Healing trauma

Trauma can be devastating. In addition to whatever horrors accompany the incident itself, it’s widely believed that trauma never really goes away – that the best we can do is manage it.

I know what this daily battle can be like. I had felt the effects of trauma from incidents that occurred during my early childhood. Some I remembered, but there was also plenty of evidence that something serious had happened that I had no conscious memory of. For years, I’d had exaggerated emotional responses to things that most people wouldn’t have even blinked at. As a teenager and college student, I still felt dominated by it.

But after someone introduced me to Christian Science when I was in my early 20s, suddenly there was hope. I learned that I didn’t have to just put up with the effects of trauma but could find freedom from those effects through prayer.

As I began praying about my past, I found a statement by Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, that put a crack in my perception of just how rock solid – or not – the past actually is. She wrote, “The human history needs to be revised, and the material record expunged” (“Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 22).

This was a revolutionary idea, and I thought, “Wow! This is the path out.”

Though at first it might seem challenging, Mrs. Eddy’s statement makes sense in the context of what Christ Jesus demonstrated centuries ago. His healings consistently overturned what seemed to be people’s permanent records. For instance, Jesus encountered a woman who’d been bent over, unable to straighten up, for 18 years. Undeterred by the long history of the problem, Jesus called her forward and she was healed.

How can the human history be revised and the material record expunged? By seeing them from a spiritual perspective.

After years of praying about significant childhood trauma and feeling a gradual lessening of the effects, I heard from a relative about a piece of my history I hadn’t remembered at all: When I was five years old, my mother tried to kill me.

Although this information was shocking, it was really what galvanized me to find total freedom.

One day, as I was praying, I had what appeared to be a vision of a moment in my childhood. I was five years old, screaming in the bathtub, with my mother threatening my life. But as the vision continued, the scene was rewritten, as though God were showing me what had really been going on. There was a tangible presence that lifted me out of the water, cradled me in a soft towel, and removed me from danger.

It was clear to me that this presence was divine Love, God. It was not a person; the best way I can describe it is as warm, caring Love. And I felt the truth of that “rewriting” so clearly that the trauma that had been influencing my life for decades was expunged. It was a moment of total healing. It’s hard to describe the profound feeling of freedom and of being cared for by our loving Father-Mother God that I experienced in that instance of prayer.

What allowed this to happen?

First, I yearned with my whole heart to find freedom from the effects of this horrible childhood event. Trusting God with that desire opens us to the point of receptivity, so we can see what the spiritual reality of any situation is. This spiritual understanding of God and God’s creation gave me the foundation for actually experiencing this reality.

Christian Science shows us reality, in which God’s goodness extends through all time and space. Anything unlike this goodness has to be powerless. We don’t ignore the evil or the ordeal that seems so severe, but we do see them healed by getting a correct perception of reality.

Whereas previously my life had seemed to be affected by my mother’s murderous actions, the truer perception that God had been tenderly caring for me, mothering me, every moment replaced the false view, and the effects disappeared. I was able to forgive my mother, and I was free.

The possibilities of this Christly approach to healing trauma are enormous. The burdens placed on victims can actually be removed as we individually and collectively gain a deeper understanding of spiritual reality.

Regardless of the tragic circumstances any of us may have endured, the spiritual perspective of reality gained through prayer is a promise of hope and healing for everyone. We can move beyond simply trying to manage the effects of painful past events, as prayer helps shift our paradigm from a belief of suffering to a conscious sense of Love’s reality. This inevitably takes us from victimhood to triumph. What a promise of freedom for everyone!

Adapted from an article published in the June 12, 2023, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.