Psycho Spiritual Trauma as Experienced by Children, Law Enforcement, in the Arena of War, and Victims of Violation

This is an excerpt from PTSD: A Handbook for Recovery and a Guide for Spiritual Care Givers. (Pictured to the left is Spiritual Healing for Broken People available at CafePress. The PTSD Handbook will be available in the fall of 2011)

There is another danger from excessive emotions: numbness. The excess causes the body and brain to go into protective inhibition, withdraw, or shut down.
What began as an over-reaction turns into its opposite: withdrawal. It may manifest first as shell shock. This can be gotten over with rest, time and recuperation.
But there is a deeper kind of numbness, one that comes from traumatic emotional and psychic reaction as a victim of evil or a witness (also a victim) of evil. It is akin to extreme battle fatigue, but deeper. It may occur soon or develop after many years of witnessing evil (such as when policemen have to deal with frequent scenes of mayhem and violence).
For the adult victim, it is withdrawal as a form of protective inhibition. But it is more than protective inhibition. It is also a spiritual crisis.
It involves a crisis of doubting God and providence, distrust of others and disappointment with them. It often results in alienation from others and from latent good.
This is not the place to discuss the origins of evil, but a brief word about evil is apropos. Evil exists. You cannot see it, smell it, or taste it, but it is there. It operates through unaware people, through people under the influence of some drug or emotion, through people who set aside conscience to carry out orders or for selfish advantage, and through people who are acting out some programming from a long ago trauma. People are operated through. Even an angry or resentful person or one under the influence of a drug may commit some harm to another.
It is one thing to see evil operating through people in the arena of war, or as a policeman or as a first responder to a scene of mayhem. But it is another thing to be betrayed or rejected by the very ones you had looked to for love, as in the case of childhood emotional abuse.
When it happens to children, often through subtle relentless cruelty and rejection, it may result in a profound autistic type withdrawal into self and/or a deep hypnotic trance of schizophrenia.
I am aware that a typical diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder is attributed to other etiology.
I am writing here of a child’s confrontation with and reaction to confusion, cruelty and rejection. At a psycho-spiritual level, if there are sequelae for adults (even policemen, first responders, or soldiers) who witness or experience human evil, then surely there are parallel processes and sequelae in children who are even more sensitive, defenseless and unprepared for what they see.
An encounter with subtle or overt evil can negatively alter the course of a person’s life if it results in shock, hatred, and doubt.
Fortunately, an encounter with goodness can reverse the negative and restore faith, hope, and heal the damage from hate and shock. But I have to say that the goodness must be real. It is for this reason that our efforts to do good often fail because there is too much of our ego in them. Our efforts to repair or to reform have too much of the hand of man in them, and not the hand of God.
Don’t get me wrong. Rescuing someone from a bad situation is the right thing to do. Providing the basic necessities, food, housing, rest, a change of environment and time are important. Likewise, being a good listener, giving someone a chance to talk something through, and being positive instead of critical, are beneficial. There is even a placebo effect in having someone pay attention to and concern for you. The fact that the placebo effect takes place even when someone pretends to care proves that there are helpful mechanisms.
And it is my contention that shock, trauma, hatred, resentment and doubt block these helpful mechanisms. It also my contention that although human efforts to repair or reform may catalyze the placebo effect, too much of the hand of man leads to dependency and interferes with the soul's reception of the touch of God. A soul is the creation of God, and Who knows better how to repair a soul than our Creator?
Human help is very good at assisting in the healing of physical wounds. Human help can come to the aid of a person in a tight spot, or intervene to prevent self harm or harm to others, but at a certain point more is needed. For this "more" the doctor, social worker, counselor or spiritual care giver must be prepared to take a step back and stop trying to be the source themselves--stop playing God in other words. Just as the math student may be given the keys, but at a certain point s/he must be given the space to search and question, and after a period of incubation to experience the "aha" experience for himself. The teacher cannot experience it for him and cannot make it happen.
By doing no harm, by demonstrating caring, and by not taking advantage, the caregiver proves the victim an opportunity to set aside distrust, doubt, and hate. This, in essence, may remove the blocks that have prevented natural and spiritual healing processes from taking place.
Giving the recovering victim a pet to care for, some simple work to do, or a college course to attend provide an opportunity for self expression, which may permit the person to begin flowing and functioning again.
I must also say that it is sometimes good for a person to have a new environment away from the family members who appear on the surface to be doing everything they can to help this person. It may be (and often is the case) that contact with such people keeps alive the reminders of subtle confusion, rejection, comparisons, denials, and physical or emotional brutality (which occurs behind closed doors when no one else observes it) that caused the symptomology in the first place.
There is nothing worse for the victims of childhood or some sort of domestic abuse than to have someone running around making a show of being concerned and taking charge of everything, fooling everyone into thinking they are so helpful, when they are the perpetrators.
When all is said and done, if it is true that evil wears a thousand masks, and if it is a confrontation with evil for which we were unprepared and which we dealt with improperly that results in over reaction and psychic trauma—it is also true that it is the unexpected encounter with goodness which heals and restores.
I believe this is what Hippocrates, the father of medicine, had in mind when he said: “the patient might yet recover if he could believe in the goodness of the physician.”
Incidentally, this is why people were restored and healed of their afflictions when they encountered the Messiah. In His humility, He got His ego out of the way, so that the light of goodness shone through. “Why do you call me good. None is good but my Father in Heaven, ” He said.
He took no credit Himself, but attributed the good to His Father within. And in the same vein, He said, “Of myself I can do nothing. It is the Father who doth the works.”
He was the credible and perfectly believable witness.
Those who believed in Him were saved and restored. Yet it is remarkable that many did not believe. For them, the light, instead of warming and restoring like a summer sun warms the rose, burned the withered branches and drove them away from the light they hated.
Therefore I caution the helper, the doctor, the psychologist, the pastor or the social worker—do not think that you are the source of goodness or that your presence will somehow cure people. Instead, humbly do what you can to give the person a safe harbor and time.
Some will get better and some won't. Do what you can, but don't play God. You will have given them a chance and not driven them off with manipulations. And if the person does not get better you will not have the guilt and frustration of trying to make things happen.
Let me now briefly address the subject of sin. I know that it is not popular nowadays to talk about sin, but it is an apt term that accurately names something that also shocks and traumatizes people.
This brings us to the subject of another form of numbness. There is also a psycho-spiritual numbness that follows some self inflicted action that is a trauma to the soul: such as taking a drug, a promiscuous sex experience, or committing a major harm to another. This numbness is actually the soul’s sensing a deadness from a loss of innocence and separation from God.
A young person who takes a drug, for example, may sense this numbness the morning after the night before. Not yet jaded and inured to sin, he or she is still closer to innocence and doesn’t like the new feeling. It is a warning to us all that there is such a thing as a forbidden act.
Before leaving this topic, I must say that recovery is possible if one finds the way back to God, to His life and His light through a sober realization and through turning from sin.
In the case of our young person who experimented with drugs or promiscuous sex--being sorry and becoming chaste again, staying away from drugs, and listening to his parents instead of resenting them will prevent further deterioration. Nevertheless, a palpable change has occurred, not a good one. Indeed a trauma. Trauma is change. But God is perfectly capable of restoring one of his beloved’s souls. There is no sin that cannot be undone by a sincere regret and a turning to our Creator.
The policeman who experiences this psychic numbness after years of dealing with terrible people, or for example, some poor woman who was forced into a life of prostitution who experiences this numbness are both suffering the effects of the traumatic sin because of resentment (and judgment). Neither of these individuals were the perpetrators themselves, they were victims through what they saw or had to do.
Why then does each suffer the effect of psycho-spiritual trauma? Because of their resentment, judgment and hatred. Resentment and hate are big traumas to the human. Humans are creatures of love, and when we hate or resent another, we are transgressing the law and hurting our own soul.
Each of them must see their hate (or secret resentment and judgment) toward those who did bad things to them. It will help them when they see, really see, that the perpetrators were doing what was done to them.
It was done to the perpetrators, and through their hate, the nature of the evil got inside them and then pulled their strings.
When the victim (in our example, the policeman or the unfortunate woman sold into slavery) lets go of the resentment and the hatred, they become unblocked to receive God’s love. Bear in mind that this does not mean liking the perpetrator, pretending nothing happened or feeling sorry for him or her. It means seeing the wrong, but just not hating the person for it. Discern the error but without the pinch of judgment and resentment.