I’ve done a lot of writing about the importance of cultivating “safety” recently, but some recent conversations have highlighted to me that not everyone understands this word the same way. While trauma survivors and psychologists use “safety” to denote a very particular experience, I’ve noticed a lot of Christians assume that “safety” is synonymous with “comfort”—or that “unsafe” is synonymous with “uncomfortable.” When we describe a something as an “unsafe space,” what others sometimes hear is, “I’m highly sensitive, and I feel uncomfortable in this space because it challenges me or exposes me to people who think differently to me, and I don’t enjoy that feeling.” If that was, in fact, what we meant, then a logical response would be to encourage that person to step outside their comfort zone and take responsibility for their over-sensitivity. This would be reasonable and well-intentioned, and it’s why I think a lot of Christian leaders act with the best of motivations but still cause unintentional harm.
When we assume ‘safety’ merely means ‘comfort,’ we risk spiritualising a very embodied experience.
When we assume ‘safety’ merely means ‘comfort,’ we risk spiritualising a very embodied experience. When we misdiagnose the issue, we prescribe unhelpful solutions. A Christian leader recently encouraged me to actively put myself in situations where I feel unsafe because apparently my sense of safety should come from knowing Jesus loves me. Do you see the step towards spiritualising a solution? What does the spiritualised ‘solution’ imply about this person’s diagnosis of the problem?
I want to be very clear that safe does not equal comfortable. This post will highlight some of the qualitatively different experiences of physical states in the body and processes of the brain that distinguish safety and comfort, and I’ve invited my dear friend Bec to co-write this article and share insights from her professional expertise and lived experience. Bec has studied areas including (but not limited to!) psychosocial development and the effects of trauma on the brain and body, and she’s also worked in environments that display the extreme physical, emotional, and behavioural responses of traumatised young people. I’m thrilled about the work Bec’s already doing in this space and so grateful for the insights she shares below!
The beginnings of a trauma informed approach to ministry: What is safety?
Co-written by Bec Preston and Matthew Ventura
You may read this headline and think, “Safety in church? Isn’t church arguably the safest place?”
Often the general public’s definition of safety aligns with “the absence of danger,” or, according to Cambridge University, “a state in which or a place where you are safe and not in danger or at risk.”
You may also then think, “There’s no physical danger in church; you’re probably talking about comfort.”
Comfort and safety are different things. But let’s peer in between the lines of danger and risk from a psychological perspective to then explore how comfort and safety are different.
The impact of trauma is not simply replayed memories or a few negative emotions; it affects both the brain and the body.[1] We know that emotions are felt physically too: e.g. anger feels like heat in the face for some, anxiety can feel tight in the stomach, sadness feels like a heaviness of the chest, etc. A trauma trigger occurs when a person’s environment (a conversation, person, place, sound,sight, or idea) reminds them of a traumatising experience or series of events. So, when a person walks through the doors of church into a building that ENVIRONMENTALLY reminds them of their traumatic experience, they will automatically scan the environment for signs that they may be triggered, and their bodies will be wired to protect themselves from those triggers; then they will look for signs of safety or protection.
Can a survivor of religious trauma simply choose to stop their stress levels rising any time they visit a church? No. More often than not, survivors are accepting that it will likely happen every time.
The danger is retraumatisation, or reliving the trauma by re-experiencing its impacts in their body as if they were back in that traumatic moment again. I (Bec) have personally experienced hurt from my brothers, sisters, and siblings through things like dismissing a person’s experience, making empathy or grace conditional, othering people, showing judgement, using prayer to “fix” someone without consent, pressuring someone into vulnerability, using power to theologically “correct” someone’s exploration of Scripture (especially those that have been weaponised against marginalised groups), and perpetuating systems with underlying prejudices (whether conscious or unconscious). Some real-life examples include:
- When discussing the struggle of being bisexual as a Christian woman, I have been told dismissively that “at least you can marry a man.”
- When seeking to understand verses such as Leviticus 18:22, 1 Timothy 1:10 or 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 in their historical and linguistic context, I have been told I’m trying to “justify and normalise sin.”
- I have had a man attempt to “cast out” the demon inside me that was “making me gay.”
- When trying to understand verses (such as ‘wives submit to your husbands’) as someone with trauma surrounding submission to a domestically violent partner, I have been met with accusations about how “fourth wave feminism is trying to destroy the nuclear family.”
- My attempts to understand why women cannot be leaders has been responded with “all women do is focus on what they can’t have, don’t you know men have a harder calling?”
I do not speak for all survivors of religious trauma (or trauma survivors generally!), but I merely share examples from my experience to give insight to those who have no prior knowledge of retraumatisation in a church setting.
The risk we experience is walking through the doors. By showing up to church, trauma survivors are actively stepping into a reminder that at any moment, they may need to defend or protect themselves.
Even if the new environment doesn’t pose any actual threats of danger, the person’s body may still feel under threat, leaving them at risk of retraumatisation.[2] Consciously, you can know you’re not in danger, but your body doesn’t. Like someone who’s been in a horrific car accident who feels heightened anxiety every time they get behind a wheel, our bodies may launch into survival mode whenever we find ourselves in an environment that resembles a context where we were harmed… and the scary thing is, if someone’s body feels this unsafe, even if there’s not an immediate threat in this environment, that person is still at risk of experiencing compounded harm through retraumatisation.[3] To fully understand this risk, we need to understand what’s actually happening in our brains and bodies in that moment.
Trauma and the Brain
When looking at how trauma affects the brain, three parts of the brain are considered: the thinking brain, the emotional brain, and the survival brain (Perry’s ‘Brain State Model’).[4] The thinking brain is responsible for thinking and reasoning within the neocortex. The emotional brain creates emotions and feelings—the limbic system. The survival brain is the brain stem which regulates all unconscious body functions such as breathing and heart rate.[5]
Trauma creates neuropathways in the brain where enough repetition, intensity, or exposure to unhealthy or negative stimuli will condition the brain to automatically react to the trigger (this framework is known as the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics or NMT).[6] When the brain goes into survival mode, the fight-or-flight system is activated and the blood stream floods with epinephrine (adrenaline). Automatic bodily functions including saliva production, digestion, temperature regulation, muscle tension/relaxation, and heart rate are now impaired.
When someone in church has no trauma background, usually they are in their thinking brain. Their prefrontal cortex is active and functioning and they have the cognitive capacity to learn while in this state, listening to the sermon and remembering the information being given.
When someone in church is in their emotional brain, their brain is unable to distinguish between what is and isn’t threatening; however, with some emotional regulation, they can come back into their thinking brain.
When someone is in survival mode, their prefrontal cortex decreases in functioning, executive functioning switches off, and their ability to process and remember information is impaired. Similarly, their relational capacity (ability to connect meaningfully with other people) is impaired while their brain is directing all its energy towards merely surviving.
The brain cannot recover from trauma when still in an environment enabling the trauma. For survivors of religious trauma to experience spiritual growth in a church setting, safety is imperative.
When a trauma survivor feels unsafe in church, they do not simply feel emotionally uncomfortable; their body is literally in survival mode.
When a trauma survivor feels unsafe in church, they do not simply feel emotionally uncomfortable; their body is literally in survival mode.
When markers of safety aren’t present and a person’s stress levels are raised, the thinking brain is deactivated, the emotional brain cannot switch off, and the body cannot return to a baseline emotional state.[7] For example, someone who does not feel safe enough to leave in the middle of a service (whether for fear of drawing attention to oneself, a disability restricting their mobility, or fear of being questioned after the service, etc.) may mentally leave the space by disassociating. The ‘window of tolerance’ concept is useful in illustrating how it’s normal for people to experience emotional fluctuations within a healthy range, including feeling unpleasant/painful emotions, all while remaining within a safe margin they are able to tolerate. While staying within the window of tolerance, they are still able to learn and connect, and their brains can access both logical reasoning and emotional sensations at the same time.
Image from https://www.integral.global/blog/whats-your-window-of-tolerance
People experiencing safety are able to tolerate strong emotions while remaining regulated. However, when something pushes a person outside their window of tolerance into the hyperarousal state, the sympathetic nervous system activates, launching their body and brain into a different state that cannot be fixed simply by pastors telling you that God’s love for you should make you feel safe enough. When that fight-or-flight response activates, the only way to return into the window of tolerance is to restore a visceral sense of safety.
Restoring a sense of safety can happen by self-regulating, co-regulating (with other safe people), or engaging a safe environment.
Creating a safer environment in this scenario might include the use of a trigger warning before the sermon, encouragement to step out of the room if needed, normalisation of emotional awareness, available seating near the exit, and support staff for those with disabilities. By taking a moment to remove themselves from the environment, a survivor of religious trauma can regulate their brain and body, returning to a baseline state within their window of tolerance and feeling supported enough to return for the remainder of the sermon where their thinking brain is activated again. Supporting people to leave if they need to, ironically invites them right back.
Safety means freedom of autonomy.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow argued that all human beings need each level of needs, starting at the bottom, to be met before they can move upwards. A person cannot address their safety needs if their physiological needs aren’t first met. A person can’t devote energy to pursuing health when they are starving and looking for their next meal.
Safety and security, in turn, must come first before love and belonging (and ultimately trust within that) can be built. Above that is then self-esteem which involves confidence, achievement, respect of others, and the need to be a unique individual.
If we treat people as whole people with bodies, people who have material needs as well as spiritual and emotional needs, it just makes sense for churches who are gospel-centered to take the need for safety very seriously. If our heart is for people to ultimately encounter God’s love through biblical teaching and rich community, we need to cultivate safe environments where people’s bodies feel safe enough to access learning and connecting. Until we do that, our churches’ inaccessibility builds a wall that keeps out entire populations of people.
Theological considerations
Some Christian leaders may remain unconvinced about these neuroscientific/psychological paradigms when their primary authority is the Bible. But what I (Matt) have found repeatedly as I’ve studied a masters in theology is that the deeper I dig into biblical texts, the more convinced I become that a Christian theology of humanity is distinctively embodied. This is particularly true of the Hebrew Bible’s rich anthropology, and Joel Green’s book Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible is an outstanding theological exploration of this topic in dialogue with neuroscientific studies.
Perhaps one of the clearest indicators that God values the physicality of human bodies is the fact that Jesus chose to be incarnated in a corporeal human body himself and now exists eternally in a physical state of atoms and molecules (see Jamir S. N. Among, “Reclaiming the Body: An Embodied Approach to Theological Anthropology,” Bangalore Theological Journal 2 [2017]: 109).
Another key theological text, Anthony Hoekema’s Created in God’s Image, summarises a biblical anthropology as teaching that the human is a “creature-person.”[8] That is, we are not only a person—a spiritual being with a soul, agency, and autonomy—but we are also a creature—a created being made from the dust and inherently corporeal, and therefore utterly limited and dependent on material provisions. “I have called this the central mystery of man [sic] because to us it seems deeply mysterious that man can be both a creature and a person at the same time.”[9] Hoekema identifies that most errors in thinking about human nature occur when we overemphasise one of these aspects to the detriment of the other.
I would argue that the Western church’s approach to trauma and psychological safety has emphasised our personhood at the expense of recognising our creatureliness; that is, the church has emphasised that humans are spirits by insisting on individual agency and offering spiritualised solutions, but we have failed to acknowledge that we are also bodies, limited by God’s good design to material corporeality that experiences trauma bodily and regulates emotions through physical nervous systems. A truly biblical doctrine views humanity as a “psychosomatic unity” and considers our material and psychological needs (like safety) as well as our spiritual needs (like security in Christ).[10]
We believe God created us as whole people—bodies and spirits—and we believe it is essential to human dignity and safety that the church relates to us on both these bases.
To summarise: comfort and safety are not the same thing. Comfort is defined by Cambridge University as “a pleasant feeling of being relaxed or free from pain.”
When I (Bec) am comfortable in church, I am content, enjoying myself, benefiting from being there and not thinking about my safety. When I am safe in church, I let out the breath I didn’t realise I was holding in, and I can begin to listen to the message in the sermon.
Because comfort and safety aren’t the same thing, I (Matt) can experience visceral safety and profound discomfort at the same time. In fact, that’s often when I’ll grow the most, being helpfully challenged or stepping outside my comfort zone. When we trauma survivors talk about the need to feel safe, we’re not asking to avoid discomfort or even pain. In fact, we’re often better at tolerating uncomfortable feelings than anyone else, both emotionally and physically. What we’re asking for is the space to honour our God-given bodies with a felt assurance that we are not at risk of experiencing harm—a felt assurance so visceral it allows our bodies, nervous systems, and brains to engage in learning and connecting as God invites us to do.
Some people might respond with “Christ says to take up your cross; being a Christian is hard and we are all going through difficult things.” People with trauma have been carrying their cross alone for a long time. How can we help others carry it for a bit?
Jesus says, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest … for I am gentle and lowly.” When we help burdened people finally experience rest—breathing deeper in that moment their bodies feel a visceral sense of safety restored—we model the love of Christ to them.
We show them that in his presence, among Christ’s Body, our own bodies can find a resting place: a haven of safety. We can breathe again. We might even heal a bit while we’re there.
References
[1] See Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Penguin Books, New York: 2015).
[2] See Building Cultures of Care: A Guide for Sexual Assault Services Programs, The National Sexual Assault Coalition Resource Sharing Project and National Sexual Violence Resource, page 5.
[3] See Bruce D. Perry, “Child maltreatment: A Neurodevelopmental Perspective on the Role of Trauma and Neglect in Psychopathology,” pages 93-129 in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology (2008).
[4] Joseph De Luna and David Wang, “Child Traumatic Stress and the Sacred: Neurobiologically Informed Interventions for Therapists and Parents,” MPDI 12 (2021), page 5. See “The Conscious Discipline Brain State Model.”
[5] De Luna and Wang, “Child Traumatic Stress and the Sacred, page 5.
[6] See Bruce D. Perry, “Applying Principles of Neurodevelopment to Clinical Work with Maltreated and Traumatized Children: The Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics” pages 27-52 in Working with Traumatized Youth in Child Welfare (Guilford Press, New York: 2006).
[7] De Luna and Wang, “Child Traumatic Stress and the Sacred, page 5.
[8] Anthony A. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 6.
[9] Hoekema, Created in God’s Image, 6.
[10] Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan), 377.
Singled Out 