Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast I have with me Dr. Francine Tan. She’s a recent graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, with her PhD. She wrote on this issue of trauma, and today we’re going to answer some of your questions.
This is new. This is the first time we’ve done something directly like this. We have lots of questions that have come in from our ACBC Truth In Love listeners, and we’re going to start a process of working through some of these questions, and I’m actually really excited about this. I’m going to frame the questions the way that it comes in from you, and then we’re going to address some of these, and Francine’s going to help me today.
We’re going to be talking about the issue of trauma and some of the things related to trauma. So, Francine, welcome to the podcast.
Francine Tan: Thanks for having me.
Dale Johnson: Looking forward to answering some of these questions. So the first one I want to start with is about trauma-informed, clinical-informed perspective, and the question is related to the need to add to the Bible for counseling, and this is the way the question is asked. What do you think is the best Scripture passage or two to help counselors combat someone when they say being clinically informed and trauma-informed is better than just the Bible?
Kind of an interesting way to phrase the question, how do we combat someone? Well, first, let me talk about that idea of what it means to combat someone. The idea is not to be combative, right? The idea is, let’s have a dialogue. Are we even sure that we’re using the same terms? Do we even know what in the world we mean when we talk about these ideas of clinically-informed?
I think it’s well-established now that lots of people who use the idea of clinically-informed, that they often don’t mean the same thing. And that’s not excusing anybody who uses that term, I’m just saying that the reality is that some people use that term and they use it differently than others. So, what you would want to do is have a conversation to find out, like, what do they actually mean when they use that term?
Further, when you think about trauma-informed, well, there’s a technical way to think about trauma-informed care that the government has laid out with SAMHSA and whatnot.
However, a lot of people hear the concept of being informed by some secular researchers out there, and they just use the term in a non-technical way. And so you’d want to find out, what do people mean by the terms that they’re using? That’s really important. And so the idea is not to be, “combative”. The idea is to, let’s make sure we’re using the same terms.
And then once we find out what we mean by the terms, now we can start asking questions. Okay, when you use the concept of clinically-informed, do you mean adding extra-biblical information in some sort of necessary or required way to add to the Bible?
Like there’s common grace insights, and we think we should utilize that kind of stuff from the outside. That’s the kind of stuff that we’re asking about. So if we boil down the back part of that question, being clinically-informed and trauma-informed, is that better than just the Bible?
So Francine, I want to bring you in here, and let’s talk a little bit about this idea. Is it better to utilize outside information, like clinically-informed perspective proposes, like the trauma-informed perspective proposes, better than just simply using the Bible? Get some thoughts on that.
Francine Tan: Yeah, just to tack on what you said about, for example, the government agency, SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, they have a very specific definition when they mean trauma-informed care. And here’s how they would define it.
They say that “trauma is the result from an event, a series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening, and that has lasting effects on a person’s functioning, mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”
So, now their definition includes the event, the experience of the event, and the effects of the event. And also, it’s a description. What they’re doing here, even in this definition, is not telling you now what to do, necessarily. It’s just describing that an individual has experienced a difficult event, and there are potentially lasting effects from that event.
So, even unpacking a little bit of what insights are we talking about, we can begin to address that question without circling back to, what are we doing in counseling? What is the definition? What’s the nature of counseling? And counseling is theological. Your understanding of the problem is going to shape how you approach the solution to that counseling.
Just to reference 2 Peter 1:3—very familiar verses to our counselors, where Peter himself says that seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.
So, when it comes down to the nature of counseling, where we aim to help believers grow in their sanctification to be more like Christ, Paul says in Colossians 1:28-29, we’re proclaiming Christ that we may present everyone mature in Christ, and God has given us His divine power in the ordinary means of grace, in the Word, in prayer, in church, in the Spirit, in fellowship with other believers, to become more like Himself, that He has called us according to His own glory and excellence.
So, what other insights then are we talking about that would facilitate sanctification in the regenerate believer?
Dale Johnson: I think that part’s key when you talk about sanctification. I want to take it back before maybe I go a little further with the concept of sanctification, and even the way that the question is asked, is using clinically informed or trauma-informed better?
Now, to be informed by something means it is shaping your worldview. It’s adding to how you think about a particular thing. So, the question I would want to know is, in what ways are you informed about these experiences that people have in life?
So, obviously people have really, really terrible experiences. In the modern, we call these things traumatic experiences.
Those things are real. As we deal with those types of experiences, what informs you on how you perceive what’s actually happening to a person? What is it that they’re feeling? Why do they feel the ways that they feel? There’s a framework that you’re using to be informed or to build a perception that you have about what they’re walking through, what they’re feeling, what they’re experiencing, what’s normal behavior, what’s normal emotion in relation to that.
What’s a proper way that the inner man can come to rest? And the clinically informed perspective, the trauma-informed perspective, they’re offering extra biblical information that adds to that framework to try and understand what a person might be walking through. When we describe that the Bible is comprehensive, what you have to see is the opportunity costs that’s available here. So when we say that the Bible is comprehensive, what I’m saying is that the Bible provides the proper context in which to understand every experience that we have in life. Even the most dramatic, difficult, terrible experiences that we would have, is the Bible actually explains the things we need to know and how we should understand contextually what’s happening to us because of the nature of reality that God gives surrounding the context of an event like that, that we live in a world cursed by sin.
It’s hard to understand a traumatic experience that we would, if somebody deeply sins against us or offends us, or some tragedy happens to us in our life, or natural disaster occurs, or whatever the case might be. When those things happen, you don’t have a category for why or how something like that would happen if we’re not found within the context of the Scripture. That starts to build how we would respond appropriately, how we would set that experience within context, how we would understand what normal emotions should be, or could be, or might be, the gamut of emotions that we would experience, and so on. Those things are absolutely critical. Even the victim’s perception of what’s happening, trying to make sense of why it’s happening.
The Bible adds comprehensively a context that gives a more full and better explanation of what’s actually happening in reality. When we say that the Bible adds comprehensive information to help us with things like this, that’s what we’re describing, and that nothing is added from outside that gives us insight into how a person could be helped. Now we get to the topic of sanctification, because if we think about what biblical counselors are called to do, and how we’re supposed to respond to deep suffering and difficulty in life as a believer, that there’s something else that’s real besides what’s the here and now, what we experience in the moment. We have to begin to look beyond that. Biblical counseling has always said that our aim is sanctification.
How do we help somebody who’s walking through deep traumatic experiences grow in the thing that truly will settle their heart? The way the Bible presents that is, how are we satisfied in suffering? How do we rest in our soul when calamity is happening all around us? That’s really the most fundamental question. That’s why the Bible helps us in context to understand the problem better, and it helps us to run towards a solution that actually has potential to settle the soul once and for all, versus groping in the dark for different ideas that we think might could add some sort of temporary solution.
Any thoughts as I sort of wrestle through that concept?
Francine Tan: Absolutely. I think even the litmus test of: is this thing or is this insight going to help your counselee love Christ more? Is this going to give them a bigger view of who God is, and it’s only the glory of God that is profoundly greater than the temporal cessation of trials? Wasn’t it A.W. Tozer who said, “what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us,” and that is what you’re bringing to bear at every situation before an image bearer.
Your view of God, your view, your interpretation of the problem, and then subsequently your method to solve that problem. It will always be an opportunity cost for sanctification because everything in life is an opportunity to run to God and dependence on Him and in greater worship of him or otherwise.
Dale Johnson: I think that’s a really great point. Maybe one final thing, because I’m intending for this to be brief, that we would answer these questions.
I’m never really super great at brief, to be honest. I think of hope. When we think about trauma and what we’re adding to the Bible, if we think about the clinically-informed or the trauma-informed perspective, anything that we would add in some way builds some idea of hope.
What am I hoping in when I experience trauma? Am I hoping in a grounding technique? Am I hoping in circumstances changing? Am I hoping in some external thing that’s going to settle cortisol or whatever? Those things become legitimate hopes.
Now I think the only way that I can settle my soul or deal with the outside external experiences that I’ve gone through are these temporary hopes. Those things, those temporary hopes, whatever they might be, no matter how imminently they may settle you in a given moment, they’re not intended to bear the weight of our soul.
When we think about adding those types of hopes, it actually doesn’t become a better solution because it’s not neutral. It’s shifting a person’s hope away from the way we were built and designed. We were built and designed to have all of our hope resting in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ for full restoration, full redemption. Subtly, what happens is now our hope is shifted to something that’s temporal, that’s rusting, that will fade away where moth and rust is destroying.
It really sets us up in some way that when that temporary relief is not there or when the circumstances don’t change or when I still have those smells or that sound that’s there, I can’t control those things.
Now I’m seeing that the hope of settling that external stimulus is not there anymore. Now I’m falling on my face and it winds up being a lot worse because the thing you’ve put your hope in is not satisfying. It’s not a neutral position either. I think the issue of hope is really important when we think about this discussion. To answer the question in an emphatic way, no, I don’t think those things actually add helpfully to the Bible.
I would argue the Bible is comprehensive in nature. Some observations can be helpful, that’s fair, but when we’re looking at particular solutions, we have to find how those solutions are met in the Lord Jesus. That’s explained in the Scripture, and I think that’s really critical. Finish with that question. Let me get to another one that I think is helpful, and again, this comes directly from you as listeners writing in, asking some questions, which I think are great.
It tells me that you’re engaging in the things that we are talking about, and I’m so grateful for these things. All right, so here’s the question. This is the way it came in. What are perceived strengths or pitfalls to healing memories theory and applied to processing traumatic experiences? This is the way it came in relative to healing experiences.
Francine, you’ve done a lot of work in this area, so I want you to talk about this concept of healing memories and the pitfalls that you see along with it.
Francine Tan: Yeah. Just as an aside, so much about what is memory, how do we define it, how does it work, what’s the purpose of memory, there’s so much that we can unpack here in this short Q&A, but I would commend to you Matthew Rehrer book, Redeeming Memory. It is extremely helpful and a biblical treatise on the topic of memory.
But at the outset, even just a couple of assumptions, when you talk about healing memories and the therapies that come with it, that they assume that there’s a special memory mechanism that supersedes the normal memory processes, meaning that traumatic memories are not like normal memories.
So that’s the assumption. So something like sexual abuse can now become consciously inaccessible, repressed for an extended period of time or dissociated, and then somehow be perfectly retrieved or recalled much later in your adulthood in therapy.
Now much more can be said about this, but the idea of repression is not new. It stems from Freud, it stems from dissociation with Pierre Janet. And many of the trauma-informed proponents today repackage those ideas to explain current psychological or physical problems or symptoms that are happening to the person.
But something now is buried under your unconscious and the body remembers, even if the mind does not. And, you know, for example, David Holmes, he’s a psychologist, he has done research and evidence of repression for many, many years. And he said, you know, after 60 years, despite 60 years of research, there is no control laboratory evidence supporting the concept of repression, that memories don’t work like that. In fact, a painful memory, you can’t forget it.
So, it’s not ‘now you don’t remember and you have to retrieve it’. The problem is you cannot forget.
So I would turn into, you know, even just biblically, how do we understand the idea of memory? I think the Puritan, Anthony Burgess, the way he frames it is helpful for us to think about it in two categories, one of natural weakness that arises from the constitution of the body. So dementia would fall under this first category of natural weakness. The second category that he talks about is a moral forgetfulness of holy duties. So forgetting God, forgetting who he is, forgetting what he has done for us, his great salvation, his blessings, what he has said in his word, which is why Lamentations 3, right, Jeremiah says in verse 21, this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.
Or Paul in Philippians 3:13, where he says that forgetting what lies behind, reaching forward to what lays ahead, and I press on toward the goal for the price of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. So for the believer, it’s not about going back and now retrieve or heal, quote-unquote heal this memory, but actually it’s to forget what lies behind. Now you are a new creation in Christ, 2 Corinthians 5:17. So renew your mind, take your thoughts captive, remember who God is, his blessings, his word, his great salvation, and that gives hope.
Dale Johnson: I love the things that you just said.
Let me break down a couple of things that I want to just emphasize that I think is really important. On the theoretical side, I think it’s really important that you described when trauma happens, what’s coming out in science is not the idea of repression, but actually when you go through something traumatic, that the memory is very profound in your mind, because it’s something that’s very unusual in a day’s time.
I mean, you’re marking your life by things like this that happen. And so repression is something that was theorized, certainly in Freud and moving forward, and even people like Elizabeth Loftus, where you see her work in memory, help people to see things differently. And that’s helpful, I think, science relative to the concept of memory.
But memory is tricky, because what we remember is basically our perception. And because of the way that we’re born into sin, that perception is often driven and jaded and shaded by how we see life through our own personal lens.
I use the example a lot when I talk about if my wife and I get into some sort of spat in the moment, when we’re coming back together to talk about that issue, sometimes it’s like, man, that was weird, because what you perceived happened is not what I perceived happened. But we were both in the room at the same time, we experienced the same thing, but our memory of what happened is radically different. And so sometimes it’s sorting through that.
Why do I bring that up? I think that’s important, because you started in the direction of saying, “okay, how do we take a more satisfying biblical alternative? And you started to build categories that I think are helpful from the Scriptures in terms of natural weakness and so on. So, I think for us, yes, we have to acknowledge what the Bible clearly articulates, that as our bodies get older and shadows of death take hold, there is physical weakness that happens those jades or harms memory.
So, second, even in our own weakness, our finiteness, we don’t know everything, and we certainly don’t recall everything perfectly. And our perception is jaded, as the Bible describes, we see through a glass darkly. And so the ways in which we see always have to be measured over and against the reality of Scripture.
So, if you think about the way Scripture describes, one of the greatest problems that human beings have is forgetting. We struggle to forget in many ways, especially significant things that happen to us like traumatic events. And so when those types of things happen, it’s very important that we take what we feel and what we think and submit that to the things that we know according to Scripture.
So, what we’ve done is abnormalize feelings of shame and guilt when moments of trauma happen. When evil things happen to you, those are shameful things. So we’ve now abnormalized that. Francine, something is wrong with you if you feel shame when somebody victimized you in some way.
Well, biblically, I would argue that that is actually an appropriate emotion when someone sins so grievously against you. And so the Bible really helps to recategorize and reset an experience according to God’s perspective.
And we can say, you know what? When somebody treated you that way, that was a shameful thing. And we can be honest about that. And why are we okay saying that? Because now the Lord sets who’s the answer, who covers all of our shame.
Right now we can understand and recast this concept that Christ is the one who covers all shame, all shamefulness, and even the things that we experience. So we can, as you then moved in direction, you said that we forget the things that lie behind. Why? Because now those things don’t define who we are. Now our eyes are fixed upon the One who, even when we endured some sort of shameful act, it is covered in the Lord Jesus Christ.
And where is it that we then go to look? And this is really important as we start moving in a direction. And again, this is brief, but moving in a direction to say, how is the Bible more satisfying? Because it makes the best sense of actually what happened to us. It makes the best sense of the ways that we feel in response.
It makes the best sense, then, in that category of shame, that now Christ becomes the covering and answer. And I think biblically we start moving in those directions, and we’re not just talking about, you know, I’ve got to figure out how to set this out of my mind, or how to not ever think about that context or fearing that context that happens again.
Now I’m pressing on toward someone, Christ. I’m pressing on toward something, Christ. And as I press on toward Christ, now I’m seeing my identity flourish, and it’s not at the mercy of this past event, it’s at the mercy of what the Lord has done in my life.
And that radically alters everything. That becomes something that is satisfying a legitimately thirsty soul. And I think that part is really critical for us to think through. And I’m glad the way that they asked this question, Francine. So last thought here.
The way that they asked this question is to raise the question about the concept of healing memories, but also to ask it in such a way to say, how is the Bible more satisfying? Because what they’re recognizing is, if I adopt this faulty concept of healing memories, I’m also forfeiting the depth of the satisfying nature of the wisdom of God in Scripture. And I think that is unbelievably critical. So those are some of my thoughts. Give me maybe a last word on this particular subject.
Francine Tan: Even as you’re talking about the anecdote of any kind of conflict, that’s recall bias, as they would say, because you have an inflation of self and a deflation of others. So even what you remembered of a particular conflict, or an incident will be biased to ourselves and that goes back to our own sin.
But yeah, even the question is asked of what then is a better way to go about it. Even how Paul writes in 1 Timothy 1, he remembered how he was before Christ, where he said,” even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, a violent aggressor, yet I was shown mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief.”
And the grace of the Lord was more than abundant with the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus. And this is a trustworthy statement deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all.
So, for the believer, thinking about the Lord’s great redemption—that He has redeemed all past sins, past shameful events and acts to be a trophy of His grace. And so where else would we go? And that’s Peter’s confession in John 6:8, where when Peter says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.”
So, even thinking about how do we reframe some of those painful, shameful memories of things in the past? We have to go back to the cross, we have to go back to the gospel, and that the Lord has redeemed that in His redemption plan, and there’s nowhere else to go.
Dale Johnson: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Maybe I’ll give one final thought. When we think about shame as being the disorder—as the way the secular world describes it—that when a traumatic event happens or something shameful happens to us, that the shame, the thing we feel, is the primary disorder, that’s not the way the Bible categorizes it.
That’s a normal response to something terrible that happened to us. When we call shame the disorder, now we’re looking pragmatically for ways to get rid of the shame that are not prescribed in Scripture, and we’re just simply trying to get rid of that feeling, but that’s actually a denial of something shameful that has happened to you.
And I think the beauty of Scripture is it’s unafraid, in the context of reality, to call something what it is, that you were sinned against deeply, and that that’s a shameful thing. But then the beauty of the power of Christ is that he’s able to overcome the worst of realities to cover shame in that particular way. So, I think it’s just a helpful way to start thinking about framing.
You know what? This has been really fun. I’ve enjoyed your prompting questions, and so keep these things coming. We want to be able to address some of these things. So thanks for prompting our thoughts today, asking questions that you found relevant, and we look forward to answering some of these questions in the ACBC Mailbag in the future.
So, thanks for listening today.
