Trauma

Trauma shatters deeply-held core beliefs about us and our world as violently as an explosion shatters glass. We may have thought the world was a safe place, or that we were loved. But trauma locks us in darkness where we cannot retrieve that safety and care. Instead, we are uncontrollably frightened. But trauma is not the end of our story. Some of us are resilient: we use our own courage and the company of others to escape the terror and move out of the darkness. Others of us are not resilient, or our trauma is too great. Then we must be authors of our own brave journey out of the darkness toward healing but we need particular help from others.

Meaning

Viktor Frankl, after his release from Dachau and Auschwitz, wrote an anonymous report that became the classic book, Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl proposed that meaning, and its creation, is essential to humanity. But among the intense privations and suffering of the Holocaust, and in the camps in particular, to continue affirming meaning in life was a daily, hourly, even minute by minute struggle. Prisoners who failed lost hope and died. Meaning is equally necessary in recovery after trauma, since trauma destroys our previous meanings in life.

Redemption

The act of gaining something that was lost. For Christians, God's plan for the redemption of His people was made flesh in the person of Jesus. In a broader view, the act of regaining, reclaiming, recovery is the hope of persons who are in darkness. After trauma, redemption is the reconstruction of personal meaning even in circumstances that cannot be undone. Psychologists who study children and adults after trauma believe that creating a new story, building a personal narrative that uses the scaffold of new meanings positively transforms the trauma and the self.

Relationship

Several words describe the process of reconstructing meaning: sense-making, meaning-making, benefit-finding. But these processes share the commonality that they occur at their best within relationship, within the bonds of community large or small. Relationship sustains meaning reconstruction through emotional support during difficult times. And the presence of a companion assists in narrative development through its sequential iterations, the revising of the meaning story. Reconstructing meaning is available within relationships that validate the trauma, that share in grief and mourning, and that promote recovery.