Podcast: Understanding Trauma with Steve Midgley

In this fifth episode of the new series of the Affinity Talks Gospel Podcast, hosts Graham Nicholls and Lizzie Harewood sit down with Steve Midgley, Director of Biblical Counselling UK, to talk about:

• a definition of biblical counselling and the importance for churches to re-skill in pastoral care;
• personhood and the problems with defining problems as either spiritual or non-spiritual;
• what trauma is and how prevalent it is in our churches;
• how churches can support people with trauma;
• Steve’s new book, Understanding Trauma: A biblical introduction for church care.

Lizzie Harewood (0:12)

Welcome to the Affinity Talks Gospel Podcast. My name is Lizzie Harewood. I’m here with Graham, as usual. Hi, Graham.

Graham Nicholls (0:20)

Hello.

Lizzie Harewood (0:21)

And we are delighted to be joined by Steve Midgley. Steve, welcome to the podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, and what you’re here to talk about?

Steve Midgley (0:33)

Very lovely to be with you. Thanks for inviting me to join. I’m based in Cambridge, where we’ve lived for just 25 years now. And for most of that time, I was the senior pastor of an Anglican church in city centre. And then ust over three years ago, stepped back from that role in order to be more fully involved in the leadership of an organisation called Biblical Counselling UK. And what other things would be useful to know about me? Married with three adult children and moved into the grandparenting era, which is a great delight.

Lizzie Harewood (1:19)

Wow, what an honour.

Graham Nicholls (1:22)

Does Cambridge feel different to other cities, or have you lived there so long you can’t really compare?

Steve Midgley (1:28)

Good question, Graham. Maybe we all think the cities we live in are sort of different and peculiar. I think there probably are some peculiarities.There is, partly associated with the university, partly associated with lots of startup companies. There is quite a big churn of people. And so whilst you’ve got a sort of baseline, and so I still attend the church where I was senior pastor. And while we have a baseline of long-term Cambridge residents, there is on top of that, a flow through of people who come and go, sometimes [they’re] only in Cambridge for a year, three years. And that is both delightful, and also can be can be a little bit sad and frustrating when you get to know some lovely people. And then you’re only going to be around for a short time.

Lizzie Harewood (2:31)

That tends to be the pattern in many large university towns, doesn’t it? Yeah. No, absolutely. I don’t have that problem, because I live in Doncaster. And there’s absolutely no university here. Although there are some qualifications associated with Doncaster College, you can have that higher education mark – but every town or city has their own kind…

Steve Midgley (2:53)

And it does make a big difference to church, right?

Lizzie Harewood (2:55)

Yeah, it does.

Steve Midgley (2:56)

Yeah, I did my first – when I was a curate for four years on the south coast in a place called Hove next to Brighton. And it was incredibly stable population. And having lived in London and Oxford before that, it was unfamiliar to me. And by the end of my four years there, I think what I really appreciated was that there were three generations of people within the church. The depth of relationship and the depth of knowledge of one another was so rich. And I’ve always thought that’s something very beautiful. Yeah, it makes for strong relationships in a church.

Graham Nicholls (3:36)

It’s funny you call it a place called Hove. This is really near – it’s not a place called Hove, it’s Hove. So tell us about Biblical Counselling UK. Maybe unpick each of those words or the three – Biblical and it’s to do with counselling and it’s UK. Is there something to think about all those three things?

Steve Midgley (3:55)

Yeah, it’s an unfamiliar term to many. Though it has been an approach that has been very influential in the church in the United States for coming up to 60 years. But for various reasons, which I guess we won’t go into. And it’s speculation – why did it never really take off in the UK? There’ve been little flares of interest during that 60 years, but nothing substantial, really until the last 10 years or so, when a more considerable interest has developed and out of that spilt the work of Biblical Counselling UK. And it, oh, this could be a very long answer, so you’ll need to interrupt me. But in a sense, the biblical counselling movement began slightly as a protest movement in the United States 60 years ago, when one particular pastor became frustrated that as the new psychotherapy and counselling movements in the secular world, which were quite new – I mean, they were a brand new thing through the course of the last century. As they got going, more and more of the things that were previously dealt with by churches, were finding their way out to secular counsellors, secular psychotherapists. And it was saying, hasn’t this always been church business? And how come we can’t do it?

Lizzie Harewood (5:43)

That’s a really interesting topic, actually, because there was an article that garnered quite a lot of interest on the Gospel Coalition website – obviously, the US version – about that topic, and about particularly women in general, perhaps looking outside the church for the help that, in generations past, would have been provided within the church. And I’m not going to get into the complexities of the arguments on either side, but I just thought it was interesting that that particular point about therapies, or even medical help that is now available, perhaps seems to be at the ‘that you would defer to that rather than necessarily also seek a level of biblical helps or counselling’. And again, yeah, I’m not going to get into the complexities, it’s quite controversial. Do you know the article I’m talking about at all, either of you?

Graham Nicholls (6:50)

I do. I did read it. I thought it was quite interesting. Yeah, yeah. The lady tried to create a kind of a model, wasn’t it, where there was the spiritual, and then there was the body, and then there was this psychological thing where – so you can get spiritual help and bodily help, spiritual help from the church, but there’s another kind of whole area. So go into – just a quick response to the point Lizzie and I were making about the tendency for people to seek help outside, almost exclusively outside, for a particular sort of constrained area called the psychology or mental health or something that they would seek outside the church. Maybe start answering that question and then we’ll get some more.

Steve Midgley (7:42)

I think one of the things is that, because 60 years ago the biblical counselling movement began, as I say, in that sort of protest way, it is sometimes characterised as being anti-things, which I think is not accurate because a lot has happened in 60 years. And in a sense, it’s not so much saying, it’s against this, it’s more saying, has the church slightly lost its nerve? Has the church forgotten that, in the Scriptures, we have everything needed for life and godliness, according to 2 Peter 1:3? And therefore, we do have things to say about the whole realm. And I hadn’t read the article that you were mentioning a moment ago. But in a sense, I want to say that the distinction between spiritual things and psychological things is not very helpful, because it produces exactly that separation out. Here are some spiritual things that the church can deal with, you know, praying and doing evangelism and the like. And then there are these psychological problems, which haven’t got anything to do with church or discipleship, and they need to be dealt with elsewhere. And I don’t think that’s a helpful distinction. I don’t think that the Bible describes us in that way.

Graham Nicholls (9:14)

No, but I guess that – and it will help because it will lead into you talking about the book of original trauma and the topic of trauma in general – that particularly for something like that, there are a whole series of fairly well-documented medical responses, you might say, to trauma, which people go and do degrees and doctorates in and so forth and have a degree of expertise in the mechanics of the way the brain works in response to trauma. And what area of discipline is that? And you could say, well, the Scripture contains all we need for life and godliness, but it doesn’t tell us how to set a broken leg or treat cancer. What category is this, for example, trauma in with respect to that? Is it in the broken leg biological sort of cancer area, which is definable, or is it in the spiritual, I’m just sinning category?Where do you locate it?

Steve Midgley (10:23)

Yeah, and the question you ask ultimately directs us down quite a complicated path about who we believe ourselves to be. If we believe ourselves fundamentally to be nothing but our biochemistry, nothing but our biology, if we take that view of the human person – that we are consistent, that we are fully explained by our brain chemistry, and our neuroanatomy and the rest, and that’s all there is to us – then you end up in a in a very different place to a biblical view of a person. And it does centre around that. Now [we’re] not saying that we’re not interested in the body. And I think actually, over Christian history, probably our theology of the body has been inadequately explored. And I think we need to do more of that quite urgently. Precisely because of some of the issues that are developing around our understanding of the place of the body in in the development of problems, and in our response to them. But I want to hold on to the Scripture’s conviction that we’re spiritual beings. And we believe that spiritual realities are at play in our lives at all times.

Lizzie Harewood (12:13)

I think that’s a really interesting point. And I think there are so many complexities here. And I’m just beginning to think about how they interplay. And I suppose we might think about emotional wounding, as something that may – I don’t know, this is me as a pure lay person interpreting this – but emotional wounding or severe trauma can then have implications that will then impact emotions, which will then have implications for relationships. And will also potentially have spiritual implications. Yeah, I just think it’s very interesting that we’ve often only really thought about the way that we can fix the emotional side or treat that through the physical or the physiological kind of roots, and perhaps abandon some of that, that spiritual element. I think what a lot of people are nervous about, and myself included, because, you know, I have sought medical help, sometimes when it comes to mental health issues, I think some people are concerned that there’s a disparaging of those that would seek medical help, rather than perhaps seek spiritual advice or counsel or support, because they disqualify the idea that it is some kind of physiological or serious psychological issue. I think that’s what a lot of people fear – that they’ll be judged.

Steve Midgley (13:59)

And I think that, in a sense is why the either/or-ness is so helpful. If we say there are spiritual problems, there are psychological problems, then you end up in exactly that polarised sort of perspective. And if you say as people, what is most importantly true about us is that we have a heart that worships. And it relates rightly or wrongly to God. But that inner person, as the Bible describes it, is set in an outer person. And God chose to make us like that. So we’ve got a body. And then there’s a whole realm of stuff around us, the context in which we live. And God is interested in all of those. And so should we be. Now that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t seek wisdom in what’s going on in our bodies, and how to respond to them. But we don’t need to see that as somehow separated off from what’s going on in our hearts or our souls. We are embodied souls.

Graham Nicholls (15:16)

Yeah, I guess the complexity comes because the thing that’s going on in our bodies is less of a biological phenomenon that’s very easy to track. And when people who study psychology and psychotherapy and those things, it’s a treatment of not so much individual cells or organs. It’s a treatment of a whole mood, isn’t it? And so it overlaps very much with the spiritual, but in ways that probably most of us don’t quite understand. Is that fair, Steve?

Steve Midgley (15:54)

Well, yes, it is. Although there has been a measure of a simplification, certainly in the popular sort of understanding and sort of popular press, that does want to reduce some of the complicated emotional and psychological and spiritual issues that we face down into simple biology. You know, depression is a serotonin deficiency, [and] there was great shock a few years ago when a story broke to say, actually, the evidence for that doesn’t seem to be adequate. But these things are simple explanations of ‘There is this brain chemical, and you haven’t got enough of it, and we need to give you a drug to give you a bit more of it. And that’ll sort your depression out.’ [These] just are too simplistic. And it doesn’t mean – and perhaps I need to say this quite quickly – it doesn’t mean that there is something wrong in taking an antidepressant. But a view of what they’re doing, and what my difficulty is, that requires me to take an antidepressant, that only thinks in terms of my biology, I think is a bit deficient.

Graham Nicholls (17:20)

But leaving aside – because I wasn’t so much talking about drugs – so leaving aside all drugs, and just thinking about a secular, in a sense, not recognising the spiritual kind of counselling, where people would say there is a medical expertise, there’s not so much looking at the biology of the brain, but just looking about how people work. And that overlap is a bit more subtle. So somebody might have CBT, for example, that’s done by a secular counsellor, where you could say they’re not so much dealing with the biology, they’re just dealing with this is how people work, and this is how people can develop habits and so on. But they’re not addressing any kind of spiritual issues about whether there’s an idolatry or lie they’re believing or whatever. I don’t know, speaking to that a little bit would help me.

Steve Midgley (18:14)

And you are taking us into lots of complicated areas, Graham. I guess the – okay, let me backtrack from that to come at it a slightly different angle. If psychology attempts to explain what people do, and why, then you could say that four of the fundamental questions that psychology is required to think about is first, what is a person? You know, what’s the best analogy for a person? Are they a complicated animal, with behaviourism being dominant? Are they best understood in terms of a sort of learning theory? And a bit like a computer model of the brain? What fundamentally is a person? What do we understand them to be? Second, what, what goes wrong with people? And what is the fundamental difficulty that lands people in life struggles? And thirdly, how do you put them right? What is the therapeutic solution? And then, finally, what’s the goal of life? What’s a life well lived?

Steve Midgley (19:40)

You’ve got to answer all of those questions. The psychologist has got to answer all those questions. And it didn’t take you very long to see that those are spiritual questions. Those are questions about which Christians and the Bible all have views. So when you think about somebody having CBT, well, CBT comes with an understanding of people, what they are, what goes wrong with them, what puts them right, and what you’re trying to accomplish. It had answers to all of those questions. They’re not Christian answers. Now, that doesn’t mean that people can’t benefit from CBT. And what it means is that – wouldn’t it be lovely if you had people who were as skilled as secular therapists and counsellors, but who in their skilful understanding of people and their problems and the ways of putting them right, brought with them a biblical worldview. But that would be ideal, wouldn’t it? That’s what a Christian would long for. And in a sense, that’s what the biblical counselling vision is.

Graham Nicholls (20:51)

Really helpful. Let’s do a worked example to do with trauma. Pick up with an easy question or maybe not. What is trauma? And then we’ll think about perhaps in some of those categories you asked about, about what went wrong and how we deal with it to do with trauma. So definition of trauma to start with would be good.

Steve Midgley (21:11)

Yeah, there’s no single given definition of trauma that everybody agrees on. There are lots of different definitions from the American Psychological Association and the British Trauma Council and so on. What all the definitions include to some degree is a past event or series of events that were so disturbing that they overwhelmed a person’s capacity to cope with them. And that there was some measure of powerlessness in the experience, helplessness. And the experience has ongoing effects into the present. So if that sounded a bit complicated, some writers think in terms of three E’s, which is a little bit more memorable.There was an experience in the past. And that experience was overwhelming. And it – sorry, start that again. There was an event in the past, which they experienced as overwhelming and it has effects in the present. So an event or series of events that was experienced as overwhelming and that has ongoing effects.

Graham Nicholls (22:54)

We sometimes talk about near-death experiences in the sense that somehow it’s a brush with death, even if it’s not literally a brush with death, it’s either death of self or the potential of death or potential of serious injury or something. Do people bring the proximity to death into definitions?

Steve Midgley (23:14)

Yeah, some people do, do describe that. Ed Welsh in the biblical counselling work over in the States does use that phrase ‘a brush with death’. It tends to veer us towards physical threat. But I think it’s important to understand that trauma could be experienced in a different kind of threat. So a woman who is a subject of emotional abuse over a protracted period of time may not have feared physically for – there may not have been any violence. But nevertheless, the abuse that she suffered has extinguished her order to doubt her own sanity, perhaps, and her own sort of ability to live independently because of the abuse that she suffered. And that could have ongoing effects of trauma.

Graham Nicholls (24:19)

Couple of scaling questions, brief answers to these, I think, which is it widespread? Let’s just keep to the Christian population, just for simplicity. Would it be that there are many people in most churches who are experiencing the effects of trauma? Or would it be some people?

Steve Midgley (24:46)

Quick answer is: some people think in terms of ‘big T’ trauma, and ‘little t’ trauma. If you think about ‘little t’ trauma, then some calculate that 70% of us have experienced trauma. In effect, we’ve been in some sort of upsetting road traffic accident. We’ve had a very disturbing bereavement. We’ve been the victim of an assault. I don’t think that’s terribly helpful. Because I think that turns trauma into something that is too commonplace, and rather invalidates the experience of people who have experienced some of the most sort of severe forms of suffering, hence ‘big T’ trauma, which is a much smaller sort of part of the population.

Graham Nicholls (25:47)

Okay, and related to that, sorry, Lizzie, you ask the next one, just a really quick one. Do different people respond in different ways – in the sense that someone may have had, let’s call it a near-death experience – and be adequately coping with it as a believer, in the sense that they have understood God’s providence in it, they’re not in denial about it, and then another person could have had exactly the same experience, but not be dealing with it very well? Is that just obvious, that there will be different categories of people who respond in different ways?

Steve Midgley (26:21)

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s important not to attribute moral or spiritual strength to one person having ongoing effects from a traumatic incident, and another person not – there will be lots of different reasons that may have a bearing upon that. But yes, what you say is true. It’s not simply a case of saying all the people who have experienced something beyond this point, on some sort of scale of awfulness, are all going to experience trauma, because, remember, that is ongoing impact. That’s part of the definition. It’s not just the incident, it’s the fact that it has an ongoing impact. And two people in the same situation can experience it in two very different ways.

Lizzie Harewood (27:19)

That’s really interesting. And I have a lot of questions about the implications of trauma language, and also about the scale. So I suppose, many years ago, when we talked about trauma, we’d be thinking about soldiers in the First World War who had experienced, who’d been exposed to, ongoing threats to life, seen their friends be killed, had constant bombardment, very noisy explosions all around them, and being faced with the reality of their own death every day for however many months or years. And I think everyone could acknowledge that that is immense trauma that will then have, for some, a lifelong impact. And that doesn’t negate then, perhaps, you know, down the sliding scale, slightly less intensive experiences of trauma. However, I do have a concern that it has become slightly overused or diluted term. And people will talk about trauma in all kinds of contexts. Does that matter, though? Do you think that what we label the experiences and then the resulting psychological or holistic implications, does it matter that some people feel traumatised by what might be relatively low-level stuff? Do we treat all these people the same, as Christians? Should we be expressing and extending immense empathy, even when, objectively, we might say, that wasn’t, that shouldn’t have been a trauma-inducing event? Though I sound really uncaring now. I don’t know whether I’m…

Steve Midgley (29:19)

No, I think the observation you’re making is a really important one. It’s referred to in the literature in terms of concept creep. So a concept that is initially tightly defined to a relatively discreet group, then creeps outward and gathers in a much broader, more loosely defined set of experiences. And to be honest, we’re all guilty of it. Because we casually use the language of trauma. I mean, I’m in my 60s now.In my childhood, if something awful had happened to me, I would never say I’d have a traumatic day. I’d never have used that language. You know, I’d have some other way to say that was rubbish, or whatever. But I wouldn’t have talked about trauma. That was traumatic. We all do that now. It’s talked into popular parlance. And yes, we have therefore, we’ve therefore taken away the language that is required for the sort of person you were describing earlier on, Lizzie, the person who has experienced the awfulness of the battlefield.

Graham Nicholls (30:37)

It’s difficult when people approach us, because we can’t really set ourselves up as the guardians of where it becomes enough traumatic that we can allow them to call it traumatic. Yeah, we do have to take people as they are, don’t we, but maybe gently pushing back so we can observe from a distance. Yes, this is a problem of the language creep or definition creep. But with an individual approaching us, in a sense, we don’t have to entirely endorse and say, well, this is your truth, and it’s entirely true. But then we do have to start with listening to what they’re saying. So talk us through a little bit, if someone approaches you who says they have had a traumatic experience, or they’re struggling with a consequence of trauma, just a few, I don’t know, stepping stones as to things you might want to talk about, think about.

Steve Midgley (31:32)

Yes, and the comments I’m making are – we’re having a conversation about the way in which the language is used. And I think it is important to consider these sort of conceptual issues and challenge them. But the point you’re making, Graham, is that is a very different engagement with an individual, how you would speak to somebody. I think there are two different errors that we can make. And we can either consider trauma to be so complicated and so specialised, that we feel there’s nothing we can do – we need to leave it all to the experts. Or alternatively, we can think, you know, I’m a Christian, God’s on my side, I’ve got an all-sufficient Bible. So I’m sure I can sort this out, and be overconfident. And both, I think, are errors that we’re in danger of falling into.

Lizzie Harewood (32:49)

Sure. What does the – just very quickly – I mean, as far as I’m aware, the Bible doesn’t use the term trauma. And obviously, it talks a lot about suffering. So where would you start in the Bible to help create some kind of framework?

Steve Midgley (33:10)

No, you’re right. Trauma is a modern term.

Lizzie Harewood (33:15)

Which obviously doesn’t mean it’s an illegitimate term, it just means it’s not…

Steve Midgley (33:19)

No, I mean, as with lots of things within our society at the moment, and particularly within the realm of psychology, we have to do some translation, we have to think – there are lots of psychological sort of complaints and difficulties that we recognise and understand, and talk about today, that – where do we find those in the Bible? To talk about trauma, particularly, I think probably the first place I would go would be the Book of Job, with the awful things that happened to Job at the outset. And then as you read through the central chapters, which so often get ignored, you discover all sorts of ways that Job is describing intense anxiety, avoidance, disturbed sleep, desire to be dead, terror, hypervigilance, lots of the features that actually are recognised elements of the impact of trauma, including particularly PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. So you can see those there, in the way that Job is describing himself. So that would be one place I’d go. There are others, but certainly lots of descriptions of severe suffering. It’s slightly harder elsewhere to say there is obvious ongoing impact in a person’s life, which, as I said earlier, is part of the understanding of what trauma involves.

Graham Nicholls (35:02)

Would you describe the cross as a traumatic experience for Christ, the cross to remember?

Steve Midgley (35:10)

It certainly is an experience of severe suffering, clearly the severest of suffering. And I think one of the ways in which you might begin to help somebody think about a Christian response to trauma, is to recognise that in the cross, you have the ugliest, most awful event in human history, which because of God’s overarching purposes, becomes to our astonishment, a beautiful thing of glorious redemption. And if God can do that with the death of his own Son, then you begin to put in front of somebody who’s experienced something awful, the recognition that perhaps he can do something, even with their awful experience.

Graham Nicholls (36:17)

Yes. And I guess also Jesus operates with faith throughout, doesn’t he? In a way that’s exemplary in terms of how we respond to trauma, in a way that Job, although he doesn’t curse God, he does wobble more in his response. So maybe Jesus is a counterexample in that sense, if you wanted to call it trauma.

Lizzie Harewood (36:42)

Just thinking about ancient times as well, and this is a slight tangent, but I’m just thinking about the level of suffering that many people in the ancient world would have gone through, would have far exceeded anyone in our day and age, and most even the last couple of hundred years. I’m just wondering whether there’s anything in that, that means, and this is from a purely objective kind of secular perspective, that it’s very difficult to compare our sort of, our responses now to suffering. Do you think perhaps there’s a level of our nervous systems are hyper alert to any level of suffering, which then is interpreted as more traumatic? Because I just think back to crucifixion – you know, Jesus was not the first person to be crucified. Executions, public executions would have been relatively commonplace, I suppose. And children mortality would have been very high. Very violent deaths would have been more commonplace. I suppose – I’m just thinking those kinds of experience would have been expected to a greater degree, which means that perhaps there is more of this communal resilience. I don’t know, maybe I’m just hypothesising here.

Steve Midgley (38:16)

I think your observations would be backed up by some studies. I’m not an expert in these cultural studies, but I did come across in the research, I did [see] some studies, which suggested that different soldiers in different countries, who therefore had different experiences of exposure to actual military combat, where there was cultural kind of familiarity, in the way you’re describing of terrible things happening, of being involved in military combat, those soldiers seem to be more resilient to traumatic events than countries where there was not that expectation or familiarity with severely traumatic incidents.

Graham Nicholls (39:20)

Just picking up the story again. So we’ve avoided these two extremes that you’ve mentioned, of thinking I’ve just got the Bible and I can sort it, and so on. But what would your next steps be? Let’s assume it is something that all three of us, at least, understand as fairly significant traumatic experience, using all the scaling discussions we had just now, but we’d still think it was significant. Where would you go then? And yeah, where would you go then? There’s such a bunch of questions to that, but what are you doing now with the person?

Steve Midgley (39:57)

I think I’m asking them what they would find helpful, and what kind of conversation they think would be of benefit to them. It’s really important to recognise that, where people are encouraged to revisit a traumatic experience from the past, and that all too easily happens because we think it’s good for people to get things off their chest, and I’m sure it’s good to talk about things, where people revisit a traumatic incident from the past, it is for them like re-experiencing it. And this notion of re-traumatisation, where somebody says, tell me what happened, and they start quizzing them, asking lots of questions. One of the ways of understanding trauma is that a person, because they were overwhelmed in the experience, have not been able to lay down a normal memory. And because they haven’t managed to lay down a normal memory of the event, that’s why it kind of intrudes into their present, unbidden and in terrifying form, because it is like they’re there again. They’re not able to separate themselves present with this memory of something that happened in the past. It is as if it is reoccurring. So, the idea of ‘Do tell me what happened and I’ll ask you lots of questions about it, because it’s good for you to get it off your chest’ can actually be very damaging and hurtful and make things worse. So, hence my comment, Graham, to say, I want to begin the question by saying, ‘What would you find helpful? Did you want to talk about what happened? Or is that unhelpful?’

Graham Nicholls (41:58)

What if they say something along the lines of, ‘I want it to not impact on me in the way that it is, where it kind of dominates my thoughts and modifies my behaviour in an unbiblical, ruining fellowship kind of way.’ So, they say something along those lines: ‘I want help.’ What are you going to say?

Steve Midgley (42:19)

Then we’d better find somebody who has the wisdom and experience to help you. And if that’s not me, I’m not going to start meddling. That’s what I would say. Because it’s well established that, you know, there are three phases to helping somebody recover from trauma. The first of those is establishing a sense of safety. And only once a sense of safety is established can you then begin to revisit the experience and then begin to think about reintegrating into activities and socialising and reestablishing life in a way that has been hampered by their trauma.

Graham Nicholls (43:04)

What were the three stages, sorry? 

Steve Midgley (43:06)

Establishing safety, revisiting the experience, and then reintegrating into life. Would be one way of describing it. And that’s been long established in the trauma literature.

Graham Nicholls (43:21)

I’m an average pastor in Doncaster area. And not that your husband is at all average –

Lizzie Harewood (43:29)

He’s very average!

Graham Nicholls (43:30)

But someone approaches me and I do what you just said, Steve. I ask them what they want to do. They say, ‘I want help.’ How do you know whether you have sufficient wisdom to even start a conversation? Or you say, ‘I do not have wisdom.’ What’s the criteria for deciding whether you have sufficient?

Steve Midgley (43:49)

Have you done any training? Have you read any books? Have you talked to people who have been through trauma and been helped and asked them about what helped them? And learn from their experience? I think if the answer to those questions is, ‘Well, no,’ or ‘I’ve listened to a podcast from Affinity and that’s about the sum total,’ then you’re not in a place to offer them help. And I’m going to sound like I’m giving a commercial now. I mean, this is why I’ve got involved in Biblical Counselling UK – it’s because we want to raise the level of knowledge, wisdom, capacity, skill, right across the church family of people to be able to help others in all sorts of areas of life. I think because we’ve stopped doing it, we’ve become poor at it. And we need to rebuild our confidence, but we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves.

Graham Nicholls (45:14)

So in terms of biblical categories, you’re not suggesting there’s a body of wisdom that’s outside the church, like it’s in BCUK and it’s in training, but it’s not in the Bible and in the leadership of the church. It’s just you’re saying there’s a specialist kind of gifting, I guess, that is part of God’s gift to the church that may be exercised in a number of different people in a given church. Does that make sense as a question?

Lizzie Harewood (45:44)

Is that what you’re saying, Steve? I understood it slightly differently, that there might be people who have special understanding of trauma itself and its impact and how it kind of plays out and then how it needs to be responded to, who can then apply biblical counsel at the appropriate time. I don’t know.

Steve Midgley (46:11)

Yes. What’s another way of answering this question? I mean, the Puritans were really good at pastoral care.They wrote vast tomes describing all sorts of things that affected people and how to make sense of them and understand them. And they predated any psychological theories. They weren’t encumbered by those views. Did that make them unsophisticated? Not at all. They were very sophisticated in their pastoral care. The history, if you like, is that we stopped doing that. We let go of that wise and sophisticated pastoral care because we passed the baton to somebody else. We said that the psychologists and the counsellors can do all of this. And so it’s re-skilling ourselves. It’s saying this is church business.

Graham Nicholls (47:18)

So if I put it crudely, in a sense you’re not saying the Bible is inadequate, we need some expert knowledge. You’re saying many churches and church leaderships have not given sufficient time and reflection to the application of those biblical principles to helping people.

Lizzie Harewood (47:40)

Well, I suppose I’m going to impose my interpretation. I suppose it’s a cyclical thing, isn’t it? If that needs, if people with those needs don’t go to the church and the church doesn’t kind of develop or doesn’t resource people to be able to deal with those things well, not just in a kind of glib, shallow, read a psalm way, but doesn’t do what the Puritans did. And spent a lot of sort of time applying biblical wisdom to their introspective kind of meanderings. And I don’t know – I guess I grasp a little more, perhaps.

Steve Midgley (48:25)

You’re right. If we stop doing it, then of course you become poor at it.

Lizzie Harewood (48:30)

Yeah.

Steve Midgley (48:31)

And the less you do it, the less good you are at it. And then of course people don’t come to you because you’re no good at it. And they go somewhere else and they find something more helpful. Then of course, that’s where they’ll go. So it is going to take a bit of effort to reverse that trend.

Graham Nicholls (48:52)

Yeah. I mean, skilling up is brilliant. But by the way, this is in the context of me being very positive about it. We, as Steve would know, we have my co-pastor who’s now tutoring in BCUK and other people in the church who are trained and so forth, and I’m part of a local group as well. So we are very positive about it. I think I have moments, because I think it’s quite hard, of just working out where all the overlaps are. And particularly if someone approaches with an issue – someone in the church who’s perhaps not part of the leadership, is counselling that person, quite where the overlap of accountability and spiritual input and spiritual responsibility – [that] sometimes [gets] a bit complicated. But I think they’re problems worth solving, rather than saying this is too difficult. But I do think they are problems that need solving at times to do with how the various overlaps and the overlaps with outside agencies as well. Maybe it’s just us.

Lizzie Harewood (49:56)

The two mistakes would be thinking anyone with the best intentions can go in and be a help to someone with trauma. You know, we have this phrase of one-anothering at church, which in general is brilliant. You know, we come alongside one another, we speak biblical truths to each other to encourage each other’s souls and to truly walk alongside each other through struggles. But that isn’t necessarily going to be helpful for someone who’s experienced trauma and is then really suffering because we may not understand quite how to apply wisdom. Whereas the other option is where we only outsource this to medical or psychological professionals. And I guess what you’re saying is we need to get back to equipping and empowering the church to do what they’ve been doing, albeit perhaps not always perfectly, but for thousands of years.

Steve Midgley (50:59)

I mean, the one-anothering is valuable as long as you know what you’re capable of. If somebody develops acute myeloid leukaemia, we don’t say, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about acute myeloid leukaemia. So I’m not going to come alongside that person.’ We think, ‘Oh, gosh, they’re facing something awful, let me love them, let me love their family.’ And in a similar sort of way, somebody who’s facing something incredibly complicated – they’ve developed severe anorexia nervosa, they’ve developed a psychotic illness, we don’t imagine that we have the expertise to step in and solve their difficulties. But we can still come alongside them with practical care and support and love and compassion. And we should. But wouldn’t it be great if we also bit by bit, gradually raise the level of competency across our whole church communities. And also we’re developing some people at the more complex end, who did have the experience to think Christianly about eating disorders and about psychosis.

Graham Nicholls (52:29)

Yeah, that’s really helpful. And yeah, personally, I’m very positive about it. And I think this is a rubbish analogy, but I know you do stuff to do with marriage anyway, but if you just take it out of the BCUK world, to do with marriages, I think we would say there’s loads of biblical teaching and you’ve got all you need in the Bible in terms of how to live well as a married couple. You as a pastor of a church may know the principles and be reasonable at chatting with people about it. But there may be other people in the church who are perhaps not part of the leadership who have taken more time to train and reflect practitioners with lots of married couples and actually are better at it than you. And I think there’s a humility you have to exercise to say ‘That’s better that they follow up with married couple than I do, because I’m not the expert.’ But that’s the kind of interface I was talking about.

Steve Midgley (53:22)

I think that’s a really helpful analogy, because I think talking with a couple is [an] incredibly skilled discipline. When you see somebody who has done a lot of it, I find it just glorious to watch. I think that is so skilful – what they are managing to do in helping that couple to communicate to identify underlying issues that are so important. And you realise that’s a highly skilled thing. But you can do it Christianly, and that’s the ideal that we want to be working towards.

Graham Nicholls (54:05)

Sure, yeah. And there’s a kind of reporting into the leadership of the church that doesn’t need to say all the details of what was discussed. But you have to build up lots of trust links and communication links that work well enough. Absolutely.

Steve Midgley (54:22)

I mean working out how to how to maintain the authority and the pastoral sort of responsibility within a church community is absolutely key.

Lizzie Harewood (54:37)

Can I ask a very brief question about something that’s come up now? I work in the realm of education. And one of the things I’m still teetering on the fence about is this idea of something that’s become very common in education, and that’s being a trauma-informed school and then you can pass that over to being a trauma-informed church. Now, is that something that could be genuinely helpful for the church, as in training members of the congregation on being trauma informed? Or is that potentially something that then adds to the narrative of trauma, perhaps replacing a level of normal suffering in our lives? I don’t know. I’m completely on the fence about this, because you don’t want to allow trauma to become the identity of a certain proportion of your congregation, because I don’t think that actually does them any good, or the church any good. But at the same time, if we’re not dealing with the potential that there will be people in the church with trauma, and if we’re not dealing with that, in a helpful way, it could be more damaging. I don’t know. What do you think?

Steve Midgley (56:10)

It’s a contentious term, probably more contentious over in the US than in the UK at the moment. And I think some of the contention revolves around different meanings tucked in within it. If by trauma informed, we mean we absorb everything, or all the understandings that exist within the secular secular world about what trauma is, how it affects a person, what the solutions are, and so on, then that’s one thing. It’s rather different to say, we’re not ignorant about the impact that trauma can have in a person’s life. And so if you come and tell us that you’ve faced some trauma, and it’s continued to impact you, we won’t look puzzled as if we don’t know what you’re talking about. Those are two rather different things. And I think that the latter seems to me to be – the world is talking about trauma. And if the church doesn’t know anything about it, and looks a bit blank, or is cynical and dismissive, then I think we look a bit out of step with our culture. And we want to be able to speak truth into our culture.

Graham Nicholls (57:48)

Yeah. All really helpful stuff. And we’ve taken you up on a few little bypaths. We’re pretty much out of time. Just as we wrap up, Steve, it’d be really good if you remind us the title of your book. And also where we can get more information about BCUK.

Steve Midgley (58:07)

I’ll be glad to do that. The book is called Understanding Trauma. And the subtitle is A biblical introduction for church care. And the subtitle is important because it is only an introduction. It’s a big topic. But it is trying to say, how do we do this better in our churches? And information about BCUK, the best place to go is, it won’t surprise you to know to go to our website. And you’ll see information about our training and various resources available there.

Graham Nicholls (58:43)

Brilliant. Well, thank you very much for your time. Really appreciate it.

Steve Midgley (58:47)

Thanks. Thank you for having me. Thank you for stimulating questions.