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Lori and I have been reading Redeeming Heartache by Dan B. Allender and Cathy Loerzel. It’s an excellent but difficult and painful read, about how our childhood traumas can affect us for the rest of our lives if we don’t deal with them.
The book addresses the difference between “big T trauma” and “little t trauma”. Psychologists make this division based on the event. Things like war, terrorism, natural disasters, physical or sexual abuse, and devastating accidents are big T. Little t events would be things an individual finds very distressing on a personal level that don’t fall into the big T category. Those would include being bullied, the death of a pet, harassment, and loss of important relationships.
But we’re all different, and we all deal with things differently. So these lists are iffy. We also need to consider repetition. Being bullied or harassed occasionally is not the same as being subjected to it every day of school for years. Repeated little t can be more damaging than big T.
Allender echoes Peter Levine, who said “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” I think this is spot on and a critical point we must grasp. Potentially traumatic events don’t become long term trauma when someone caring is there to listen to us talk about it. And years or decades later, healing from trauma requires us to talk about it with an empathetic listener. That can be a good friend, maybe your wife, or someone trained to do it.
All of this is to encourage you to think about the trauma in your life. Please don’t minimise it. And please don’t tell yourself real men suck it up and keep going. That can be life-saving in the middle of a war or a natural disaster. But it’s life crippling if you don’t ever deal with it. Unresolved trauma hurts you, your wife, your marriage, and your kids.
If you want to start healing, Redeeming Heartache would be a great place to start.
Redeeming Heartache: How Past Suffering Reveals Our True Calling
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I love your blog, and I rarely have any issues with your posts: many of them are incredibly valuable. But I have to take issue with this particular one. I find myself increasingly distressed by the victim culture we have created, where every hurt, every pain, every poorly chosen word gets magnified, and the recipient receives positive strokes in direct proportion to how much hurt he or she perceives. We REWARD weakness. We MAGNIFY injury. I consider my parents’ generation: born shortly before a crippling depression, then coming directly out of that into World War II. They saw and lived through things that we can’t even imagine, yet not once did I hear from them about their crippling traumatic childhood. They realized that, as Jesus told us, there will be troubles and pain in life. I truly believe we need to take the focus off of victim status and reward quiet strength and survival skills. Our latest generation is experiencing a mental health pandemic because of this: it has to stop.
@Gary Giessmann – I doubt I will change your mind, but I will address what you said because I know you are not alone.
I do see the victim culture you mention. It’s wrong. But I also see that, it’s an overreaction to a different wrong. My goal is to find God’s truth between those two wrongs.
This is not about reliving every little thing. It’s about dealing with legitimate trauma. I fear those of us in the church have set the bar for what is trauma way too high, and well above what God sees.
The goal of the book I mentioned is to leave the trauma behind. Not by denying or suppressing it, but by dealing with it so it falls away and stops controlling who we are and what we do.
My parents both lives through the Great Depression. I don’t see much fall out from that in my father’s life. Perhaps he got past it, perhaps he hid it well – he was a very quiet, private person. OTOH, I see lifelong fall out in my mother. It saddens me that she never deal with that and was hurt by it for all of her adult life. I may write a post about that.
The highest US suicide rate occurred during the Great Depression. They didn’t talk about it because it was culturally unacceptable to do so. And because of that, some just ended their lives.
The Bible tell us to weep with those who weep. It doesn’t suggest we tell them to just toughen up and move past it.
Now, during our mental health pandemic, the suicide rate is just over half of what it was then. And it was below half for decades up until Covid.
This post reminds me of an article I found: https://journalofpsychiatryreform.com/2021/12/07/early-exposure-to-pornography-a-form-of-sexual-trauma
@Robert Dundon – I agree with the title, but the article seemed to be “proving” it based on how individuals with clear mental health issues reacted to porn. That’s easy to dismiss. Of course, showing the effects in people without mental health problems. But it’s more useful.