As a little girl, Diana Gourley faced more abusive pain at the hands of teenagers and adults than many people do their entire lives. But until recently, this devoted woman of faith saw little connection between these earlier agonizing experiences and her later spiritual challenges. Despite earnest efforts to align her life with God’s will and feel His love, for instance, she often felt mostly a “disappointing sadness.”
To the ancient question, “if ye have felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can ye feel so now?” she admits for years feeling essentially, “No. I have not. I can’t feel much of anything.”
Still, she described experiencing occasional “bright glimmers of God’s love,” which “lifted and sustained” her when most needed — helping her “to keep going and keep trying.” As the years passed, however, this “inability to feel more than fleeting love” began to weigh heavily on her.
The natural aftermath of trauma
According to trauma experts, none of this should be very surprising. “Anyone who deals with traumatized men, women, or children is sooner or later confronted with blank stares and absent minds,” writes researcher Bessel van der Kolk. This state, he explains, is a normal biological reaction to going through serious trauma, which he defines as a painful experience that is impossible to escape and which overwhelms your capacity to cope.
In an attempt to survive something excruciating like this, people young and old learn to “shut down” certain brain areas involved in transmitting some of our most “visceral feelings and emotions,” says this Dutch research psychiatrist, one of the world’s leading experts on trauma and author of “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma.”
When painful emotions are dampened, however, so are the sweet ones. One former Marine who fought bloody battles in Vietnam lamented to this doctor how challenging it was to “feel any real affection for his wife,” who he genuinely loved. He felt “dead inside” — like he was “going through the motions of living a normal life.” Although dearly wanting to love his family, he “just couldn’t evoke any deep feelings for them” — feeling emotionally distant “as though his heart were frozen and he was living behind a glass wall.”
This kind of unsettling state has been recognized in the mental health field for over a century, labeled with common terms such as “numbed out, blanked-out, and shutdown” as well as professional jargon like “emotional detachment, desensitization, depersonalization, alexithymia, and dissociation.”
William James, one of the early fathers of American psychology, wrote about a woman who described being “surrounded by all that can render life happy and agreeable” yet who struggled to feel “any sort of enjoyment” — this, despite being conscious of her acute need for the same, which disconnect she said often felt like a kind of relentless “torture.”
Life’s sweetness blocked
Although blocking serious pain can make life “tolerable” for anyone suffering, van der Kolk again emphasizes how much such suppression simultaneously “muffles the everyday sensory delights of experiences like music, touch and light, which imbue life with value.” That can include a diluting and subduing effect on spiritual experiences of transcendent peace, joy and love.
Frequent dissociations from pain would “block out everything emotionally, both the good and the bad,” Gourley recalls. “Trauma can restrict a person’s emotional range, especially when it occurs in childhood,” Latter-day Saint therapist Rebecca Taylor observes, even if such a restriction on feeling can temporarily protect victims from acute pain.
“Since the Spirit often communicates to us through our emotions, or in ways that are linked to our emotions,” she adds, it may subsequently become “more difficult for some who have experienced severe trauma to feel or sense the Spirit.”
What’s even going on with me?
It’s not just spiritual realities that can become difficult to sense in the aftermath of trauma. One psychiatrist, Henry Krystal, who worked with more than a thousand Holocaust survivors, observed that many had successfully learned to “shut down their once overwhelming emotions,” yet as an inadvertent consequence, they “no longer recognized what they were feeling” in a general sense.
“I don’t know what I feel,” a research participant told neuroscientist Paul Frewen at the University of Western Ontario. “I’m living in a tunnel, a fog, no matter what happens it’s the same reaction — numbness, nothing ... my brain doesn’t feel.”
It’s also common for traumatized people to struggle to “make sense of what is going on,” van der Kolk points out. “With nearly every part of their brains tuned out,” it also becomes uniquely challenging for someone to state confidently, “this is what I think and feel” and “this is what is going on with me.”
“Many traumatized children and adults simply cannot describe what they are feeling because they cannot identify what their physical sensations mean,” he continues. This is partly explained by an extreme disconnection from the body that can follow in the wake of serious trauma, which often damages essential connections between the brain and the rest of our sensory system. “Our sense of ourselves is anchored in a vital connection with our bodies,” the Dutch researcher adds, suggesting that it’s difficult to “truly know ourselves unless we can feel and interpret our physical sensations.”
A hidden variable undercutting faith
When things are this hazy and muddled inside, it’s especially easy to miss how even consequential events from the past may be affecting the present. According to Latter-day Saint therapist Jeff Bennion, it’s common for people to not recognize how past trauma may be influencing their current faith.
It was psychologist Wendy Ulrich who suggested years ago the value of coming to “see our blindness” and make connections like this in a way that can catalyze steps of more genuine healing, both past and present. Ulrich draws particular attention to early painful experiences with parents getting mapped onto one’s relationship with God unawares.
Gourley recalls equating her father’s anger with God’s wrath, during many years when she couldn’t feel the love of either one. It’s worth considering how many conflicted believers are dealing with the residue of unresolved trauma from neglectful and abusive relationships in the past, without recognizing their lingering effects today.
Whatever the knotty circumstances, it can be helpful to “create a little space,” Latter-day Saint therapist Carrie Skarda notes — comparing trauma to having a pillow strapped to your face, where the only thing you can see is the pillow in all directions. “But when you can hold the pillow at arm’s distance, you create some space between you and the pillow that allows you to see the pillow with more clarity, as well as the rest of the room around you.”
Additional space between a person and their “thoughts, behaviors and emotions provoked by the trauma,” she explains, can help them see more clearly “what’s actually going on.”
Awakening faculties
All this explains why it can be so helpful, according to experts, for those experiencing a restricted emotional range to take intentional steps toward becoming more “alert and engaged” — which van der Kolk calls a “difficult but unavoidable task” for traumatized people who “want to recapture their lives.”
In the meanwhile, as long as this kind of “spiritual dryness” remains “where God doesn’t seem accessible,” Taylor says that traumatized people may “need to go on faith for a while as they seek healing.”
Gourley tells Deseret News that as her healing continued, she felt a growing ability to feel joy and love with others around her, as well as in a closer relationship with God. “Cultivating sensory awareness” in this way is a “critical aspect of trauma recovery,” van der Kolk says. This involves various ways to “reactivate” one’s complex sensory system that has broken down, the Dutch psychiatrist adds, while bringing back into action brain structures that “deserted” people when they were “overwhelmed by trauma.”
Yet this kind of “arousing your faculties” alone may not be enough when a cycle of heightened overreactions is also taking place.
Calming overreaction
Even “benign things can be triggers” in the aftermath of serious trauma, says Skarda — which can understandably prompt people to step back from any situation that feels unsure. “This is pain, so it must be dangerous.”
Van der Kolk recounts the experience of a client, Annie, with a background of severe abuse, who learned to “tolerate her physical sensations for what they were — just sensations in the present” by “staying calm enough to notice what she was feeling without judgment.” She was eventually able to come to see these unsettling and “unbidden images and feelings as residues of a terrible past and not as unending threats to her life today.”
Whether from past or present discomforts around us, “there are ways to work through those traumas,” Bennion encourages. “The answer is never to just avoid.” In the context of discomfort with people or ideas around us, the problem with walling ourselves off from a present source of our discomfort, Bennion explains, is that it tends to “just makes us more sensitive.”
People who, for whatever reason, are “initially triggered just by attending sacrament meeting,” he says by way of illustration, “if they aren’t actively working on their trauma, will eventually be triggered by even mentions of the church, if they just avoid.”
Whatever it is that someone is reacting to, “it’s easy to assume that whatever is triggering us is bad and we need to get away from it,” Skarda agrees. Yet it’s possible to learn how to “hold still” even in those moments, she emphasizes. “Learning to hold our reactivity with compassion is a very difficult skill, but it allows us to let the mud settle a little so we can see what is really happening more clearly.”
This isn’t as easy as it looks when you’ve been through something agonizing, especially since traumatized people often feel “too numb to absorb new experiences” and are surrounded with so many options in society today to artificially manipulate what they’re feeling.
Chasing ‘any way to feel something new’
As people await deeper relief and healing, it can be hard to resist the many avenues towards some temporary relief. Whether it’s drab numbness or acute spikes in emotional pain someone is facing, traumatized people can be led down rabbit holes chasing sensation-seeking that ultimately numbs their capacities even more — be that through overeating, food restriction, overworking, excessive exercise, compulsive shopping, pornography, drugs or alcohol.
For anyone who feels “chronically numbed out,” it’s uniquely tempting to “go to the places where you did feel alive,” even if those outlets are potentially dangerous, van der Kolk says, as people try to “make themselves feel better in the only way they know.”
There are, of course, many life-giving and healing ways to pursue deep and lasting relief — including most tangibly, turning toward loving relationships with friends and family around us. Gourley describes the impact in her own life of shifting away from anxious insecurity (“Are you going to drop me, like so many others have?”), as she eventually learned how to choose to trust that others around her really did care for her.
Deeper spirituality, deeper healing
Skarda cautions against assuming this is some kind of a consecutive process — e.g., “you better heal trauma so that you can then connect with God.” She explains, “You don’t heal trauma first and then engage in spiritual life. It’s not so linear.” Whether someone is “feeling stuck, triggered, gaining insight, healing, or engaging in spiritual or religious life,” these can “all be happening all the time, and sometimes all at once!”
“There is nothing more effective for healing than spirituality and faith,” Taylor remarks, while acknowledging the complementary value of therapeutic tools among clients she has observed. “Both are often needed together,” she says — sharing how years ago she had worked with a client who had experienced horrific abuse as a child. “He told me that the one place he felt any semblance of peace was in the temple.”
After many years of seeking relief from various professionals, Gourley says she was ready to give up on any further healing and just say “well, this is just the way my life is going to be.” But as she developed more “secure mortal attachments,” she described growing deeper confidence in God as well.
“The pathway out of trauma has been paved with words,” she says, describing how often she was surprised by new understandings from scriptures she had known most of her life. Along with these insights came more specific guidance towards steps she needed to take to find “the healing I’d been seeking — hoping for — nearly all my life.”
Taylor further describes a woman she worked with who grew up in a dysfunctional environment involving significant abuse. After discovering The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this woman was most struck by the contrast between the environment in her home and in church buildings. Her involvement in the faith, including priesthood blessings, led her to “be able to feel God’s love for her,” which ultimately “helped immeasurably in her healing.”
Anyone who’s participated in or supported a 12-step meeting for the church’s Addiction Recovery Program will likely “meet people who have experienced significant adversity and are holding on to the gospel for dear life,” Taylor adds — pointing out how faith “becomes a spiritual lifeline” for many.
Seeing more clearly
“Gently notice that you may also not be seeing God clearly,” Skarda encourages those with significant trauma in their past. “Trauma can distort our thinking and impact our view of ourselves, our relationships and even God.”
Yet these present triggers coming up from the past can be a blessing in disguise, she emphasizes, since this kind of discomfort can “push us to confront earlier formed misperceptions of God’s character and motives.”
The important question isn’t “what’s wrong with you?” Eleanor Longden famously said following her own healing journey. But “what happened to you?”
Far from a personal failure, Skarda says surprising emotional wrestles can become “opportunities to heal old wounds so we can have a more true, deeper relationship with God.”
For those grappling with the messiness of this overall process, Skarda adds by way of reassurance, “I think God is so gentle and nonjudgmental as we try and navigate the impact of trauma and is very willing to work with us where we are.”
Patience with a nonlinear progress
If God really is that loving and kind in working with anyone struggling, perhaps this offers a clue to how the rest of us can provide more support too. “Go sit next to the door when the person goes and hides in the bathroom stall,” Skarda suggests to family members and friends. “Listen to them as they share their story or thoughts. See this person with love, and be willing to ‘mourn with those that mourn’ without judgment.”
“I’m sorry you got hurt. I care about you. I know you are not defined by this trauma and that you are more than this moment. What do you need?” she says by way of illustration. “When someone offers this kind of gentle, curious, presence, it helps.”
“Trauma healing is not necessarily linear,” Skarda reminds people. “Ups and downs doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, this is just how it goes. If you can’t make it to that baby blessing or that Mother’s Day sacrament meeting, or that service project … be patient with yourself. Don’t run away from those triggers, but don’t beat yourself up either.”
Instead, “Hold still, don’t judge, observe what’s unfolding with curiosity and gentleness, be mindful that you may not be seeing everything totally clearly, but that’s okay and part of the process. Give yourself some space, and find a good friend to sit and witness your experience with you. And allow yourself to be open to a potentially different experience next time.”