Thirty years ago my older brother asked if I wanted to go to Sonic with him to get a cherry limeade. On the way back we passed my dad in his beat up Chevy truck. As he waved I asked my brother where my dad was headed. “He’ll be back,” my brother responded. But he never did come back. That one moment in time defined so much of the following decades, and it still presses itself into my mind some nights, refusing to let me sleep. I didn’t know it then, but that moment marked the beginning point of a “distinct type of suffering that overwhelms a person’s normal capacity to cope.”¹
Trauma is a sort of suffering that forces us to our knees, that defies all attempts to come to grips with what has happened or been done to us. Scholar Jennifer Beste states that this sort of suffering “shatters persons’ key assumptions regarding self and one’s relations to others in the world, including a sense of self-protection, personal invulnerability, and safety and predictability in the world.”² People respond to trauma in their own ways, but a few coping strategies show up regularly. For example, survivors of trauma often dissociate and withdraw in order to protect themselves. I’ve seen this in my own life, as I’ve struggled to develop what my counselor calls “safe and meaningful relationships.” Since that day my dad left, I thrash about at the first sign of intimacy, doing everything in my power to push people away before they leave of their own accord.
Please visit Fathom Magazine to continue reading this article.
Russ Meek is a visiting professor of Old Testament at Tennent. He studied at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (MA, biblical languages; PhD, Old Testament) and has taught at various colleges and seminaries since 2011. Russ writes widely for lay and academic audiences about all things Old Testament and its relationship to the Christian life; you can read his work at russmeek.com. He, his wife, and their three sons live in north Idaho, where you’ll find them gardening, cooking, and trying to tame the havoc that three boys wreak.