Untapped Reserves of Strength & Resilience
DAWN SCHURTER
When Pastor Josh asked me to write about the theology of the body as it relates to assault and abuse, my initial reaction was to start digging into the psychological and physiological effects of abuse on the mind and body. A social work standard for this is The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., and should you want to understand these physiological details better, I would encourage you to read it. But fair warning, it’s quite dense. When I ran it by my excellent supervisor, he rolled his eyes and said that that wasn’t the point at all. As usual, he was right. It’s difficult for me to really wade into the emotional aspects of this topic (as it consumes a fair amount of my work week), so I prefer to stay on the more superficial levels of cognition and physicality, even though they are intrinsically woven together with the emotional experience. After all, that is what the human experience is about… finding ways to bring together in unity the body, mind, and spirit. The thing about trauma is that it tends to rip the three apart, making it difficult to experience “being human” like one did before the trauma happened. This robbery of the human experience can take the form of intrusive flashbacks hijacking your present reality without warning, a sympathetic nervous system flooding your body with survival hormones when it’s erroneously read an innocuous detail as a sign of life-threatening danger, or a numbing mist shielding you from the dangers of the world, but also from forming meaningful connections with those in your life or experiencing joy.
It’s time to lean into the uncomfortable stuff. Let’s stick with the standard Biblical metaphor of the body being a temple. While sadly not the case for many, the church (the physical building, the specific congregation, the institution) was meant to be a place of sanctuary. As defined by children’s author Lemony Snicket, “Sanctuary … means a small, safe place in a troubling world.” I truly believe that’s what the church was meant to be… a refuge where no one would have to feel alone in a world which can be senseless, isolating, overwhelming, and painfully dark. If we're comparing the body to a temple, then it too should be a safe place in a troubling world. But as we know, temples and bodies are not always respected or protected. Churches are ransacked and desecrated... bodies are battered and broken. This betrayal of a safe space comes with a particular type of grief. It's a loss of what was, and a loss of what you counted on in the future. In my experience, it's hard to move past the betrayal and begin rebuilding the sanctuary until the grief is acknowledged and addressed. Denying the grief of assault and abuse sometimes looks like cognitively knowing that an experience is over, but getting upset when your emotions and body don't seem to agree. It sometimes looks like a functioning life, but with distant relationships or ones filled with pointless conflict. It sometimes looks like an unhealthy relationship with food, the inability to sleep, or pain in the body.
But if grieving could be the answer to rebuilding our sanctuaries, whyever would we resist it? Because grieving is terrifying, overwhelming, and so painful. We are afraid that if we allow it in, it will overwhelm and drown us long before we see the other side of it... if there even IS an "other" side of it. Grief tends to strike at our identities, which are often built in relation to other people or concepts. I am a parent. I am a sibling. I am a [enter your professional identity]. I am [enter your adjective of choice]. But what happens when the descriptor that has been stripped away is: I am in charge of my body. I am safe in this relationship. I am safe in my home. When those fundamental identities are called into question (or are never allowed to form in the first place), it can become nearly impossible to know what's left without those things. And that question... "What is left of me?"... is the question that leads us into vast, unknown spaces in ourselves. That space is a difficult place to sit. I have no answers from here on out... because that question leads to different places for every person who faces it. However, I do believe that unflinching self-reflection leads you to better, truer places than a denial of what has passed and what has changed ever could. I hope that when you are ready, you will be able to sit with grief and think about the questions it poses to your very self.
The great hope in my line of work is that with courageous self-reflection, a stable living environment, and emotional support, my clients (who are all survivors of abuse) may find answers that will lead them toward untapped reserves of strength and resilience. When my clients are willing to grieve their losses in life, they're able to integrate those things into a part of their whole experience instead of allowing those painful experiences to become the center of their identities. When this happens, they're able to regulate and live in peace in their own bodies again, they are able to engage in meaningful relationships again, and their minds are able to look to the future instead of forever towards their past. They're able to experience being human again in all its complexity and richness.
Dawn Schurter prefers living in her own head, but as a therapist, spends most of her day living in other people’s. She loves reading fantasy and science fiction, traveling, being outdoors, and crafting things. Her New Year’s resolution is to draw something every day.