When trauma strikes, it can shatter a person's fundamental understanding of the world, leaving them struggling to reconcile their experiences with any pre-existing belief system. According to author Jackie Bailey, who writes from personal experience as a trauma survivor, the journey toward healing often involves re-examining one's spiritual foundations.
The Spiritual Impact of Traumatic Events
Trauma functions like a hand grenade in the context of spirituality, exploding two of its primary purposes: helping individuals make meaning of their experiences and feeling at home in the universe. Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk explains that traumatic events overwhelm a person's capacity to integrate what happened into their life narrative in the moment it occurs.
Theologian and psychologist Karen McClintock identifies three key questions that typically emerge after trauma: "Why me?", "Why evil?", and "Why God?" These fundamental inquiries challenge the survivor's existing worldview and demand new ways of understanding their place in the world.
As Jackie Bailey recounts from her own childhood experience, watching her sister suffer from brain tumour led her seven-year-old self to a simple conclusion: if a loving God existed, such suffering wouldn't occur. This early attempt to make sense of something fundamentally meaningless shaped her perspective for the next four decades.
Two Paths After Trauma
Survivors of trauma essentially face two choices, according to psychological understanding. They can either develop new frameworks for making sense of the world, or live with existential despair, convinced that nothing will ever make sense again.
Psychologist Judith Herman describes how trauma survivors stand mute before the emptiness of evil, feeling the insufficiency of any known explanatory system. They must essentially become theologians, philosophers, and jurists to articulate the values and beliefs that their trauma destroyed.
For some individuals, trauma doesn't sever their connection to divinity but rather deepens and expands their understanding of faith. In Leigh Sales's book Any Ordinary Day, former University of Sydney vice-chancellor Michael Spence explains how losing his wife to cancer actually strengthened his Anglican faith, maintaining a list of ways he felt God continued to care for him after her death.
The Journey Toward Spiritual Safety
The concept of trauma-informed care, first introduced by researchers Maxine Harris and Roger Fallot in 2001, provides a framework for understanding spiritual recovery. Their five principles include:
- Safety
- Trust
- Choice
- Collaboration
- Empowerment
Spiritual safety encompasses the freedom to express, explore, and question fundamental beliefs and values without fear. Bailey reflects that she never felt spiritually safe, even before her sister's diagnosis, operating with a child's binary understanding of religion: believe and go to heaven, disbelieve and go to hell.
Only in the past decade, through therapy and the stability of a loving family, has Bailey found the spiritual safety to develop a position closer to Sam Harris than Richard Dawkins. While she doesn't use the word "god" or believe in a deity, she has become open to mystery and the possibility that the universe might bend toward life.
The most crucial realisation for Bailey has been that self-forgiveness doesn't require belief in a higher power. Even without forgiving a god she doesn't believe in, she has learned to forgive herself, marking a significant milestone in her trauma recovery journey.
Jackie Bailey, author of The Eulogy which won the 2023 NSW Premier's literary multicultural award, now works as a funeral celebrant and pastoral care practitioner, helping families navigate death and dying with the wisdom gained from her own difficult path.
