I have recently encountered the work of Professor Gordon Turnbull, the internationally acclaimed expert on the topic of trauma.  His professional training is that of a psychiatrist but, unlike the majority in his profession, he has always used the minimum of drug therapy with his patients.  In focusing on treating trauma and PTSD, he has changed the lives of many.  He has not just brought relief and healing to his patients but has succeeded in changing some of the attitudes of his notoriously conservative profession.  

Turnbull’s 2011 book, Trauma, is part autobiography and part exploration of the therapy that can be offered to many sufferers of post-traumatic stress.  Having read the book over the past few days on Kindle, I find that my brain is now buzzing with ideas as to how Turnbull’s thinking and theoretical models illuminate many of the problems of spiritual and sexual abuse in the churches. There are many ideas to be shared but here I can only touch on a few.  One major claim made by Turnbull is that significant trauma is something that touches up to half the British population.  This is something he brings out in an internet discussion with Rob Hopkins. Trauma is the consequence not only of car accidents, plane crashes and episodes of war but it can be the result of everyday episodes of controlling behaviour.  If one person controls the life of another over a period, there can be profound effects on an individual’s ‘psychology and maturation’.   Taking this further we can see that society provides many opportunities for people to become victims of trauma within socially approved institutions.  We ‘allow’ husbands to control their wives or adult children their parents, all within the parameters of legally tolerated behaviour.  Readers of this blog will not be surprised to note that I began to think immediately of the ways that churches can be guilty of trauma-inducing behaviour.  The church does little to question congregations where the Bible is used as a tool of intimidation.  Acceptable behaviour within some traditions includes the constant reminder of the existence of hell and how eternal damnation awaits those who stray from a narrowly defined path of behaviour.   Although these applications of his ideas are not found in the book, I am sure that Turnbull would identify ‘Jane’ as a sufferer of PTSD. Her reported ‘glazing’ and ‘dissociation’ appear to be a common feature of post-traumatic experience.  They are part of the survival method used by the brain to try to process experiences of violent attack from the outside.

There is a lot of information about the physiology of trauma in both the book and the internet article.  One key message that I picked up from both is that a trauma response, such as PTSD, is in no way to be identified as a mental illness.  It is rather to be understood as the way a brain attempts to cope with traumatic or stressful events.   Stress events naturally range in their severity from the mild to the severe.  When these events go beyond a certain point in severity or length of exposure, something gives way.  The fight-flight response is activated first.  If this is ineffective, a freeze response may take over.

Turnbull describes the way that many people are affected by trauma more or less continuously.  This would apply typically to women in violent marriages or people who live in dangerous neighbourhoods.  Such people would be in a state of ‘hyper-vigilance’ and exhibit signs of paranoia in their day to day interaction with others.   A constant sense of danger will over-stimulate the brain into a kind of overdrive of alertness and stress.

Living with constant stress is, to put it mildly, detrimental to good health.  The body will typically look for addictive substances as a way of blocking out these internally stressful reactions.  Such addictions carry their own health risks on top of the high blood-pressure, neurological disease and digestive problems that come with high levels of traumatic stress.  Turnbull mentions how nomads in Africa who live without this stress do not suffer from these illnesses. 

One very interesting point in the Hopkins article is the observation made by Turnbull about creativity.  To summarise, he explains how dealing with severe stress will lessen or even destroy creativity.  He takes the example of the NHS.  When a hospital comes into a stressful episode, the ability of the staff to come up with a creative response to the crisis is undermined.  From the outside, solutions might seem easy to put into place.  From the inside, because imagination and creativity is paralysed by the stress, everything becomes harder to solve.

In this short piece I am only able to share a tiny part of what Turnbull has shared.  The main book goes into much more detail about Turnbull’s own life story.  In particular, he records the details of his battles with the medical establishment to change attitudes and the understanding of trauma and its treatment.  

For the rest of this post, I want to reflect on Turnbull’s claim about the ubiquity of trauma and how this may impact our understanding of the Church.  My summary of the situation is that the Church is an unwelcome contributor to the existence of stress in society.  At the same time, it has the resources both to neutralise and heal much of the same trauma and stress that we find all around us.

The first thing to be said is that, at its worst, the Church can be seen as responsible for inducing an environment of fear which contributes to serious and persistent trauma.   When an individual is reminded of the reality of hell every Sunday, that can be considered an example of the persistent control that Turnbull describes as being a cause of trauma.  By contrast Jesus seems to have read Turnbull’s book.  One key message we read in the Gospels is a simple one: ‘Do not be afraid’.  The word that sums up what Jesus came to bring is contained in the Hebrew word ‘shalom’.  This word sums up everything that is an antidote to stress and trauma.  It draws on the idea of reconciled relationships, forgiveness and the freedom that comes when we let go of the urge to have power, domination or control.  When we summarise Christian teaching as being a command to love, we are summarising the impulse to allow everyone, even those we do not like particularly, to flourish and discover their true shalom.  In that peace there is no trauma or stress.  Perhaps shalom is the gift that the Church has to offer to a world where there is so much in the way of trauma and the stress that follows it.

In recent days we have been reading about the letter from 2000 Christians addressed to the Archbishops.  These signatories are arguing that the Church should not allow the flourishing of transgendered individuals.  The existence of such people offends the biblical world view of conservative Christians.  This implied condemnation of people who do not somehow fit a narrow mould of ‘normality’ is, to me, a kind of blasphemy.  From Turnbull’s perspective there is being enacted an attempt to control a group.  In this place of desired control, they are effectively being placed in a situation of trauma.  Thankfully most of them will not willingly surrender to this controlling categorisation.  This is because many other Christians, apart from conservatives, read the gospels in a different way.  For them Jesus speaks of acceptance, tolerance, inclusion and love.   I for one will always want to protect transgendered people from listening to dangerous expressions of traumatic rejection.  I will read the gospel again and again to reassure myself that the Jesus I follow is indeed one who cared about wholeness and deliverance from trauma.  He it is, who invites everyone, rich, poor, male, female, transgendered and every other condition into a place of rest.  ‘Come unto me all ye that are laden (traumatised) and I will give you rest’.