Nick StumboExecutive Director driving healing from sexual brokenness

TRAUMA Are Things That HAPPEN To Us And DIDN'T HAPPEN To Us #puredesirepodcast #podcast

18 Jan 2024

Watch on YouTube

A YouTube video monologue (Nick Stumbo, Jan 2024) defining trauma broadly as both events that happen to us and failures of expected care (things that didn't happen). The speaker gives examples of infringement (bullying, name-calling) and abandonment (parents absent for long periods), recounts a counselor's definition framing trauma as anything outside God’s intended order, and situates trauma within a theological Garden-of-Eden narrative about broken relationships after the Fall.

Trauma is both things that happen to us, but also things that didn't happen to us. There are traumas of infringement, of. I was called a name. I was hurt, I was bullied. But there was what we call, like, a trauma of abandonment that. That I came home and my parents weren't there, or I was left, you know, for hours and hours with no support or help. I remember once in the counseling process that I asked the counselor, I said, well, what, you know, what can qualify as trauma? And their response, I've always remembered they said, anything that happened to us that is outside of what God intended in the Garden of Eden, that, in a sense, there was a perfect order to creation and care and relationships and God's presence, you know, Adam and Eve, God's present with them, walking with them in the garden. And then when sin and fallenness and brokenness enters into the world, there is a divide in that relationship, not only with God, but with one another. And now all sorts of things happen to us or don't happen to us that in a perfect world designed by God, we could expect would happen. Well, anything outside of that has the capacity to create trauma.