Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: This is Rachel and recovery. We're back with heat senior, and he's gonna tell the rest of the story.
What are the three e's of trauma?
[00:00:11] Speaker B: So the three e's of trauma.
We have to think of trauma, really in a holistic way. A lot of times we think of trauma as just being the event, just the thing that happens. So just the sexual assault was the trauma.
The car accident was the trauma.
Being sexually harassed or bullied was the event, was the trauma.
And when we look at just the event, we miss out on a large part of trauma.
A story that I like to tell is related to the fact I have cancer, and I'm currently on my third round with cancer.
During my second round, my church lived out these three e's. And here's how they lived out the three e's.
They recognized that they couldn't change the event. Now, many times we can change the event. The event is the first e.
Many times we can change the event.
We can prevent. Engage in effective prevention strategies that often are able to help prevent an event from occurring. But there are times that you can't prevent an event. When somebody shows up at your church service and the sexual assault occurred ten years ago, you're not going to be able to go back in time and prevent the sexual assault.
It may have occurred in their childhood, and now they've just come to your church as an adult. But for whatever reason, you may or you may not be able to effectively prevent an event.
You must do whatever you can. You must, absolutely must do what you can in prevention. But there are going to be some things that you simply cannot prevent, either because you didn't know of the situation or because you didn't know the person or didn't have close enough proximity to the situation.
So when I was diagnosed and I was told the second time that my cancer was back, my church could not stop that event from happening.
But that didn't mean that they couldn't do anything.
So what did they do? They immediately stepped into it, impacting the experience of the event. So the experience of the event is the second e. And how did my church do that? Well, they came over to my house and they prayed over my family and me. The pastor then said, would it be okay if at church on Sunday, we prayed over you and your family? And we said, that would be fine. And so the next Sunday at church, they prayed over my family and me.
And after about ten or 15 minutes of prayer, the pastor announces, you know what? Today we're just going to skip the sermon, and the entire time will be spent praying over the singer family.
We were surrounded by people that represented Jesus and loved on us. We were surrounded by people that cared. We had a friend that was going to that same church, and she came up to us after that time of prayer, and she said, I know this is going to sound weird, but can I do your laundry?
And for the next year, we set our laundry out on the porch, dirty. That was returned clean and old at the next.
[00:03:47] Speaker C: Ow.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Not one.
Did anyone in that church say to me, Pete, you're 310 pounds. What did you expect, Pete, you have a sedentary lifestyle. What did you expect, Pete, you have a diet high in sugar and fat. What did you expect?
Nobody said that to me, and that meant that I got to experience the event, not blame, because nobody went about trying to find how somehow it was my fault.
[00:04:27] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: I recently was talking to someone, and she had decided that she needed to confront her pastor about something. And so she told her father that she was going to confront the pastor about this something. And it wasn't a major question of abuse or anything like that. It was something else.
And her dad's first response to her was, well, are you sure that you haven't done anything to prompt the situation?
Her dad was trying to be helpful, but even then, her dad was saying, are you sure it's not your fault?
And we don't pay attention to how the little things that we say, the little things that we do might convey, you know, that this is really your fault. Right.
And so often, a person who has an event in their life will experience that event as blamed for the event.
So on the three e's, we've got the event itself, the experience of the event, and then the third e is the ongoing effects of the event.
During that time with cancer, my wife and I were sitting in our office, and we were going over our finances, and we came to the realization that we did not have enough money to make our house payment. I hadn't been able to work for four months.
There's something called medical bills, both of which are not good for Fiji.
[00:06:02] Speaker C: No, they are not.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: No. So we're sitting there, we're realizing we don't have enough money to make our house payment. We faced a very real possibility that we were going to lose our home in the middle of cancer. And as we were having that discussion, somebody came to the door, and it was Rod from church.
And Rod is holding an ice cream bucket. Rod is a man of few words, and he just says, you know, we were thinking about you at church today and thought that maybe you could use a little help. And he hands me the ice cream bucket, and the ice cream bucket was full of cash and checks, and the ice cream bucket paid our house every step of the way.
Our church made sure, okay, you know what? You can't attend as many church services.
How do we make sure you don't lose community?
How do we make sure that you don't lose as an effect of the cancer? How do we make sure that your friendships don't suffer, your relationships don't suffer? You have full access to the church and to the people of the church. How do we make sure that happens?
And so, very often when an event has occurred, especially if that event has occurred at church, the person who has been harmed ends up losing their faith, community ends up losing a huge part of their circle of support, ends up losing a huge part of those who have been in care and love during their time at that church.
We need to recognize that that's a risk and then takes active steps against it to make sure that that person does not lose community as a result of having experienced harm.
So those are the three e's, the event, the experience of the event, and then the ongoing effects of the event, which may be financial, spiritual, psychological, really could go across spectrums.
[00:08:13] Speaker C: What are some universal precautions?
[00:08:18] Speaker B: So just this idea of universal precautions is the idea that.
So let's just say.
Let's just say that you know 100 people.
[00:08:40] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: That's a lot of people.
You don't know how many of them or which ones of them have experienced some type of trauma, you simply don't know. And that might be because they have chosen not to talk about it. It might be that they've chosen not to talk about it specifically with you.
They've, for whatever reason, not revealed that they have a trauma history, that they have this history of harm.
And if we only did trauma informed practice, and we only worked to let our understanding of trauma impact how we interact with people that we know have had trauma or harm in their background, we're gonna miss a lot of people.
The average time for a male to tell anyone, not a professional, but to tell anyone that they've experienced some form of sexual abuse during their childhood, it's over 20 years.
Are we just not going to show care and compassion to males who are between 18 and 38 because they haven't have a tendency not to talk about being sexually assaulted?
[00:10:07] Speaker C: That's interesting. I've heard most men don't try to get help until they're 50.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: For many, it's longer than that average of 20 years. Yeah. That 20 some odd years is an average.
So, yeah. So, so what we have to do is we have to realize that it's not just for the people that we know have experienced trauma, but it's not going to hurt.
It's consistent with scripture, and it's just in general, helpful in our interactions with each other. So what universal precautions does is it says, since it's not going to hurt, since it's helpful and since there are a lot of people that we don't know have experienced some form of trauma, and since it's aligned with scripture, let's just do it and not wait for a specific time when it's called for. But do it all the time.
[00:11:18] Speaker C: Yes. We should be doing it all the time. And I feel like we just, well, I just don't feel like a lot of people have done enough healing to get it or understand how prevalent it is. Some people don't even realize they've been abused until they talk about it so many years later because they've suppressed it.
Because that's, I mean, I can't count how many times I've had conversations with little old ladies and they tell me what happened to them. Like, that's assault.
That's childhood sexual abuse.
And they, they want to deny it.
[00:12:11] Speaker B: Yeah. I've had, as a therapist, I've had clients in their sixties and seventies that have come to see me and tell me for the first time they are revealing that they were assaulted during childhood. And sometimes they don't realize at first that at 14, you're not able to consent to somebody happy with you, to an adult having sex with you.
When you're held down and you're trying to get away and you can't get away, that's an assault. That's not having sex willingly with a person.
And so, yeah, a lot of times I've talked with people who don't realize that what they've experienced is some form of abuse. And then as they talk about it more and as they think about it more, it's like, oh, my gosh, I was a beast.
And so we have to be aware of that dynamic that sometimes, and it could be, boy, a wide range of reasons, sometimes it's just self protection. Right. Because if we have been abused, we are vulnerable to abuse.
So sometimes it is safer to think we haven't been abused.
[00:13:41] Speaker C: Well, and that, and if your abuser is, is somebody you depend on, you have to block that out to survive.
And that's why a lot of people who don't, like, remember parts of their childhood or hardly anything, it's usually huge sign of abuse.
I think I have a book, grab it real quick.
It's called the betrayal of trauma.
It's the logic of forgetting childhood abuse by Jennifer Fraide.
I don't know if you've read that or not.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: Oh, boy. She is really good and has really helped that they understand.
[00:14:48] Speaker C: I mean, and one of the things she mentions in her book, it talks about, you know, you can suppress it because you need that person to survive.
And so, you know, because, you know, there's fight, flight and freeze, but people don't talk about appeasement, compliance.
And I think there's one other, you know, to avoid, you know, long term situations. And those are submit, I think that's the word that's usually on the chart that doesn't get talked about. And people don't talk about those three in particular when talking about trauma response or fight or flight types of responses.
Yes.
Yeah. Doctor Anna Salter recommended her book.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: So she's, Salter is also.
[00:16:01] Speaker C: Oh, yes.
She's a very interesting lady and very, very intelligent and has so many resources, so much knowledge.
So let's go on.
In what ways can the church support survivors?
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Well, one of the things that's going to be super important as the church works to support survivors of abuse is that you have a framework of how you would support a person.
And this framework isn't going to give you all of the pat answers because all the pat answers are usually going to fall short.
But what the framework does is it gives you a way to analyze what you are thinking about doing.
So I'll give a quick summary of the six pieces of a framework, and they're really the focus of the article as well, these six key principles of trauma informed practice.
So the first is safety.
It is absolutely essential that as the church tries to support survivors, as the church tries to be there for people who have been harmed, whether that harm occurred inside the church, whether the harm occurred outside the church, safety is paramount. And safety can mean physical safety, such as I would really prefer not to be hit, thank you very much.
And it can also involve psychological safety, emotional safety, spiritual safety. Is it safe to question why the heck God let this happen?
And there's a lot of seeking around that question, and it's in part trying to find out, trying to find some type of context for what's happened. Is it safe to question God within that search for content and to actually let your pastor know I do not yet how this, the event that happened, fits with a good God who happens to be omnipotent and is in charge of everything that happens, I'm having a real hard time with that.
So it needs to be safe for the person to be questioning. I mean, we look at examples like David, my goodness, David questioned God and somehow God was able to handle it.
So safety is that first piece. The second piece is trustworthiness and transparency.
Trustworthiness we head into.
A lot of times when we head into trustworthiness, it's almost as if trustworthiness is a tool.
We decide that we're going to be trustworthy because we want the person to trust us.
And it's not a tool.
It is just something that we as christians are called to be. When God lists out the things that he hates, two of them are related to giving inaccurate information.
When we're told how to behave, we're told to behave in a manner that is worthy of trust. Who is Satan? He is the great deceiver.
So we're called to be worthy of trust in all that we do. And then transparency goes along with that. Trustworthiness to be appropriately transparent, which involves what information is shared, when it is shared, and how it is shared.
For example, there was a meeting coming up where there's going to be a city council vote on a particular amendment up in northern Minnesota. Well, they didn't announce it until after. Until the day of the vote because they were pretty confident that the people who supported it would show up and knew about it, that the people who opposed it wouldn't show up because they didn't know about it.
That's not being transparent. Even though that same day that the vote was called, they made an announcement.
No, it should have been made actually days before in that particular case.
We also have to realize that with transparency, transparency relates to our power. I was in target the other day shopping, and there was a person that I'm assuming was a staff person and a person with an intellectual disability shopping at Target. And the person with the intellectual disability asked, where are we going?
And the person that I'm assuming was a staff person said, I'll tell you when we get there.
The person with the intellectual disability was only asking, hey, where am I going? So that I can plan accordingly? I would like to know to what part of the store I'm going.
And the staff person decided to withhold the information at that point.
And so transparency does not involve withholding information just because we can, just because we have the power to.
So there's safety, there's trustworthiness and transparency. There's peer support.
Peer support is on a couple of levels. It's helping make sure that a person has the support that they need, whether that's financial support, housing support, mental health support, spiritual support, or some other type of support that the person might need.
It also means that we're helping a person understand how not to overtax the supports in their lives, and we are helping the people, the caregivers, as it were, that would be a support for that person. We are helping them to care.
We are providing them with resources that they can then share with the person.
Believe it or not, caregiving can really take.
[00:23:01] Speaker C: Oh, yes, it can. It's one of the most exhausting jobs ever.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Ever. And so it's also just taking care of the caregiver, because the caregiver is doing so much, and so just taking care of the caregiver.
Peer support also is a recognition that there are people who are out there with similar lived experience, and that similar lived experience needs to be respected and honored. That if the person wants to have some type of a role in helping to provide care, they're not obligated to by any stretch of the imagination.
But if a person with similar lived experience wants to provide some level of care and support, that's honored.
I mentioned that I have cancer. I was in the hospital. This was during my first round with cancer, and I was in the hospital for, I believe, a blood clot.
And I was feeling really down, and I was feeling really defeated.
And my aunt Diane walks into the hotel room, and she says, knock it off. You don't have time for this kind of an attitude.
If anyone else had said that to me, I would have kicked him out of my hospital room.
But it was my aunt Diane, who was a cancer survivor.
She had similar lived experience, and because she had similar lived experience, she was able to look at it and take it from a different approach that somebody who had never experienced cancer wouldn't have been able to have.
And I gave her a respect that somebody without cancer would not have gotten from me. And that doesn't let those without similar lived experience off the hook. You still need to be there. You still need to do your part. But it's also recognizing the power of that similar lived experience.
The fourth principle is collaboration and mutuality.
With collaboration and mutuality, we're looking at working together, and in part, it's working together with the person who's been harmed. You don't just go ahead and decide what's best for them. You work alongside them to determine what is best, because they kind of know their situation a little bit better than you do.
It's collaboration within your group.
So is it a group of people inside the church that are leading the matter?
Is that whole group involved? Or is it just one person making all the decisions? And then you collaborate with people outside your group, and that might be that you collaborate with housing assistants, you collaborate with mental health providers, you collaborate with child protection by making that child protection report that you're legally required to make, or that you need to make, simply because it's a moral or ethical responsibility.
So there's collaboration and mutuality. The fifth principle, the fifth piece of this framework for how we can help people is empowerment, voice and choice.
AMa, by its very nature, strips power away from a person, and it is our job to walk alongside them as they take some of that power back and as they take some of their voice back.
And then the final principle in this framework is humility in the face of historical, cultural and gender considerations, which are often just simply inseparable from trauma that is happening.
So we have to be humble with those because we recognize, you know what? I'm not going to have as much insight into a particular set of experiences as somebody else will because they've experienced it and I haven't. So I need to be humble in that.
So those six principles kind of form a framework of how do we go about helping? And when we have those six principles, we can think about specific things to do within that.
Also, anyone is willing to, is able to contact Grace and just say, hey, can I have some help walking through this? Can you walk through this with me? Help me think through how these principles.
[00:27:34] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's great. I think.
I think the cultural and the gender consideration, I feel like we could.
Could you give some good examples of that? Or even historical.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: Sure.
So, for example, sometimes, so I'm not commenting on.
On whether or not a theology is appropriate or not appropriate, right or wrong. I'm just giving this as an example.
An example would be a church that speaks frequently about the sin of same sex sexual activity.
And then they wonder why nobody came forward saying that they were abused by a member of the same sex.
Well, that church has set it up and made it harder to report because they put so much emphasis on that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong.
Without clarifying a difference between being sinned and sinning against within their theology.
They haven't said anything about if you're abused, it's not sin.
So that would be one example. And again, I'm not trying to speak to the rightness or the wrongness of a theology, but I'm giving that as an example.
Another example would be, I was talking with a church one time, and we were talking to them about sexual harassment that had occurred at the church and the male leaders of the church. There were three people in the meeting with us.
All except one were male, and the one female was the pastor's wife.
And so they're talking and they're saying that they feel really good about their response to the sexual harassment that was occurring and in how they dealt with the situation.
But to me it's ringing a little bit.
It's seeming like it's not quite what the response should have been.
And so I just asked the pastor, well, have you asked any women what they think about how you've dealt with the situation?
And the pastor's like, oh, we haven't.
Maybe we should. And he turns to his wife and he says, how are we doing?
And the wife turns to him and says, yeah, the ladies and I have been talking about it. You've totally blown it.
[00:30:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: To the pastor's credit, he said, well, I guess we're going to have to go back to, well, at least that.
[00:30:47] Speaker C: Was a humble response.
And that's, that's not, and that's not.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: I'm sorry, go ahead.
[00:30:56] Speaker C: That's not, that doesn't happen a lot.
[00:31:03] Speaker B: Right? It's. We totally get it. Cause we're guys.
No, you totally don't get it.
And it's super important because when we think about these things. So let's just take sexual harassment as an example. 50% of women and 33% of men report either seeing or experiencing sexual harassment at church.
That's not sexual harassment out in the world. That's sexual harassment at church.
50% of women report experiencing or seeing sexual harassment at church, and a third of men report experiencing or seeing sexual harassment at church.
That's a problem. And if we don't have humility in the midst of that problem, it's just.
[00:31:56] Speaker C: Going to keep perpetuating.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: And.
[00:32:00] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I mean, I've seen sexual harassment at church and I've had to report it. And it's, it's very overwhelming at times. It's like, how much, you know, how do you bring this up to your pastor, to your leadership? And when do you, you know, when do you bring it up? Because, you know, sexual harassment can be kind of minor stuff. I mean, we had a guy at my church, and he was, you know, he's a mentally ill kind of creature. He's got a lot of health problems and things, but he's probably in his thirties or forties. And he was making comments about the high school girls and calling them, you know, derogatory terms because of what they were wearing. And I'm like, that's not okay.
And I told him that, and then I reported him to the pastor's. Like, that does not need to be said.
That can be very harmful.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Yeah, we want to be mindful of limitations that a person may have. We want to be mindful of that. But that doesn't mean that a 14 year old girl is responsible for carrying the weight of somebody else's mental health, or a 14 year old boy is responsible for carrying the weight of somebody else's mental health.
That's not their responsibility.
And so adequate safeguards need to be set up.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Pete will be back next week at Thursday at 10:00 a.m. To tell the rest of his story. Always follow us on your favorite podcast platform and social media platform. If you have any questions, reach out to rachelonrecovery.com and always subscribe to us on YouTube. Thanks.
