A Spiritual Approach to Trauma Recovery

we are much further along than we think we are in the black community I think we've had a narrative for so long black people don't go to therapy church people don't go to therapy but when you get in a room and ask people you see so many hands and so I want to encourage you all to share your stories of what it means for you to be in therapy about your successes in therapy because things have changed a lot and I think people are sometimes surprised at how many people are connected to it so actually said my name is dr. Anita Phillips I'm a therapist a minister and a professor and ministers a nice word is way of saying preacher any of those could show up today I am you know promises on which one of those who's gonna be here maybe a little bit of everybody but I'd like to quickly ask a few of you to tell me why you chose this session what is it that you're specifically hoping to get today trauma information okay we're definitely gonna talk about that why else anything else curious as to why people chose this session today what are you hoping to get because I have a short period of time and I want to give it to you good how'd it get unstuck okay anybody else how to function after the trauma okay stay focus a wellness plan for grieving because grief can is a form of trauma loss of life is particularly unexpected loss sudden loss is a form of trauma just a wellness plan in general okay wellness and faith awesome well I will try to touch on all of those staying grounded spiritually and this is such a natural space for us as black women nobody does spirit and emotion that altogether like we do spirituality is so defining I'm in terms of our worldview 3 almost 3 years ago I had the opportunity to travel to South Africa and we went out to visit the Zulu villages and there was one made certainly for tourists and had all kind of signs to help us understand what was going on and there were signs on trees explaining the roles of different people in the village and I found myself standing in one in front of one that said sangoma and I was drawn to it and when I read the definition it said that the role of the sangoma in the village was to attend to both the spiritual and psychological health of the Ville and I was so moved by that because that told me that as far back as we can get in our ancient traditions it was not uncommon for a single person to deal with spirituality and psychology to deal with faith and emotion this is actually a natural central part of the traditional African worldview and so I think that's why it's been so important such an important question in our community how do we handle faith and mental health the idea that faith stays at church and mental health stays in the office is not our original idea we come from people's who connect these things very deeply and so if we're working to get back to a state of health that we defined for ourselves if you study across world views of traditional African perspectives you will see this over and over again that somehow our spirituality and our emotions are linked and so until we really begin to work from that space I think we're missing an opportunity to have a holistic sense of wellness so when I talk about a faith LED emotional wellness response to trauma I want to put it in that perspective for you today so first thing is what is trauma we think that we know what it is and most of us think about trauma as the big stuff that happens to us the sexual abuse the rape the car accident the sudden death you know people going off to war witnessing violence on a regular basis these are traumas that we define as trauma with a capital T these are the things we think about and sometimes people develop post-traumatic stress disorder the result of that but we are also exposed to something that we call the little T traumas developmental traumas and many times we overlook develop mental traumas developmental trauma is those little things that happen to us as we're growing up that may not be so little I'll give you an example of one of mine on a hot Saturday afternoon my mom was baking a cake for the church dinner the next day and she was not in a good mood never get married never had no kids at Moody California well man that really hurt my feelings it's not something that you would call a trauma traditionally but it was a trauma it was a elemental trauma because it hurt me deeply and it began to change my thought process about family and whether family is a trap somehow and I had to work through that idea after I got married when I got pregnant I was suddenly like and I was like where is this fear coming from where's this stress coming from happily married and as I worked with my own therapist to do some backtracking I realized that starting at that point I began to think about having children as some kind of limitation as some kind of trap but you couldn't have told me that that was a trauma but it was and very often we don't give enough credence to the little things did my mom mean that no have I snapped at my children unfortunately yes and I've been better about apologizing probably than my mom did but that generation wasn't big on the apology but even as you think about trauma today I want you to expand your idea of what trauma might be because as many of these little experiences have changed us experiences in your neighborhood may have changed you in ways that traumatized you because it cost you to come to conclusions that weren't healthy so a trauma is anything that changes your perspective on yourself other people the world or God and when our perspective on God has changed that's a spiritual trauma and often we're not looking at how that affects our lives as well so the first step in having a plan to thrive after trauma is to identify your trauma is to name your trauma really examine your life what lessons did you learn or what negative conclusions did you come to as a child based on different experiences that you had those are traumas if they change the way that you see the world and particularly I'm always concerned with it changing the way that we see God and so we have to name them so I'm gonna add you to name them and to confront them I was speaking with a client a couple days ago and I asked her specifically if she was a survivor of child sexual abuse and she said yes but she didn't want to talk about it and I said well I asked you that question because a lot of your explanations and your behaviors are suggestive of symptoms of those who've been sexually abused and she was very distressed to find out that her behaviors and her stress may have been connected to that trauma and she didn't want to work on that trauma because she felt like if we talk about it then I'm giving it power and I'm not gonna let it have power over me but I'm like this it has power over you because you're not talking about it it's keeping you silent and you can't fix it without addressing it so she wanted to just pick the symptoms she wanted to pick the fruit off the tree but we gotta lay the axe to the root and so if we only want to work on what's bothering us about our trauma instead of processing the trauma we're going to keep putting out new batches of fruit every year and so we have to name our trauma we have to identify it and we have to be willing to go to the root to do the work the second step in this wellness plan is the faith step faith is important because with faith we define what the trauma means spirituality is all about applying meaning let me give you the difference man that's gonna be tough I got a few minutes let me give you the difference between spirituality and religion because it's sometimes it's really difficult for us to understand the difference and how they're connected so spirituality has to do with what we believe about the world we can't see that's a basic thing and we get a lot of that technically our ethnic worldview defines a lot of that so if I ask you who God is I'm not asking for his name or her name and a specific religion I'm saying what tell me the quality of your deity is this a loving deity is this an angry deity is it's a judgmental deity how do you define what you cannot see what do you believe about the purpose of life about where evil comes from why people do things they shouldn't do because these are all ways that we define our trauma and it affects our faith and in order for me to have a faith led response to my recovery my faith needs to be healthy some people have strong faith but not healthy faith I don't care if your faith is strong if it's not well you can be strong and wrong I need your faith to be healthy and if that faith is telling you things like or you been raised hearing things like well God allowed it to happen to make you stronger I'm sorry but the guy that I serve is not sexually abusing children to make them stronger if you've been told that the reason that your brother was shot down in the street is because God needed another basketball player on his team in heaven I'm sorry that's not the God that I know I don't believe that those are healthy faith perspectives what they're saying is I we have no idea so I'm just making something up and that's so dangerous for us because how do you use a faith like that to recover from something that devastated you so we got to get down into this thing and really ask ourselves what do we believe about what we cannot see because if it's unhealthy and it gives you no power for us as black people that doesn't work traditionally we have viewed the spirit realm as a place for information and power if you explore the Yoruba culture for it isn't for example where which influence many of the enslaved Africans that were brought here you will find that explanations for what's happening in the seen realm are spiritually rooted so we go there first for information that's why as a pastor and a pastor's wife I get a lot of the requests first it's traditional for us as African peoples to go into the spirit realm looking for information and so we have to be careful how we fight against our own culture because sometimes we attacked ourselves with a Western tongue well they don't need to go to the pastor they need to go to the therapist know there's something culturally driving us to a spirit space the question is how do I is a minister learn to respond in a way that gives you healthy faith and professional help we also tend to have an action-oriented faith tell me what to do how do I respond where can I get power how can I make a difference our faith asks those questions traditionally as African people's our faith is also traditionally thought led or I should say our spirituality is traditionally thought led now this is a little bit of a weakness for us and every culture has strengths and weaknesses we're a thought led but we don't like to talk about feeling feelings have not traditionally gotten a lot of attention it's like get over it move past it feel and act now feel it later and that is fine in some ways it has kept us healthy it's one of the reasons that our suicide rates have been traditionally lower because we would use thought before feeling even though we were still suffering however when we leave emotions out and never come back to address them they eat us up and because trauma shakes us on an emotional level you can't out think that you have to get into the emotion space so this is one of the areas where our traditions are fayliss a little bit and then finally spirituality in the African perspective is fully embodied we're spirit soul and body we don't leave the body out and traditional mental health has historically left the body out so that's something that we're getting better at as mental health professionals is recognizing that trauma actually lives in the body so our response is out of our traumas feels automatic because it's in our nervous system and it's our physical body and so we have to be willing to go into those spaces to address it so Yoga is a way of addressing it somatic therapies our way of addressing it there's a therapy that is very effective called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing or EMDR and that's a very powerful therapy so as you're stepping out if you're a trauma survivor looking for therapies spiritually and naturally going to deal with the body works for us because we're body oriented does that make sense and so our spirituality tends to be based in this way now religion think of spirituality that I just described spiritually focus for information holistic action-oriented thought led an embody that's our spiritual perspective now think of that as like a mannequin and then religion is like the outfit I put on it so if I put on a dress and my friend my new friend dr. Lauren Powell back there puts on the same dress it's not gonna look the same on us because we're about a foot and a half difference in height she's much slimmer than me it's not your looking but it's not the same dress because it looks so different on our frames and that's what religion does that's why Christianity looks so different on us Christianity illness looks like body it looks like hey it looks like sound that's very African we make sound with our body it looks like dance that we improvise we praise loud we expect information so we approach Christianity differently so if your spirituality which is your perspective on the invisible world has been altered or you're given a religion that is based on a different culture of spirituality and that culture spirituality says that I don't have power in the spirit realm all I do is follow rules it doesn't always match us so when we are preparing to define our trauma against the backdrop of our faith we have to pay attention to the health of both our spirituality and our religion together they make faith now Christianity is my religion it is the one I was raising is what I know it's what I believe but if you were raising a different religious perspective this still makes sense you just have to know your details but understand what you believe about what you can't see because if what I believe about what I can't see says that I'm on my own then there's no scripture to help me with this trauma if my spiritual belief is I can find power then I'm in that Bible looking to say no weapon formed against me shall prosper and that I can plead the blood of Jesus that's where our traditions come from and so you haven't come from an empowering spirituality that allows you to look at trauma a different way we also tend to believe as African descendants that evil does exist and that's one of the questions about trauma why did this happen to me why did it go wrong why didn't God stop it but our spiritual perspective says that evil exists and some of you have been the victims of evil there's no other way to explain it evil has come into your life but as an African spirit I believe that we can combat evil and through the lens of my Bible that means first John chapter three which says for this purpose where the Son of God manifested to destroy the works of the enemy so I power to reverse so when we're talking about a faith lead emotional wellness plan we have to identify our trauma but then we have to make sure that the faith that leads us is healthy if your faith now is you're looking at it you realize it's not healthy I urge you to begin to address that first because whatever meaning you apply to your trauma through your spiritual lens will affect how you feel emotionally if my spiritual lens says I have no power what emotions does that lead to if my spiritual lens said God chose me for this suffering what emotional response will I have so you may not realize it but every time we have an emotional response it's a response to something that we believe to be true we believe and then we feel we believe and then feel and so we have to ask ourselves what do I believe then what do I believe my word says for me my word says about emotion Christianity has had the widest impact on black Americans and so I find that many people are struggling through the lens of scripture to understand this my Bible says in Hebrews chapter 4 verse 15 that Jesus came because of how I feel and we never really give credit for that it says we have 90 bucks for that scripture we have not a high priest who cannot be touched by the feelings I hear a few folks by the feelings of our infirmities but we've been presented this God who doesn't care about how we feel he just wants us to behave but there's an emotion space available for healing but that is important if you're going to have this faith led perspective what does your spirituality and your religion tell you about emotion are you allowed to feel we haven't traditionally allowed ourselves to feel and there are a lot of emotions associated with trauma that has to be addressed what are some of them give me some emotions associated with trauma fear anger anxiety what was that bitterness yes bitterness shame depression so we have these emotions that can also develop into mental illnesses like generalized anxiety disorder or clinical depression and how do I deal with that and for that perspective we really have to look at the body and so again when I'm looking through a faith lens what does it say about my body if you're taking those and you want to use this faith perspective write down Romans chapter 7 Romans chapter 7 actually defines mental illness and distress very clearly verses 14 through 25 some of you have heard it is where Paul's talking about what I don't want to do I do what I do want to do I don't do every time I try to do right I do wrong and then I do wrong when I want to do right everybody familiar and then he goes on to say the reason for this is that there is a law in my members warring against the law in my mind think about that Paul is saying that my body and my mind are battling and you already ever feel like your body and your mind were at war so if anybody ever tells you mental health distress is not in the Bible Romans 7 14 through 25 my body which includes my brain is warring with my mind your brain and your mind are not the same thing if your faith is teaching you that you can use your mind to out think everything that not a healthy faith and we've been presented a God that wants to punish us for our symptoms when really there's a guy who wants to heal the child not kill the adult not punish the adult that's unhealthy faith and I'm speaking from as a minister but also personally I had to develop in my faith in that way because I'm like God all these things I'm doing wrong why don't you just hit me with lightning or something you know when the Holy Spirit said it to me I don't want to hurt you I want to heal you you're still seven in my eyes you're still 10 in my eyes that thing that happened to you I'm in that space with you so while you're punching yourself we need to fix that because that's an unhealthy faith go every time you attack yourself go back to what your faith says how does God feel about you how does God feel about you any arm wrestling between my faith and my mental health means that I have something going on that I'm misunderstanding about God check that definition and I don't believe anybody would've hung out in here today if they didn't want to hear something about how their faith is connected because it was in the title so it's a really important thing because it hasn't always been presented to us that way so once we've named our trauma and you may name many and we have committed to getting our faith healthy and then our address our emotions from that perspective we do need more than our spiritual tools we have more opportunities we have therapy we have therapy how is faith in therapy connected I say it this way prayer is a weapon therapy is a strategy prayer is a weapon therapy is a strategy if any of you come from very very very kind of strict church traditions like I do I was raised Pentecostal oh yes holiness we weren't allowed to do nothing huh no secular music no makeup I came from the hardcore space so therapy us I know but I had a mentally ill sister and so that was a lot of chaos and our family is this demonic is it something biological and so we didn't really have therapy space but what I've come to understand what is the relationship between faith and therapy prayer is a weapon I can absolutely make a difference in the spirit realm but therapy is a strategy in the war that I just told you about between my mind and my brain because therapy will help reduce the strength of the battle that your body and your brain are waging against you medication will reduce the strength of the war that your brain is waging against you we cannot be afraid of medication and it is not mutually exclusive with your faith I'm gonna say that again we cannot be afraid of medication short-term or long-term because it is not mutually exclusive with your faith but something from trauma changes the body and there are many things we can do before we hit the medication level if you want to try those and exercise and nutrition and getting enough sleep and yoga and movement all of those things can help but if you reach a point where you're still not functioning it is okay to utilize medication and that is something that we really are challenged with in our community and many times people feel that they're failing in their faith if they go to that level and I'm here to tell you it's not the case and medication is not the end of the line and you may not need to take it for your entire life and if your therapist recommends that it's okay you're still in control so once you are working on your healthy faith you recognize where you need to make that change you're putting emotional boundaries in place to help you recover from trauma which includes distance from toxic people which includes therapy which includes sleep which includes eating well all of the things that prepare you to do your emotional work the next thing I need you to do is activate community so we're identifying our trauma and naming it we're checking on the health of our face and our emotional space and I need you to activate community community is essential to African worldviews we know that but many of us have fallen out of community we have a few good friends but larger community has broken down for us so from a faith perspective I encourage you to find a you're not anyone now a safe and healthy faith community where you can talk about trauma where there's talk about mental health at women's ministry night we need to find a place and when you look for that place ask when you're thinking about joining a church ask is this a place where we can talk about these things I'm covering from some things and I want to be in a place where I can be supported and if they say well we don't do that therapy stuff here well move along get into the healthiest place you can get if you're already in a faith community and you're concerned about the health of that faith community there are ways for you to make a difference and bring mental health in and give me a call I'm happy to come and help you but you may be able to start the conversation but it's so critical that you activate a healthy community of faith that will not give you messages that work against your recovery and then I need you to activate community in terms of sisterhood support groups major I saw a lot of hands go up for therapy how many people have ever participated in an open support group lot less hands so I want to encourage you to add support groups to your wellness plan there's a support group for everything for everything if you google it you will find it and it will help to change your life more quickly and have you thriving more quickly because when you connect with other people who have been through the same thing and you begin to hear what's normal response to the abnormal thing that happened to you it's very very very affirming also when you're in a group people can help you see your changes well two weeks ago you came in and you wouldn't even talk to us and today you just told us your whole story and you might not even recognize your progression but other people are helping you recognize your progression I love to run groups because when I'm done with the therapy group I step out but the women have each other we have to form communities of healing where explicitly talk about what we've been through and allow ourselves to heal in community and figure out how to protect ourselves and our children and our children in community so please make support groups a part of your wellness plan even if you have an individual therapist support groups are life changing and they have them for grief and they have them for adult children of addicts and they have them for adults who have been sexually abused anything you can think of there's a group for it I'm urging you to go to a group activate community find a healthy faith community and then a community that's centered on the trauma that you are recovering from and the final thing that I want to ask you to do how am i doing oh pretty good three minutes the final thing that I want to encourage you to do in this wellness plan is to blend whenever possible your faith and your emotional work blend them whenever possible because we're taught to do them separately and I want you to blend them whenever possible and because of that we're gonna end by doing a meditation together for anyone who will join me that blends our faith perspective and our emotional work anybody up for that now this particular meditation again is through a Christian framework because that's where I come from I don't mean to offend anyone and if it's something that you don't want to participate in I understand but I'd like to give you a living example of what it would mean to intersect your faith work and your emotional work in a meditation that is a response to trauma so if you're up for that I'm gonna ask you to grab the hands of the sister next to you actually you got look at you guys grabbing all kinds of hands but I actually want you to only the sister next to you so I'd like you to get into pairs I know I love it though I love it though I'd like you to get into pairs if possible and three at the most if you need to do three I understand three at the most and I may have two minutes for our question at the end of this but I know I'm supposed to wrap up at 12:30 so three at the most I want you to turn and face them take both hands so you're really really with her one of the things that trauma does it puts lies in our minds and hearts about what's possible for us and we carry those lies into every challenge in our life and we're constantly in a battle not letting the world give us evidence that that lie is actually the truth and so because lies are one of the fruits of trauma this meditation is about addressing lies so take your sister's hands I want you to look her in the eye directly 15 seconds don't break eye contact I want you to look at her I know it's tough but we hardly ever take a moment to really see another woman and we rarely take a moment to really let her see us so I want you to look her in the eye I want you to try to see her but I also want you to let her see you now that you've had that moment to connect keep holding her hand but I want you to close your eyes I want to tell you or remind you of a story about Jesus the last three words that Jesus spoke on the cross were these it is finished he didn't say it was finished because his fight was over he said it is finished because he was moving the fight as a human being he had completed everything he could do he had been obedient to God he had taken care of his family he had been betrayed by friends he had been beaten to death he had put his blood sweat tears literally in what it was that he believed he needed to do and so everything that he could possibly do as a human being was done he said finished and many of you are in that situation you're fighting some battle in your life and you have done literally everything you can think of there isn't anything else you can come up with and so the words for that now is it is finished when he said that he got off the cross and his soul went down into hell so he actually moved the fight from the earthy realm into the spiritual realm that's what we're about to do and when he got down there he confronted the devil directly and the Bible calls the devil the father of so he went down there to address a lie and that's also what we're about to do I want you to get your current most difficult fight in your mind you may be fighting a health diagnosis you may be fighting for your child you may be fighting depression or anxiety you may be fighting a financial fight you may be owning a business that's struggling you may be in school trying to finish and it looks like it's not gonna work out whatever fight you're fighting I want you to get that fight in the front of your mind and I'm gonna ask you a very difficult question if you were to lose that fight what do you think that might say about you if you lost that fight what truth are you afraid it would speak about you I'm a failure I'm a bad mother I'm trapped I'll always live paycheck to paycheck no good man will ever pick me I'll be alone what life scares you the most about losing this fight because we can't defeat fear until we call out its name whatever lies is trying to make itself your truth I want you to get that in your mind right now recognizing that I'm going to ask you to listen to your spirit for the actual truth what truth comes up in your spirit to combat that lie I am powerful I have a purpose on this earth I can make a difference in my children's lives I'm worthy I will break this pattern in my family I will live once you have that truth from your spirit that is going to combat that lie I want you to repeat it in your own mind four times and now that you have repeated that truth I want you to silently open your eyes and look back at your sister again see the winner in her eyes let her see the winner in yours tell her your truth out loud I am say it out loud hear your own voice speaking your truth now throw your arms around your sister hold on to her for 20 seconds 20 19 18 don't let her go 17 16 squeeze are tighter 15 14 13 10 harder tighter 9 8 7 strong arms 6 5 4 3 2 2 2 2 2 1 I love you ladies thanks for spending a half an hour with me

Channel: Dr. Anita Phillips

Views: 67,445

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Id: h2RHoRW2Tcg

Length: 32min 16sec (1936 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020