We make a mistake when we think of discipleship as something which develops in a straight line from A to B. Instead, when working with survivors of, or people experiencing, trauma, we need to recognise the fragmental nature of human reality and so also avoid faith-tropes such as holism, wholeness, and flourishing. We need to develop our language of trauma-informed discipleship.

I am not an expert in trauma. However, I’ve spent the last couple of years teaching at our recovery church on questions of trauma and faith. Central to my reflection on trauma and discipleship has been understanding the way that the experience of trauma causes a rupture in the person’s life. The disruption to our sense of self, particularly our meaning-making narrative, and to our capacity to rationally engage with our world, affects the way that we experience Christ in our lives.

Trauma and Time

Following an experience of trauma, our ability to regulate and make rational decisions is frequently negatively impacted. Our past experiences continue to be felt in our body, emotions, and mind. The distinction between past events and present reality is, to an extent, lost, as past and present are folded together. Traumatic memories are experienced as current reality, and our bodies react to the events which trigger those memories as if it was experiencing the original trauma. We experience it as a threat to our existence, and our body and emotions react accordingly.

As past and present are brought together and our capacity to tell reality from our trauma is disrupted, we experience a rupture in our language, specifically in our storytelling. Humans are storytelling animals. It is through narrative that we make sense of our reality. We tell stories to explain the world, to teach things to each other, to share our lives with other people, and to explain who we are. Stories are the basis of human reality, far more than a dry recitation of facts. But our experience of trauma often leaves us unable to articulate our stories, and thus our ability to self-narrate is ruptured. The effects of trauma on our memory and on our current ability to make sense of reality mean that our self-storytelling is often not sequential and lacks any sense of consistent meaning.

Fragmented Meaning

We are used to making meaning out of our lives sequentially. A leads to B, followed by C, and so on. We experience our lives as a series of events, one after the other, which give meaning to each other. But our experiences of trauma fragment our memory and damage our ability to tell a meaningful story, and so make it difficult for us to explain or understand ourselves in the present. This also has an impact on our discipleship and our faith journey.

Just as our sense of self is fragmented, so our sense of journeying with Christ is fragmented.

We tend to think of discipleship in a linear fashion. People come to know Jesus, experience conversion, grow in their faith through a series of experiences and encounters, and grow over time into a deeper knowledge and love of God. But a linear narrative of faith development does not work for a person who is experiencing a rupture in their own narrative.

Discipleship always has to be understood in the specific context of each individual, and this is particularly true for a person who has experienced trauma. When our experience of reality, and our own story, is not linear but is fragmented through trauma memories, our experience of faith development and our encounter with Christ have to equally be understood in that fragmentary sense. Suffering is not linear. A non-linear sense of self requires a non-linear sense of transformation and discipleship.

Non-Linear Discipleship

The development of faith for a person who has experienced fragmentation will not occur sequentially. There will be moments of disruption alongside moments of revelation. Encounters with Jesus will exist alongside the pain and suffering of triggered memories. Transformation will not be an inevitable movement from A to B but will go forwards and backwards and, more importantly, will act as a kind of nexus within which both past and present exist simultaneously whilst the future hope becomes something far more challenging to hold onto. When discipleship so often points towards a future hope, but our experience can be painfully rooted in the past, we need a different kind of discipleship.

This kind of discipleship moves away from holicism and embraces brokenness. The language of wholeness can be difficult for people who do not feel whole and are not equipped to be able to see a future apart from their past. What does it mean to be whole when your life is fragmented? What does it mean to be in Christ when we do not know how to be in ourselves? Perhaps this starts to make sense when we ground ourselves in the brokenness of Christ.

Being Like Christ Means Being Crucified

What if being like Christ does not mean being made whole, but recognising that in accepting our brokenness, we are accepting being in Christ, and in so doing, the power of our wounds and our pain is destroyed. A fragmented discipleship recognises that the crucified Christ retains his wounds even after he has been resurrected. The very nature of God experiences pain and brokenness, experiences trauma and separation on the cross and in death, and so to be in the image of God is to be broken but healed, scarred but restored, alive but still carrying the experiences of the past. We are a new creation, but one which is made out of the fabric of our past.

Fragmented discipleship does not flow in a linear fashion and does not move towards a goal. Instead, fragmented discipleship operates in an interweaving movement of experience and memory, of suffering and healing, of hope and reality, which comes together in the person of Christ. In Christ, reality is known, because in Christ we are free to be known as we are in our brokenness. To be in the image of God is to be crucified and scarred. This does not glorify suffering, but it understands that our suffering does not separate us from Christ and that our brokenness does not mean we have not been transformed. The new creation, our transformation in Christ, does not fix us or take away our history, but it makes our scars holy as signs of our victory over death.

Fragmented discipleship owns our pain and robs it of its power over us. Fragmented discipleship accepts the reality of our trauma but learns to disarm it by learning to tell our stories again. Stories which flow from the cross and which bring safety out of fear, healing for our scars, and recognises that though we are broken, we are still beautiful.

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