My dear Catholic/Christian complex trauma survivor,
We’re deep into Holy Week now, and perhaps you are feeling triggered and activated by the readings, liturgy, devotions and reflections, and this makes you feel guilty and ashamed. Or perhaps you are staying away from church this week because your reactions to these triggers are too intense and this too is filling you with guilt and you can’t help wondering, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I reacting this way? Why can’t I just toughen up and participate and be prayerfully present to Holy Week like I want to?”
As a fellow complex trauma survivor who has experienced different variations of what I described above in the last 8 years of my life, I want to first assure you that you are not alone in your pain – that I get it! And I know how lonely being in this place is and how difficult it is to find any people or resources that help us understand what is going on inside of us. Most spiritual guides, even good ones, are still unfamiliar with complex trauma and how it interacts with our faith/religious practice. And most good trauma-informed practitioners (which are already hard to find!) are not necessarily able to relate with what our Christian/Catholic theology and spirituality means to us.
While I am neither a certified spiritual director or any kind of licensed trauma practitioner, I am a lover of Christ within the Catholic Church who is also a recovering complex trauma survivor. It is from my own experience that I wish to reach out to you now. I hope that sharing my journey and what has helped me will let you feel less alone and abandoned this Holy Week.
I Used to Numb and Dissociate in Order To Be Physically Present
I have been Catholic since I was 6 years old when my parents converted to the faith. And for the first 30 years or so of my life I never consciously had any trouble staying through any mass, liturgy, or devotional practice (even when it was boring, or when I was irritated or annoyed by the preaching). Even during the decade I lived abroad away from home and the faith community I grew up in, a decade that coincided with a period of my life when I interiorly felt the furthest away from God and the most sinful and unworthy, I never missed a single Sunday mass unless I was too sick to go.
Even when I traveled in foreign countries, finding a Catholic Church to attend mass on Sunday was always a priority – even if mass was celebrated in a language I did not understand. That was how “good” a Catholic I was – or at least that was how I thought of myself! Not only did I attend mass regularly, I actively read and learned about the faith so that I could more deeply appreciate what the teachings of the Church, the sacraments and the liturgy of the mass was all about.
In my mid-30s (which is 10 years ago now!), God began to do deeper inner healing in my life. More specifically, God began to draw me into healing the affective foundations of my humanity. Before this happened, I never thought that spiritual maturity or discipleship needed so much emotional healing and integration! But it became painfully clear that in order to love God and neighbour authentically, I needed to be healed in my relationship with my Self. I came to realise that there has been much complex trauma in my life, in particular attachment trauma that was heavily tinged and blended with my family’s Catholic faith.
Without being aware of it, I have been numbing and dissociating when any faith-based activity or event triggers my wounds. That was no different from the way I numbed or dissociated in my family or daily life when I was in a situation I could not escape. I automatically “tuned out”. Sometimes, time passes without me even realising, for when I am present again I could not recall what had been said. When this happened at mass, I used to feel guilty because I thought it was simple distraction – or that I was just not attentive or interested or humble enough (I know now that’s a common survivor mindset). I never realised that numbing and dissociating was what had enabled me to be physically present for so many faith-related activities that would have otherwise been emotionally stressful for me.
Waking Up to Anger & My Body Saying “No”
I experienced burn-out and developed chronic digestive and health issues during my early 30s when I was working full time in a parish. It was eventually these issues that led me to accept my limits and to begin to take my body’s protests seriously. I had been used to ignoring my body’s signals and pushing ahead to do whatever was “right”. Self-abandonment was part of my distorted understanding of love and discipline, and numbing allowed me to ignore the shadow side of my psyche until old dysfunctional relational patterns reappeared and wreaked havoc in my life and my health. That was when I realised that I needed more than spiritual healing.
Being aware that the dysfunctional patterns in my relationships with others and with authority were linked to my family of origin wounds, I began going for counselling to work on these issues. And as the deep affective dimension of my inner self began to feel safe to express itself to me, I began to feel – really feel – long suppressed emotions in my body. The first of these emotions that really surfaced was anger. Sometimes the anger was so strong I would even describe it as rage. And I did not know at first where it was coming from! It was so scary – but thankfully, I had not only a good spiritual director to talk these things through with, I also had a therapist who was trained to help me process my emotions. (My current therapist whom I’ve been seeing for the past 3 years is somatically trained and that has brought a whole new dimension to my integrative healing!)
I began to notice that I would feel angry at some masses, sometimes very angry indeed! And during Holy Week in particular, I began to notice how much I dissociated during the liturgy. Even when I tried to be fully present, I would dissociate again after a few minutes. Now I know that it was my body (and nervous system) trying to protect me. It took many months afterwards for me to learn to dialogue with my anger and with my body… to begin to understand what the anger was trying to protect me from. There were so many layers to unpack and it took months… and then years!
Trauma Mingled With Faith
Without going into detail, I can share that over the years I realised that particular notions and images of God and the Catholic faith have been interwoven into the intergenerational trauma that I have inherited. As I learned more about trauma and became more integrated within myself, I also began to realise how much of the liturgy, preaching and church experiences (e.g. confessions, retreats, guided reflections) are also coloured by distorted images of God, human dysfunction, and even systemic and historical trauma.
My distorted lens of God, faith and Church had exacerbated and compounded my familial trauma. Sin, shame and fear (instead of a free and joyful love of God) had become the driving force behind my quest for spiritual perfection. But all of this happened in a climate of unawareness, much like it was in my own family. My body and my nervous system had protected me from being aware of much of this pain and shame without my mind ever being conscious of it by simply numbing me or taking my attention “offline” when necessary. I strove for perfection and excellence as a Catholic in all the ways I knew how to in the meantime to keep shame at bay.
But now my body was awake, and I was feeling again. I began to experience physical symptoms when I refused to listen to my body’s “no”. I remember one particular mass I attended when I felt angry and nauseated during the homily, and again while watching a video that was played after mass. Both times a part of me wanted to bolt out of the church, but I was determined to stay until mass ended. I managed to stay, but I fell sick the next day. I had entered a new phase of my healing where I could no longer dissociate even when I wished I could! My body was speaking loudly now, and I had to decide how to respond.
Dying (to Ego) Into Authentic Love
Healing and interior integration is a great “shaking up” and “shaking off”. During these years I realised how much I clung to my self-image of a disciplined, devout, well-formed “model” Catholic just as much as I clung on to my self-image of being a responsible, loving, selfless and capable daughter (which in my family included being a good, well-formed and knowledgeable Catholic). God began to ask me to choose between (1) accepting the truth of my reality in humility and (2) clinging on to a facade of perfection and performance to protect that image even when it was harming my body. Only one of these can lead to more healing and integration. One led to life, and the other choice would keep me living in denial which was no life at all.
I chose truth. Choosing truth required me to leap into an abyss, a dark hole where I had to forgo the ‘safety-nets’ of my old understanding and certainties about right and wrong, my old certainties about what ‘truth’ was. To heal and become alive in Christ, I needed to die first. Would I be willing to be that grain that falls into the earth and dies in order to bear an abundant harvest? With God’s grace, I said ‘yes’, and that ‘yes’ led me to enter more deeply than I ever had before into God’s love and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Entering Christ’s Wounds Through My Wounds
All the theological and spiritual knowledge I had gained intellectually before was now becoming incarnated. What did it truly mean that Christ came for the lost? That he went to the marginalised, the sinners, the ones who were incapable of earning proof of their worthiness through merit and that he loved them unconditionally? In the past I believed all this intellectually but I never identified myself as one of the marginalised. I always identified myself as one who was doing a pretty good job earning righteousness because I knew my faith and I knew what I needed to do to be a good, practicing Catholic and I did them! When I failed, I went to confession (also the right thing), but I was performing for God, for others and even myself. I had not yet touched the wounds of Christ because I had not entered my wounds.
My resistance in accepting the truth of my inner reality – that of a gravely wounded child rather than a mature, respectable and sterling Catholic specimen – revealed just how much of me was still in need of being unconditionally loved and accepted. Only unconditional love of myself in the truth of my inner reality could set me free. By entering my wounds, I was finally able to enter Christ’s wounds, and through his wounds into the heart of God the Father.
Why Holy Week Can Be Re-Traumatising For Trauma Survivors
Among the newest explanations of trauma are that trauma is what happens inside of us when we are left alone (abandoned) to deal with fear and helplessness, and that trauma is also anything that happens to us too much, too fast and too soon (Dr Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing®). In other words, experiences that are too intense to be ‘digested’ by our current capacity, especially if these experience activate our unhealed wounds, can easily re-traumatise us.
Holy Week is the most intense week of the Church’s liturgical year – not only physically (e.g. longer readings and liturgies) but also emotionally and spiritually. Think of the themes that come forth during Holy Week – what we are often viscerally made to pay attention to – Christ’s betrayal and abandonment, Christ being mocked, condemned, tortured and killed for being true to who he was (the Son of God), and for speaking his truth.
We also have the shame of Peter’s abandonment of Christ in his time of need and Judas’ despair. We observe the grief of Mother Mary as she witnessed her Son’s torture and death. We experience the terror of the followers of Christ who feared for their lives. Any ONE of these could be sufficient to activate a trauma survivor, much less ALL of them in a span of an intense few days!
What compounds the trauma for some of us is that we have been shamed and blamed for Christ’s suffering somewhere in our religious upbringing. For example, as a young child I was told that every time I sinned, I was nailing Jesus to the cross anew. I was a highly sensitive child with a vivid imagination. I don’t need to explain how this image has haunted me my entire life, especially during Good Friday and during the Stations of the Cross. Was it surprising that I always dissociated in some way or form when I had to meditate on Christ’s passion? Imagine the guilt I felt that I could not be more like the saints who frequently contemplated Christ Crucified. Whenever I tried, I would feel nothing, and I would wonder what was wrong with me that I felt no emotion for Christ’s sacrifice for me. (I share more about this in last year’s blog entry: A Good Friday Confession: I Don’t Feel Anything).
Letting God Love Me Through Self-Love
It has taken me quite a few years and liturgical cycles through Holy Week to simply accept the truth of how I feel during Holy Week. It has taken even more time to believe that the loving God who is healing my wounds was not demanding me to show up and suffer through Holy Week (because Jesus suffered) and fall sick just because that is “what a good Catholic would do” or to prove my faithfulness to Him. No. That came from an old distorted image of God that I had somehow inherited. It is not the true God who has been revealing himself in new ways to me in my healing.
Surrendering to my healing process helped me to experience that it pleases God for me – the wounded one – to be tenderly treated, ministered to and lavishly loved according to my needs in the present moment. Experiencing this helped me to enter more deeply into Christ’s life and even into his suffering and death. For by embracing my helplessness, I entered Christ’s helplessness in his passion. By grieving the truth of my powerlessness I was united in a very real way with Christ who freely chose to be powerless.
An important principle in trauma-informed care is titration. Because trauma is “too much, too fast, too soon”, allowing ourselves to experience things in small doses that our bodies can digest will allow us over time to heal and grow in our capacity to receive those experiences that used to traumatise us. I have found that the practice of titration is a powerful form of contemplative self-love through which I can slowly become present to the events of Holy Week. This requires that I trust my body’s wisdom and my own inner intuition about how much I can take and that I honour these boundaries. Each time I could show up to protect the dignity of my wounded parts, my fragmented inner parts felt safer with me and became more integrated into my True Self. In this way, healing slowly (very slowly!) happened.
New Trauma-Informed Wineskins Needed
I believe that the Church is still maturing and evolving in consciousness, and I have hope that someday, there will be more trauma-informed theology, spirituality, pastoral care and perhaps even trauma-informed liturgy. I think the day that these will be normalised and commonly understood and accepted by the Church is still very far away indeed. So unfortunately, trauma (both big “T” and small “t” complex trauma) survivors will continue to be among the misunderstood and under-cared for people on the margins of the Church.
Some of us suffer in secret while still showing up regularly in churches. Some of us are trying to find ways to ‘titrate’ our encounters with church or aspects of faith that re-traumatise us. And some of us have decided to just stay away from all aspects of organised religion and worship for the time being. We are at different stages of healing and different seasons of life and different stages of our relationship with God. Many different factors contribute to our choices, and I know that it has not been easy for you, no matter how you are coping right now.
What can trauma survivors do to support ourselves better in a church culture and environment that is not yet trauma-aware or informed? What I can suggest based on what has helped me is this:
- Pray for and seek an experienced, attuned spiritual director who, even if not formally trauma-informed, you experience felt safety with. Such a spiritual director will not hasten to judge or advise you even if your experience is new to them. A discerning spiritual director is a good listener and will listen with openness to the Holy Spirit’s prompts on how to respond to you and guide you to recognise how God is present to you in your current situation in ways you do not expect.
If you can find such a spiritual director, you are blessed! You can share your healing and integration experiences with your SD because I have found that an open and attuned spiritual director will be eager to learn new things beyond their own training. - Pray for and find an attuned, trauma-informed counsellor or therapist. This is different from just a therapist who does trauma work or advertises themselves as trauma-informed. Being trauma-informed and attuned is quite distinct (unfortunately) from being trained to work with traumatised clients. How can you tell? Your body will know. Your intuition will tell you. An attuned therapist (even if not formally trained to be trauma-informed) will make you feel safe and relaxed. You will feel seen as a PERSON and not just a collection of issues to be analysed and fixed.
Such a therapist will not rush your treatment or healing and will help you to feel a new spaciousness in your journey. If your therapist makes you feel hurried or rushed, tell them so. If they are open and are able to repair with you and adapt to your needs, that is also a mark of an attuned therapist. - Pray for, seek and find faith resources that are emotionally safe and gentle. Such resources are quite rare, especially for Holy Week, but some are starting to exist! A good example of a gentle and safe resource that can help us remain connected with Christ and ourselves during Holy Week when more traditional forms are too intense or traumatising is Brya Hanan‘s Holy Week Journaling Prompts For Healing. You can find the Instagram post here. (I am waiting for Brya to send me a PDF version which I will provide a link for download as soon as I receive it.)
Final Thoughts
I have been asked by people from different countries where they can find trauma-informed spiritual directors and therapists. It is indeed a grace to find even just one of these! And I wish to stress this most important point: that God will and does provide, just not always in the ways we expect. There may well be long seasons when we cannot find an appropriate spiritual guide or therapist, but God may send us help in the form of someone else that enters our life, or through books and media. In my own journey I have been fed in many different ways and I have also been kept feeling ‘hungry’ for long seasons too. Yet there has always been sufficient grace to keep me healing and growing. It is all part of the journey into deeper faith, hope, and love and this journey was never meant to be easy!
I hope this very long sharing that I have written today can be one of the resources you were surprised to discover exists. I hope that in some small way I have made you feel less alone, lost or confused. It has taken me a very long journey to feel at peace in sharing this much of my journey publicly. I know it will not be welcomed, understood or approved of by many of my fellow Catholics. In fact my younger self would not have been able to appreciate this sharing either! Not before God revealed to me my own wounds and invited me into them.
I share this now because it is the right time for me in my own journey to do so. I can do so without abandoning myself. I can do so feeling deeply and securely rooted in God’s love for me. Writing this blog entry is part of my own trauma-informed Holy Week spiritual practice this year, for it has kept me in deep silence and solitude for an entire day and has helped to ground me in the Paschal Mystery through my own life.
I share my story in solidarity with all trauma survivors who love Christ and love the Church but who often feel unseen and unsafe in the Church we love. Take courage and have hope! For our stories are not finished yet, and it is God alone – God who is Love – who will see us through to the end.
Journeying with you,
Ann Yeong
(If you are new to me, you can learn more about my journey and find more content that supports the interior integration journey at my website: https://www.integroformation.com)
Journey of the Heart 