well done good and faithful servant.”

You don’t need to understand my suffering to point me in the direction of the Lord of Glory. You just need to love me and come along side me and care. And when I sense that you love Jesus more than you want to breath and it shows in how you love me, I’ll run through a stone wall for you, with you—to Jesus.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay