Trauma-Informed Faith

Do you feel like you just don't have the bandwidth to listen to people talk about their problems right now? You are not alone. The collective trauma of Covid, on top of any other traumas you have experienced, decreases your capacity to empathize for others. One of the key markers for empathy is our ability to listen to others. Listen to Ken and Paul explore the subject of how trauma impacts our ability to listen and how we might go about restoring our empathetic ears. 

In this episode, Paul and Ken explore how our instinct to cover up our woundedness is the very thing that keeps us from healing. Being vulnerable with safe people opens us up to healing and restored relationship. 

Trauma can shut down your emotions and it can spin them out of control. Ken and Paul discuss how trauma impacts the ability to regulate our emotions. How can forgiving what happened to us help restore our emotional regulation? 

Are you being held captive by your trauma? Forgiveness sets your free to begin to heal. In this 4th episode on forgiveness, Ken and Paul explore the relationship between healing from trauma and forgiving others. 

A common response to trauma is the tendency to blame oneself for what happened. As a result, some people become stuck in their ability to move through healing. In those cases, healing from trauma requires self-forgiveness.  Paul and Ken continue their segment on forgiveness as they explore the challenges of self-forgiveness through the lens of faith. 

Is it forgiveness that you struggle with or do you struggle with one of the false notions about forgiveness? In this second episode on forgiveness, Ken and Paul debunk common myths about forgiveness and define it in essential terms. Withholding forgiveness keeps us tied to the harm that has been done to us. Forgiving is key in healing from trauma and sets us free to grow emotionally and spiritually. 

An unhealed trauma experience arrests our ability to grow in our relationships with God, self, and others. Within the God-Personal-Social (GPS) model of spiritual health, self-differentiation is essential in our ability to have healthy, loving relationships. It is also key to healing from trauma. Ken and Paul begin a 4-part segment on forgiveness by focusing on the relationships between self-differentiation, forgiveness, and healing from trauma. 

Trauma often causes us to feel isolated and distant from each other and God. Paul and Ken discuss the effects of trauma on our ability to be intimate in our relationships and how cultivating a sense of nearness with God can provide the safety and security we need to be vulnerable again. In this episode, they use real life examples of working with people experiencing trauma, give best practices for living in relationship with traumatized people,  and share a transformative exercise utilizing Psalm 139 to help us to develop a greater sense of the nearness of a loving, parental God. 

Communicating your experience of trauma is key to healing, but trauma can cause you to withdraw from relationship with others and God. Paul and Ken explore the impact of trauma on our ability to communicate. They examine the stories of Hanna and Samuel to illustrate how communicating with God in the midst of stressful situations can help us to function by maintaining a relational mindset.  

Is God there for us during trauma? Are we there for each other? In the debut episode of Trauma-Informed Faith, Dr. Ken Logan and Dr. Paul Burns examine how trauma impacts our ability to trust God and people.  They look at two stories from scripture, the parting  of the Red Sea and Zechariah's encounter with an Angel, to illustrate the challenge of trusting under difficult circumstances.