Faith After Spiritual Trauma

When you've built your entire life around faith and then experience trauma, betrayal, loss, or doubt in that arena, it can set off an avalanche in your spiritual life. You may find yourself asking what is even real, whether you still believe some things, and whether you want to walk away from it all. These upheavals might be further complicated by deep community involvement, financial dependence, or other factors that bring the spiritual trauma into intensely practical realms, as well.

So what do you do when trauma hits your spiritual life and pulls the rug out from under you?

When spiritual trauma feels like an avalanche rearranging the mountain

First Aid for Spiritual Trauma

First of all, if you feel frightened that everything you know is lost but you don't want to walk away from faith, know that this is not the end. The avalanche may rearrange things on the surface, bury things that used to be visible, and expose things that used to be hidden, but it is not the end of the mountain. The mountain has survived many avalanches before and it will survive more in the future. Help your mind tap into that perspective by repeatedly returning focus to things that do still feel stable, even if that's just the surety of sunrise and sunset every day or the unconditional love that someone has for you. What hasn’t changed? Keep that in mind.

In the same vein of perspective-keeping, look up and around: don't let the shock consume all of your brain. It is a big deal, but also keep yourself tethered to other things that are real and happening right now. Listen to the rain, smell a rose, watch something funny. A traumatic experience will want to take over your entire brain (or your brain might want to completely dissociate and pretend it didn’t happen!), and it’s important to keep yourself tethered to the present moment in the wider world. Feel the texture of interesting fabric, go watch kittens play at the animal shelter, and attend an interesting event that isn’t related to the trauma. Take moments to tether yourself to things that are outside this experience.

Then, add in as much self-care as you can. Sit down and write a physical list of things that genuinely nourish you when you aren't in crisis: healthy meals, hot baths, deep sleep, going on a run, etc. Post this list somewhere visible and do some of those things every day. Trauma is a significant drain on the nervous system; increasing your self-support can help reduce the longterm impact. Some additional tips for self-care:

• If you find yourself shaking with aftershocks in the days after trauma, allow yourself to do that in a safe environment until the shaking runs out. Don’t try to stop it; allow your body to discharge that stress all the way to the last drop.

• If you feel frozen and numb, get up and look out the window. Wiggle your toes. Play music with a beat. Smell something potent. Do something activating for your sensory systems to remind your body that it is still alive and present.

• If you feel agitated and tense, notice where in your body this stress is sitting, then place a supportive hand there and take deep, slow breaths. Help your body slow down a notch.

Try to start naming what happened. It may not be safe to use factual words with everyone, but look for places that are safe to talk about it. If you don’t have a place to do this immediately, therapy can be that first safe place.

If you're feeling past your capacity to cope, make sure there are people checking on you regularly who will connect you to emergency resources as needed.

And finally: know that the process of healing a spiritual trauma will take time. Try to hold the process with patience and curiosity, without the urgency of needing to have the solutions and answers right now.

Snow drifts settling into new patterns

What If You're Questioning Your Faith Now?

Questions after trauma is normal - questions are a natural part of faith development even without trauma. Faith generally begins with youthful certainty about what is true and right; it's a comforting, cocooned feeling that's a vital part of spiritual development and mirrors stages of brain development in other arenas of life, too. This stage also helps communities bond and provides a strong sense of stability. Some people remain in this stage their entire life, others gradually move into a stage that has addresses questions, and some are abruptly catapulted into the throes of questions through trauma. Regardless, know that questions are a normal part of spiritual life for many people: they’re not just the consequence of trauma. Trauma hurried your arrival to this place, but you are still in the good company of seekers over the millenniums, who asked hard questions without easy answers. You are here because of crisis, but it is not an innately wrong place to be.

A practical tool to focus on while you exist in this space of uncertainty, is growing your capacity to hold two opposite things simultaneously. In the therapy world this is called “dialectics”: balancing two opposites. So a person might learn to say to themselves, “I'm very anxious, and I know I will survive it” or “They hurt my feelings and I also could have handled it better.” Dialectics are about the capacity to hold some paradox and complexity.

You can begin by noticing the paradoxes you already have the capacity to hold in other situations - perhaps your parent did their best and it was also not enough, perhaps your dog is adorable and also destroyed something valuable. Practice the muscle of holding both/and rather than either/or paradigms. You can expand this capacity through small practices like reading two opposite views of the same news story, by chatting curiously with friends who hold opposite views on a touchy subject, and by noticing people of integrity who nonetheless disagree with each other. Grow your capacity to feel steady even when things are complex and lack quick answers.

And as you increase capacity for complexity, eventually you might find yourself able to say: “The church hurt me, and the church also helped me” or “I don't believe everything I was taught about God but I still believe some things” or “I was abused by XYZ person but not all XYZ people are harmful.”

The other part of that equation won’t be surprising to you, coming from a therapist: go to trauma therapy. If your nervous system is dysregulated and reeling from the shock of spiritual trauma with insomnia, hopelessness, agitation, grief, anger, and flashbacks, know that the distress of these things can be helped with trauma therapy. Look for someone who can both hold your story in a way that feels safe to you, and for someone who has been trained in trauma treatment modalities and can help your body also find healing. Your brain will increase its capacity for complexity through practice, but your body still needs to heal enough to be at peace with that complexity. You can read more here about what symptoms might indicate that trauma therapy would be a good fit in the overall process of healing spiritual harm.

But be patient with yourself: allowing the avalanche to settle and new, settled complexities to emerge from the rubble is not an overnight process. It’s also not something that anyone else can do for you: the questions & answers will be something you wrestle toward in your own faith - it won't look exactly like anyone else’s journey. You may find it helpful to listen to people who have also wrestled and retained faith, but the answers you truly believe will be the ones you yourself have grappled toward. Healing from spiritual trauma that has also triggered a stage of questioning is a large task that requires patience and self-compassion.

I offer a free consultation to all new clients so you can walk into therapy with confidence that you’re in the place that feels right to you, for healing to emerge. Reach out to schedule your free consultation today!

Elizabeth Peters, LMSW is a licensed therapist seeing clients in person in Wichita and online across Kansas. She provides EMDR and somatic therapy for adults who are overwhelmed by anxiety, trauma, painful relationships or spiritual harm.