You have been deeply hurt in relationship. And you will also be healed in relationship. The trauma that comes when our closest personal relationships are ruptured may be one of the most painful things we humans ever experience. How do you carry on when your body, mind, and soul have been so devastatingly fractured?

Trauma is a sometimes-overused word in our culture, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. Abuse or neglect from parents who should have cared for you, been attuned to your needs and experience, and loved you. Betrayal by the lover, spouse, or close friend you should have been able to trust.  Deep harm to you in the name of God through your family or a faith community.

And don’t make the mistake of saying to yourself (or God forbid someone else), “It wasn’t that bad. Others had it worse.” Sometimes ongoing perhaps invisible harm is the most damaging to your inner being. Only you and God truly know the impact you’ve received from the bad stuff you’ve been through.

And what you’ve experienced with relationships in the past powerfully affects your willingness and ability to engage now both with others and with God. But the good news is that you don’t have to stay where you are. There is a good future available for you to embrace.

Impact on Your Soul and Relationships

You learned much about relationships long before you knew you were learning anything. Your nervous system picked up unconscious and nonverbal messages about people, relationships, safety, intimacy, even sex, from the time you were a baby. Those first months and years of life taught you things like:

• The world is mostly safe and joyful. My needs matter and will often be met. When I feel distress I can anticipate a resolution. (A healthy soul place to grow up in.)
• The world is unpredictable. I hope to get some needs met if I scratch and claw hard enough. I must be alert and on guard always. (This breeds anxiety and desperation.)
• The world is largely dangerous. My only hope is self-protection. The only soothing I can expect is from my own self. (That turns into isolation and addiction.)

You may recognize some ideas from attachment styles in these descriptions. But this is much deeper than any conscious understanding; these core beliefs are rooted deep in your right brain’s memory, and they dictate your automatic responses to people, challenges, stress, life, even God.

And you naturally interpret further events as confirmation of those core ways of seeing the world. Your friend doesn’t respond to your text message for a few days. Your spouse raises their voice or says No to sex. Nobody from church reaches out when you get sick. Without excusing other’s responsibility, the story you tell yourself impacts you the most.

God-Concept and Trauma

Many people I speak with who have experienced hard things in life have struggled with their relationship with God. Why do many wrestle with that, but not everyone? I believe there’s a relatively simple answer; what matters most is whether that person experienced a caring human presence with them during their trauma.

Researchers have come to understand that it’s not the events or circumstance that determines the effect on a person; it’s mostly the presence or absence of someone who is reliable, attuned, and supportive who is with them through the hard times.

• A child who experiences the divorce of their parents will fare very differently depending on whether at least one parent remains truly present and is for them rather than solely embroiled in their own losses.
• A tween who experiences their first heartbreak at the loss of a “crush” may come to believe all relationships will lead to pain/trauma, or can gain understanding and resilience and develop lasting friendships going forward – depending on whether a truly caring adult was there for them.

Reading the Bible or telling someone “God was with you during your trauma” doesn’t do anything for someone who has never experienced a human being with them during hard times. And these implicit beliefs about God are even harder to undo when the harm occurred in a spiritual/religious context.

God understands all this. Our ability to trust Him fully is complicated. Faith is not primarily an intellectual conscious affirmation of certain propositional truths; it’s the moving of the human heart, how one feels God feels about them. That may seem an insurmountable obstacle for those who struggle to sense God’s love and presence. Know that God truly does understand.

And He also invites you to take a step toward Him. What can that look like?

The Path to Healing and Moving Forward

If you are that person who can’t imagine trusting anyone, let alone Someone you can’t see with your physical eyes, what do you do?

This has been the human problem for millennia. It was certainly the case when Jesus was here on earth. How did He interact with people who had experienced trauma, who had developed a deep internal mental framework of distrust, self-protection, and grasping for anything they could get?

Think of the person we call the woman at the well (John 4). She’d certainly experienced trauma; her several marriages had likely ended in various combinations of abuse, rejection, loss, death, or more. She had almost certainly responded out of desperate attempts to find provision or a measure of validation. She had become calloused to attempts at real intimacy and was settling for existence over seeking life.

Jesus begins by attuning to her. “I see you. I understand you. Even though I know all about you, I’m inviting you to come closer.” For probably the first time in her life she experienced Someone who was safe and good, Someone who was neither judging her nor exploiting her, Someone whose very presence made a different kind of relationship and life seem possible.

That’s what you need too. The first or hundredth time you hear this good news it may be impossible to believe. But when your whole internal system begins to sense that someone – and Someone – sees you, gets you, and won’t leave, it begins to change those deeply-rooted assumptions about life and relationships – and “holiness.”

We Can Help

That’s the experience we aim to offer through our small-group Intensives at Transformation Place. 3-4 days may not be the end, but it can be an amazing beginning!

Find out more. And let me know if you have questions.

Your Turn: As you observe your life and relationships, what are some of the deeply-rooted assumptions about life, intimacy, and relationships that you’ve come to believe? Do you see any impact from trauma? What you would hope could be different?  Leave a comment below.

Want more? This week’s podcast is a conversation with Vaneetha Risner about what it can looks like to move forward after an unwanted and devastating divorce.  Listen or watch.

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• Your whole internal system was trained by relational trauma. And it will be healed through presence, when someone stays. That’s how faith happens after relational trauma.  Tweet that.