Trauma & the Eucharistic Table
In Chapter 3 of “The Body Keeps the Score,” our group read about how trauma remains part of our story, as it literally alters the mapping of our brain. Trauma is physically held in the body, and the body doesn’t lie in the same way our mind does. We asked the question, “What happens when your trauma is connected to church?” Especially in liturgical churches, the liturgy, rituals, and regular practices are continued and repeated, which beg the question, “What does it do to the body to be reminded?”
Bessel van der Kolk asserts that all trauma is preverbal (p. 43), and in the aftermath of trauma the victim loses their voice. They lack the ability to put into words what they have experienced, and language is what allows us to connect to one another and to tell our stories in a way that helps us to make sense of what has happened and what is happening. Without words and the ability to form a coherent narrative, even if it is a narrative our mind has concocted to make sense of how we have gotten to be here, we remain stuck. Not only do we stay stuck, but we feel isolated.
Following the thought of trauma being connected to church, we considered how healing may also be found there, in community. We wondered aloud how connection to a larger story can be healing. We discussed the vital importance of community and connection as we seek healing in our own stories. We drew a link between learning to tell our stories, or re- tell our stories, and the role of counseling and therapy, where a client can re- create a narrative with the therapist. In this newly co- written story, the client is offered hope of new interactions and ways of being. In a similar way to Christ’s promise of something new, of hope, the therapist can offer the client a new way of interacting and relating that heals where in the past there was harm.
Shelly Rambo, in her work on the Spirit and trauma, has described the Eucharist as a “form of witness,” where those who partake are reliving the death of Christ and practicing remembrance. In the therapeutic setting as well as at the Eucharistic table, we are offered both the opportunity to remember and sit with the pain and loneliness and hurt, as well as the opportunity for a new ending to be written, in which we are healed by allowing someone to touch the very wounds where we ache.
