Emotional Trauma: Is it Possible for Me to Heal?

We live in such a culture where fitness is so important and body image and all of that. When we were going to seminary, I got into this real fitness phase. Do you remember this? Oh, do I remember? You were like six percent of body fat.

What was it? Four percent? Look at her.

She had four right on her lips. Well, it was terrible because I was teaching classes at a gym and this is when the fitness craze hit the culture where gyms were opening. And I've been teaching these classes with 100 people in them. But we had to do body fat testing once a month in order to teach there.

And if it got to be a certain point, we were disqualified and we'd have to lose weight in order to teach. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson.

And you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. I mean, there's a lot of messed up stuff in my background with eating disorders and all kinds of stuff. So talk about triggering. Now I'm like, I am winning the competition. So I dropped my body fat down to four percent. So this was just messed up anyway.

And it's just feeding all of my insecurity. I mean, she I remember this class at this gym, all the men took her class because they said she's the hardest instructor. And she was.

She's a former gymnast and she just I couldn't even survive. So then at the same time, we're taking seminary classes and I took some classes, especially on how to do counseling. So I'm thinking, oh, this will be fun that I can help people. And as we're in the class, they're doing our family tree and then we get into abuse. And then I'm digging into sexual abuse that I experienced that I had told you about. And I thought, oh, that's in the past. It's fine.

It's over. Well, of course, now I haven't dealt with any of it. So now I'm starting to deal with it. I'm crying every night. I'm working out every night. And I'm realizing, oh, this mental health thing.

It wasn't even a word back then that we used very much. But this was something that was affecting every single area of my life. We started on a journey of mental, emotional, spiritual and the physical was all part of it.

Yeah. It's interesting to be sitting here with a therapist looking across the table at us thinking, oh, boy, were you guys. You'd love to have us in your office.

We sort of are sitting in your office right now in a studio. But we've got Deborah Faleta with us today. You've written a book called Are You Really OK?

And I know you're looking at us like, no, you guys aren't. She's like, John, to your husband, like, we need to come back here and help these people more. Well, we're glad to have you back on Family Life today. Welcome back. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, we've talked about, you know, quite a few things in this book, but I love your subtitle, Getting Real About Who You Are, How You're Doing and Why It Matters. Yeah. Right. So let's talk about all that. But start with why it matters, because, again, we've said this previously, but often in the church or in the Christian community, the stock answer is, I am OK. I've got Christ and there's a lot that is true about that. And yet it's hard for us to answer that question.

Are you really OK? Yeah, we zoom in on the spiritual health and forget all the other aspects of health. When Jesus says, love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, there are different aspects to health that we really have to focus on. And just being a Christian doesn't make us healthy. It's funny that you mentioned the physical fitness in the gym, because we don't have that mentality with our physical health. We don't assume that when we come to Jesus, we're going to be at the right BMI. Our blood pressure is going to be right.

Our cholesterol is going to be perfect. But we make that assumption with our mental health and our emotional health. We assume that when I come to Jesus, I'm good in these areas.

It's good. You know, we don't see the process like going to the gym. I always tell people, what if we were to start seeing counseling kind of like we see going to the gym? Sometimes people see counseling like I'm sick and I have to go to the doctor and I don't want to acknowledge that I'm sick. But what if we were to see the process of counseling like going to the gym? I'm going to work my emotional and mental muscles and get them strong and fit.

I mean, we'd be high fiving each other. You know what I mean? Yeah, you're going to counseling.

Way to go! Would you say that almost everybody could use that kind of therapy? One hundred percent.

Yeah. And I say that as a therapist, I understand. But also as a woman who has been through my own personal journey of mental health and needing counseling and needing medication.

OK, talk about that a little bit. What's your journey? You know, for me, I've counseled a lot of people with depression and I've been through postpartum depression a couple of times with my first two children.

So I've known depression. But where it really hit was about five years ago, I went through a really traumatic miscarriage and it was actually an unexpected miscarriage. I went in for a routine appointment. I found out I'd lost the baby. And then while I was at the appointment, just by chance, I started hemorrhaging, bleeding to the point where I almost lost my life. The doctor literally ran me to the emergency room in the wheelchair. She literally pushed me there herself.

And she said I was just minutes away from losing my life. So you recover from that, the loss, the trauma, like we talked about earlier, you deal with it, you grieve, you go home and you live your life again. But the thing about trauma is it's not a once and done experience. You've got to really process it in layers.

It comes back for a new opportunity for healing and then a next layer of healing and then a next layer of healing. Which people always are so frustrated with. I was frustrated with this. I thought when I was done with seminary and I had done these counseling classes, I'm healed. I've done it.

It will never come back. And then something triggers it a few years later. And there's another layer to be dealt with.

Yeah, it happens in layers. And not only that, but sometimes people think time will help me heal. But time does not heal all wounds. In fact, some wounds when left with time will just get infected.

They'll get worse, not better. And that is trauma in a nutshell. I mean, when a soldier goes off to war and they're on the battlefield, there's so much going on. There's so much trauma. You don't deal with the trauma while you're on the battlefield. It's when they go home and life is safe and secure that the trauma begins to come back up.

And that's what happened for me. When I went home a few years later when life was safe and secure, I started having symptoms of panic attacks that came out of nowhere. This was like months later after the miscarriage? It was actually about two years later. Two years later when it's like not even in my mind anymore, but your body remembers. Your brain remembers. And I remember I was on a safari bus with the kids and I started feeling really hot and kind of lightheaded. And my body remembered what I didn't. When I was hemorrhaging, I felt lightheaded. And I actually said to the nurse, I'm feeling lightheaded.

Can I get a drink? And I didn't realize what was happening. My body was like, you're feeling lightheaded again?

Uh oh. There's a part of your brain called your amygdala. The amygdala is responsible for emotional memory. It remembers these deep emotions. And when my amygdala sensed the presence of lightheadedness, the first thing it probably went back to was, uh oh, last time you felt lightheaded, you almost died.

This is an emergency. And your body goes into fight or flight, false alarming. And that's what a panic attack essentially is.

Your body is false alarms that's rooted in something a little bit deeper. So I had to learn to identify what that looked like in my own life and begin the process of healing. Our son was preaching a message and he told a story similar. A guy that got bit by a rattlesnake in a woods, almost died. They had to airlift him out, saved his life. Three years later, he's in a woods, a twig hits his calf, the same place where he got bit. He looks down and his leg is swelling up like there's venom.

And it was a twig. But his body and his brain said, we've been here before. Isn't that something? That's crazy.

The body reacts in such a severe way. Yeah. I mean, it's just amazing how God's made our brain, which is fascinating and beautiful, but it can play tricks on you if you don't know how to okay mentally, what do I do? I'm thinking of so many of our listeners that maybe they've experienced depression or panic attacks or their kids are right now and they feel at a loss of what are my next steps?

Yeah. Well, first and foremost, we thank the Lord for giving us that response because it's protective. Thank you, Lord, that my amygdala works.

Thank you that it protects me. Thank you that my body reacts to danger and stress. But now I've got to understand the effects of trauma on this reaction that's causing me to overreact. And for each person, it's going to look a little differently for that man.

It's learning. I'm actually safe. Trauma fills our mind with lies. How I like to think of trauma, it's like if your life is a book, chapter by chapter, trauma is like that big black Sharpie that just scribbles all over that page with lies. So for me, the lie was, you almost died, you could die again. What was the truth? The truth was, I was in God's hands all along. I remember the first time God allowed His truth to kind of break through the voice of my trauma.

It was in the evening, I was getting ready for bed. And I remember just having all those flashbacks to that day. And my body's just starting to feel tense again, thinking I almost died. And I remember God breaking the tension with a light hearted chuckle. It wasn't an audible chuckle, but I just felt the Lord speak in a chuckle. And I'm thinking, why is He laughing?

This is serious. But in a light chuckle, He said to me, you didn't almost die. Just because the doctor said that, I had you in my hands the whole time. That truth broke through the experience of trauma for me. And part of dealing with our trauma is learning to see it through God's eyes, learning to replace it with what is actually true, that I am safe, that I am loved, that my days are numbered and in His hands. And so there's mental work to be done in battling trauma. And so much of that mental work can be done in the context of therapy.

It's such a helpful way to get a jumpstart on some of that mental work. Yeah. Talk about truth, because we have to replace lies. And it may be, you know, a physical trauma like that, but it could be just lies we've heard or even been told from childhood of I'm worthless, I'm not wanted, I'm not gifted. And you come into adulthood and you are living out lies. How do we replace those? Therapy is obviously going to help.

Yeah. How many ways can we replace lies with truth? I think it starts with us identifying those lies to begin with. I think sometimes we're kind of on autopilot. We don't even realize all the lies that we're carrying and living out of.

We don't even acknowledge them. And so I think a huge part of it is recognizing those lies and then beginning to replace them with God's truth. What does God's word say? But here's where I always have to be cautious, because for some people, this response is so intense that it can be characterized as clinical anxiety, clinical depression, panic attacks. And what happens then is that your chemistry is actually changing.

Your stress chemicals, the cortisol is getting so high that it's beginning to hijack your body's ability to absorb the good chemicals, the feel good chemicals of dopamine and serotonin. And when that shift begins to happen chemically, some people need medication in order to even be able to digest God's truth. I remember the times in my worst moments with panic and depression, if somebody would have given me scripture, I would have been like, what do I do with this? I feel horrible.

I feel like I'm dying. I need you to save me, not give me scripture. So this is where I feel like the church has to be cautious in how we talk about mental and emotional health. God is in the work of healing, and all of these things can move us in the direction of healing. So this would be you're talking about cognitive disorders of bipolar. You're saying like, oh, when we're at this point, it's okay to come in with a therapist, with a psychologist and psychiatrist to administer some medication that can help with a chemical. Just like a diabetic will go get insulin and change their lifestyle, get insulin, pray over the situation. We've got to see mental health in the same way and tackle it in a holistic approach as well.

Because maybe this problem with worry that's controlling my life is actually undiagnosed clinical depression or clinical anxiety. And I'm not putting a name to it, so I don't even know how to begin countering it. I think sometimes Christians are afraid that when we name it, we claim it. But I believe when we name it, God doesn't lose his power.

When we name it, I now see my responsibility in the equation, what I need to start doing differently. And so you're seeing both come hand in hand. Like scripture is important.

God's word is so alive and vibrant. But also sometimes we bring in medication that could possibly help and a therapist that can guide us in that area. Do you think a Christian therapist?

I do. I think that's an important piece to the puzzle because true healing is multifaceted. True healing involves our emotional health, our mental health, our physical health and our spiritual health.

They all work together. And so there's so many resources out there. But even if you go to my website, truelovedates.com slash counseling, there's all kinds of databases and opportunities to connect with licensed counselors who are also Christians. There's so many different places that have resources for good Christian counselors.

Yeah, I know. I've shared here in the last 18 months, I sat down with a therapist. It was amazing to me as we sort of put up my life in my childhood on a whiteboard. He had this God-given gift to go, hey, let's talk about this.

And I'd be like, why that? And five minutes later, I'm like, oh, boy, he's identified something in my life that is triggering and active in my life. And all I know and I'm not saying we're done, but as I went through this year with Greg and then Ann went over and we did it as a couple. I thought I wish I'd done this 30 years ago.

I thought, what a gift I could have given my kids 30 years ago. At the same time, I'm thinking I'm not done. Yeah, it's never too late. I love that.

It's never too late. A guy can change me even in my 60s and I could have an impact on my marriage and my kids at this point. But let's talk about another thing that you write about in your book. The physical part as well with the mental, I think we underestimate even the power of rest.

Yes. So talk about how the physical helps us heal as well. You know, the body-mind connection is real. And when our mind is struggling, our bodies will struggle. When our bodies are struggling, our mind will also struggle. So even something as basic as sleep, you know, when we're not sleeping well, it affects our mental health, our ability to concentrate and focus and process and even our ability to just not get overwhelmed.

And so looking at our sleep, looking at our exercise, which actually increases our serotonin and dopamine, those good feeling chemicals, looking at our diet, all of these things are part of the equation. I also say looking at your schedule because sometimes we are doing so much in the name of ministry, in the name of the Lord, but we're depleted. We're running on empty. We're not healthy emotionally and mentally. And if we're like a well pouring out to others, we have to be pouring out of our fullness, not out of our emptiness. And we don't want to wait till we get to a place of burnout before we take care of ourselves.

We want to start taking care of ourselves before we get to empty. And that's something that I think is a word for so many of us in the ministry world, in the caregiving world. You said in your book and even at lunch that you and John say no a lot.

What's that look like? Because you have four kids. You're traveling, you're speaking, you're a therapist. You guys have a lot on your plate. You know, we've learned that you can only do a few things well. So we've began to the discipline of focusing on the things that we can do and saying no to everything else. And for us, that looks like the amount of activities our kids are allowed to be in, the amount of ministries that we're allowing ourselves to be a part of. I mean, you know, in this field, you get so many invitations and opportunities, but not all opportunities are opportunities you say yes to.

Sometimes you've got to say, you know what, I'm not going to be able to say yes because when I say yes to this, I'm inadvertently saying no to time with my family, to my own personal mental health, to my own marriage and investing in my marriage. And so realizing that there is power in that word, it's not an anti-Christian word and neither is self-care. You know, a lot of times people think self-care is an anti-Christian word, but Jesus himself knew what it looked like to get away, to say no, to spend time with the Father so that he could be filled up to sleep. I love the passage when Jesus gets on the boat and is like, I'm going to go take a nap. And the storm doesn't even wake him up. He modeled what it looked like to take care of himself, allow the Father to pour into him so that he could pour into others.

And what a beautiful example for us. I want to end, Deborah, talking about maybe you've done this too. I talk to so many women that feel like, oh, their kids are shut down emotionally or their husbands shut down emotionally. And they see like, oh, I see the greatness in my husband if he would just look at this area. But their husband or their kids are saying, no, I'm OK, I'm fine. As a spouse or a parent or grandparent, coach us, like, do we just pray?

Do we talk? What's the best steps for us to take? You know, it's really hard when it's somebody that's not in your control, your child. Don't you hate that? Your spouse. That's the worst thing.

You can't control them. It is very difficult. I think there's two steps.

Number one, to model it yourself. So to begin to share and use that vocabulary with my children. This is how I'm feeling. This is what I'm going through. This is what I'm stressed out about, what I'm overwhelmed with. Start modeling those words. And you even do that with your kids.

I do. I do an activity with the kids where I sit them down and have them color the feelings in their body so that we can begin to talk about them. And I lay that all out in Are You Really OK, what that activity looks like and how to apply it to your family. But with grown ups, with adults, you want to begin to even model that language in your marriage, begin opening up in your marriage. I think that vulnerability begins to take the walls down. It's like, oh, you're being vulnerable and maybe I can be vulnerable, too.

And so modeling it is really important. And then learning to ask the right questions. I think sometimes we ask accusing questions rather than inviting questions. Give us an example of both. You know, for example, to say, you seem like you're just so stressed out these days. Tell me what's going on or is there something going on with you that I don't know about versus like, you know what, honey, I'd love to pray for you.

What's something that you feel is causing stress right now in your life that I can be praying for you about? You know, the tone and the way that we ask the question. And then they come in to me and say, well, I did ask him how he's feeling and he won't tell me.

So it's like, can you record that and bring it in? Because I'd like to do an assessment and just see, like, how are we asking these questions? What is my responsibility in that conversation? What does it look like to be an inviting person rather than someone who's accusing someone who really wants to know how you are really doing?

Not because I want to accuse or manipulate you, but because I genuinely care for your heart. What does that look like to be people who invite one another into that part? And this takes practice. This doesn't just happen overnight. Jon and I have our routine we call Sunday night check-ins. And on Sunday nights at 9 p.m., his alarm goes off on his iPhone and we'll sit down and check in with each other how we're doing emotionally, how we're doing mentally, how we're doing in our marriage, how we're doing in our parenting.

Are you really okay? Let's talk about it. And in the beginning, it wasn't easy.

Yeah, what did it sound like? It's a little awkward and you don't know how much to share or not share. And you just, you're not comfortable with it because, like I said earlier, this type of practice is something you have to learn. And to check in with each other, what that can do for your marriage, for your emotional health, for your mental health, to be on the same page with one another, to help each other. You have a built-in partner. And sometimes it starts with modeling that and asking those questions. Man, I think here's what I want to put into practice.

Oh, good. Are we going to do something? I'm saying this out loud and I'm hoping some listeners will go, you know what, I'm with you over the last several sessions talking to you about this. Number one is a journal where I would write down what emotions am I feeling and what lies am I hearing and replacing that with truth.

Literally writing those down, like that'd be interesting. And then what you just said, the Sunday night check in, I'm thinking nine o'clock for a couple to at least once a week, check in and talk about emotional, physical, mental and spiritual health together. And coming in without accusing one another. That could transform a marriage. Just that conversation. And I think, I don't know, like you do, but you're so right. It'd be so awkward at first. It's like a new workout. Right. I don't know how to do this, but guess what?

You get in there, you learn and you keep doing it and pretty soon you're going to get pretty good at it. I think we'd all have to admit that the last almost two years now have taken a toll on our emotional health, our mental health. All of us are weary and the extent to which our mental health has been affected by the events of the pandemic and by the turbulence in our culture.

That's going to vary from person to person, but we've all been impacted. And to help us get a grip on our own mental and emotional and spiritual health. Deborah has written a book called Are You Really OK?

The subtitle is Getting Real About Who You Are, How You're Doing and Why It Matters. Her book is a good first step in self-diagnosis and in providing some steps we can each take to become healthier people. We've got Deborah's book in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can request your copy from us online at familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get your copy. Again, the title of the book is Are You Really OK?

by Deborah Faleta. Order online at familylifetoday.com or call to order at 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And we know here at Family Life that the next few weeks may be a stressful season for you.

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