The world religions that claim "life is suffering" are absolutely right. The role of the Cross in communal grief has been under-examined. Christ was right to accept suffering over avoidance. Christianity is grief work, first of the death of Christ, then of our own deaths. Whether "one who finally feels communal trauma" is called a priest, a prophet, a suffering servant--the name isn't the important part. Most significant is the fact that Christ embodied all three, that we will do the same whether we like it or not. Trauma, finally felt, is either consecrated as a sacred offering, or it increases suffering immeasurably.
On a nervous system level, avoidance of suffering costs us dearly. We long for a security we don't have. Manipulating to suffice our survival needs is an option: that possibility manifests in the mind itself, as thoughts of gluttony, greed, sloth, sorrow, lust, wrath, vanity and pride. But the wage of manipulation is paranoia. We long for a degree of control that escapes us. Spiritualizing to avoid facing powerlessness is an option. Even if we gain a sense of the beauty of the "self," avoidance of lack of control manifests as self pity, blame, self righteousness, shame, rationalization, resentment, worry and entitlement. But the result of acting on these thoughts is anxiety. There's no harm in saying the self is beautiful. The harm comes when benefit or advantage is sought because of it. It's confirmed by disappointed expectations. When the Apostles asked Jesus what they'd receive for all they'd given up, all Jesus added was persecutions--then he left them with disappointed expectations. With suffering and struggle left in place post-redemption, the real miracle is "choosing to value small, impermanent joys" over and against something flashier, and despite hardship. This (and connection with those who do likewise) is the core of Christian transformation.
Examination of Complex PTSD's specific symptoms--and how they are transformed into gifts--pays massive dividends. People with CPTSD intellectualize as a survival mechanism: limitedly, the artifice of theology or wisdom can assist with this, so long as "the moment to let go of intellect and ground in the body" is intuited correctly. But tongues will cease, knowledge will pass away, and the only thing left will be love. And listen: love and presence are the same. It's a sweet spot that avoids denial on the one end, and running the show on the other. But love cannot always be tidily conceptualized or verbalized. And if we over-identify love with positive thought and sensations, suffering will function, with difficult kindness, as a corrective.
People with CPTSD have difficult relationships with mind, emotions and nervous system. The Trinity is, in the first place, a personification of how the mind works: in other words, fragmented minds choose deities with moving parts. The Father becomes the "divine persona" in relation to whom we straighten out the mind. The Son becomes the "divine persona" in relation to whom we work out our emotions. The Holy Spirit becomes the "divine persona" in relation to whom we learn to regulate our nervous system. The arising of the trinity within--what the Greek Orthodox Church calls "theosis" or "deification--comes specifically out of trauma induced fragmentation of the psyche.
People with CPTSD store trauma in the body. The prophets very often felt generational trauma viscerally. Elijah was so depressed he asked the Lord to take his life. Ezekiel saw a field of dry bones, most likely his own, and had to reframe pent up trauma by prophesying to the flesh. He had to calm the nervous system by prophesying to the breath. My body and yours may have been slapped around too much, and will then permanently brace. We'll have pain we can't explain in the very spots that were struck, until we go to that spot, speak soothingly to the body consistently enough that it can finally relax. It is a hard, necessary obligation.
People with CPTSD dissociate: when we come out of denial, dissociation feels negative. After a while it begins simply to feel numb, and after that, we realize dissociation is preferable to attachment. When we deal with the suffering of life increasingly head on, we are freed from attachment in real time. The task then becomes to fill that space with virtue and the various transformations of theosis--learning to bear up under stress and become the Christ you've received.
People with CPTSD are hypervigilant: when the ego becomes quiet, the energy behind this can become deep acceptance of reality as it is. Life can be full of alternating bliss and pain, full of alternating attraction and aversion, and the individual practitioner remains still. To craving and clinging, there is always a cost. Our help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Attempting to control or find security based on ego, craving or desire will always take a toll in anxiety.
People with CPTSD struggle with identity. The demoniac said "my name is Legion, for we are many." Martha was worried and concerned about many things. Mary was possessed by eight demons. Let us remember: ego is an umbrella concept that is driven by many different compulsive thoughts. But ego is a preoccupation that quickly shows its ineffectiveness--eventually, the demoniac was gashing himself with rocks. The "many preoccupations" yield as one becomes grounded in the body. The vehicle of this is the name of Jesus, repeated as mantra. Giving attention to the feeling of sound, we increasingly see the worth of giving ourselves something to feel that's neither a drug nor anxiety. The question "who am I" ceases to be as important as "how do I give meaningful attention to the sound of the name?"
People with cptsd struggle to feel understood. No one understands the trauma, and no one understands the spiritual awakening. It is hard to figure out which spiritual thoughts are socially significant, and which are merely individually significant. The prophet Jeremiah said "When I said 'I will not mention him or speak anymore in his name' then within me there is something like a burning fire, shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in, and I cannot." Verbal impulsivity is a trauma response, often referred to as "trauma dumping." Legion, after being healed, went off and proclaimed Christ in the decapolis--but this is a charitable framing indeed. Confrontation with the limits of people's energy for understanding is swift. St. Francis knew the pitfalls of going through life longing to be understood: he prayed "grant that I may never seek so much to be understood as to understand." Suffering doesn't end, nor ultimately does it cease to be solitary or burdensome: instead it gains us empathy for the struggles of others.
People with CPTSD struggle to identify normalcy. They have often been told their responses are odd, that they can't deal with "life as it is." The truth is different: people with CPTSD have normal reactions to dysfunctional situations--which they're then gaslit into believing are normal. One of the most important functions of scripture is this: emotional recognition. Jesus flipped tables and wept. He was troubled, but understood being troubled as "a task at hand" through which God could be glorified. The psalms express a whole spectrum of desolation, feelings of dehumanization, wrath, vengeance, paranoia. And when we who are traumatized read about them, we become safe enough to say "so that's what that sensation is called!" Face time with the scriptures is important for emotional literacy.
People with CPTSD often have racing thoughts--in ways that mimic obsessive compulsive or bipolar thought patterns. The difficulty is this--those thoughts aren't always negative. Racing thoughts can be about, for instance, faith. They can feel quite blissful, and can offer a real alternative to addictive behavior. In that way, blissful racing thoughts are a mercy; and yet they may still be a trauma response. This is why God was silent while Elijah told him, three times, that he'd been zealous for the Lord and they were seeking his life. God knew the racing thoughts were a trauma response: the is why God was not in earthquake, wind or fire, but why he was absolutely present in the still small voice of silence.
People with CPTSD have difficult relationships with mind, emotions and nervous system. The Trinity is, in the first place, a personification of how the mind works: in other words, fragmented minds choose deities with moving parts. The Father becomes the "divine persona" in relation to whom we straighten out the mind. The Son becomes the "divine persona" in relation to whom we work out our emotions. The Holy Spirit becomes the "divine persona" in relation to whom we learn to regulate our nervous system. The arising of the trinity within--what the Greek Orthodox Church calls "theosis" or "deification--comes specifically out of trauma induced fragmentation of the psyche.
People with CPTSD store trauma in the body. The prophets very often felt generational trauma viscerally. Elijah was so depressed he asked the Lord to take his life. Ezekiel saw a field of dry bones, most likely his own, and had to reframe pent up trauma by prophesying to the flesh. He had to calm the nervous system by prophesying to the breath. My body and yours may have been slapped around too much, and will then permanently brace. We'll have pain we can't explain in the very spots that were struck, until we go to that spot, speak soothingly to the body consistently enough that it can finally relax. It is a hard, necessary obligation.
People with CPTSD dissociate: when we come out of denial, dissociation feels negative. After a while it begins simply to feel numb, and after that, we realize dissociation is preferable to attachment. When we deal with the suffering of life increasingly head on, we are freed from attachment in real time. The task then becomes to fill that space with virtue and the various transformations of theosis--learning to bear up under stress and become the Christ you've received.
People with CPTSD are hypervigilant: when the ego becomes quiet, the energy behind this can become deep acceptance of reality as it is. Life can be full of alternating bliss and pain, full of alternating attraction and aversion, and the individual practitioner remains still. To craving and clinging, there is always a cost. Our help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Attempting to control or find security based on ego, craving or desire will always take a toll in anxiety.
People with CPTSD struggle with identity. The demoniac said "my name is Legion, for we are many." Martha was worried and concerned about many things. Mary was possessed by eight demons. Let us remember: ego is an umbrella concept that is driven by many different compulsive thoughts. But ego is a preoccupation that quickly shows its ineffectiveness--eventually, the demoniac was gashing himself with rocks. The "many preoccupations" yield as one becomes grounded in the body. The vehicle of this is the name of Jesus, repeated as mantra. Giving attention to the feeling of sound, we increasingly see the worth of giving ourselves something to feel that's neither a drug nor anxiety. The question "who am I" ceases to be as important as "how do I give meaningful attention to the sound of the name?"
People with cptsd struggle to feel understood. No one understands the trauma, and no one understands the spiritual awakening. It is hard to figure out which spiritual thoughts are socially significant, and which are merely individually significant. The prophet Jeremiah said "When I said 'I will not mention him or speak anymore in his name' then within me there is something like a burning fire, shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in, and I cannot." Verbal impulsivity is a trauma response, often referred to as "trauma dumping." Legion, after being healed, went off and proclaimed Christ in the decapolis--but this is a charitable framing indeed. Confrontation with the limits of people's energy for understanding is swift. St. Francis knew the pitfalls of going through life longing to be understood: he prayed "grant that I may never seek so much to be understood as to understand." Suffering doesn't end, nor ultimately does it cease to be solitary or burdensome: instead it gains us empathy for the struggles of others.
For what it's worth, a spiritual program that better suited people with CPTSD would consist of five things: shadow work, via negativa spirituality, theosis, somatic body work, and mantra. Shadow work is a practice of "being safe enough to look at what you've repressed." The cross of Christ may seem like retraumatization, but devotion to the suffering and death of Christ can become a safe method of gradually facing and processing your own. The Scriptures can be helpful in this regard--it can allow us to face our unhealthiest selves and embrace something better. For example, take the wide acceptance of the "tongues of fire" metaphor for the holy spirit--it comes from Isaiah 5. The fact is, the same spot says "woe to you who are heroes at drinking wine." We all know that drinking is a tempting way to avoid grief, and that the apostles were certainly grieving. It isn't a stretch to think acceptance of the tongues of fire image points to a realization that assisted in concretizing sobriety for those who overused it. Via negativa spirituality is important because the transactionality of negotiating survival needs can often feel blissful and be clothed in spiritual language--but it is still transactionality; it still falls short of trust in providence. Manipulating in God's name is a possibility, and since God's name is "I AM" it is easily confused with ego--we can fall into it simply by forgetting that God's ways and our ways differ. The famous "cloud of unknowing"--the mystical method for quickly letting go of understandings we cling to--can be useful whether those understandings are negative or positive. Theosis is simply the process of realizing that, as one greek orthodox catechumen said "I can do hard things." Growth in virtue, in this case, is a manifestation of the indwelling of the Trinity. Bearing uneven and unfair weight, being happy when reasons to be sad persist, and choosing fascination with beauty when horrific chaos persists--all of these are "God skills." They show that the Father is arising within, of whom psalm 2 says "he who sits in the heavens laughs." As we laugh along, our ears open to later lines in the same psalm, where the Father says to us "you are my son, it is I who have begotten you this day." We need not wonder where the Father, Son, or, indeed, the Spirit are--they are the one within us whom we do not know.
Somatic body work is a fancy modern term for "the body keeping the score." The body will store what the mind fails to face and let go of. When the patriarch Jacob "struggled with a divine being till daybreak" he was dealing with trauma stored in his hip. He faced the tension and it blessed him but it left him with a permanent limp. Such is the lot of those who "struggle with God and prevail. The Desert Fathers are depicted as "struggling with demons"--and many of those struggles resolved as did the demoniac in Capernaum. The man yelled "I know who you are, the holy one of God"--interestingly, excessive certainly clothed in faith is shown, here, to be demonic--and when the man became more able to sit with uncertainty the text says the spirit "came out of him, without having done him any harm." Mantra is important because "the feeling of sound" is, on a sensation level, a more pleasant feeling than anxiety. Mantra's inner dimensions--slowly calling the mind to the name of Jesus (or whatever your mantra is)--this is easier to think about than the afflictive thoughts with which the mind attempts to secure survival needs. Such prayers work their way slowly, making an echo chamber of the body by repeated practice. First the sound becomes something that can be felt, then the vibrations assist in breaking up stored tension, then bodily sensations themselves come to represent prayer. Finally, the sounds and people we're surrounded by begin, themselves, to pray the mantra. This is what St. Paul talked about "in God we live and move and have our being." It is also what St. Peter talked about when he said to the paralytic "in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise and walk."
The desert fathers have a term, called "penthos." (Theologians would also use the term "compunction." Both mean "healthy sorrow for sins.") In a broader sense, the grief we are called to includes mourning our impermanence, suffering and death, as well as all of the generational trauma we've inherited. And it brings us back to what is perhaps a fuller definition of Christ's priestly ministry. The prophet Joel says "let the priests, between the vestibule and the altar, weep." In Christ, we don't bemoan attachments and sins on behalf of others--as if we're an unblemished sacrifice, they're in denial, and we're doing them a favor. We are becoming more aware of a malady common to us all, as Saint Paul said "there is not a good man left, no not even one." About the process of becoming emotionally sober, a recovering alcoholic once humorously noted "I don't know why I expected the process to be cleaner than this. I mean, I'm made of dirt!" It turns out that our serenity itself consists of this: to remember we are dust, and to dust we shall return. Earth and heaven, the stuff we're made of, will echo with anxiety till we do.
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