“I guess I’m not sure who got traumatized by ministry … was it my dad? Or was it me because he was my pastor?”
“Perhaps it was both.”
Her tears confirmed it was likely both.
I had worked with her years earlier…
but had never heard the story she shared this time.
Her father had been a pastor. Her mother had been difficult — to him, and to the us as children.
When things went wrong in the church, my client had always assumed her mother had something to do with it.
“They finally divorced, but probably not soon enough. My siblings and I all had screwed up marriages. Three of us divorced. The other two probably should — they have awful marriages.”
“I’ve always been confused about what to think about God. If things don’t work for a pastor’s family, how could they work for anyone?”
“My dad always been my hero. But when everything blew up, the drinking started.”
“Now I don’t even recognize him when he comes to visit. My 11-year-old son sat me down after his last visit and said, ‘Mom, if we acted like grandpa acts, you’d paddle our butts!’ He was right!”
She described a man who mutters constantly.
Who sighs in disgust over nothing.
Who peppers every inconvenience with “You’ve gotta be kidding me”
and “Oh sh*t!” A man who once had no swearing in his home, who was once described as a jolly good fellow.
“He’s never been the same.”
And now she was raising four children as a single mom, spending a week after every visit straightening out their attitudes. Her desperation confirmed her deep love for her children.
I asked what she’d said to her son when he pointed out grandpa’s behavior.
“First I made excuses for him … just like he did for my mom. Then I told him, ‘You’re right … and I’m going to talk to Dr. Neecie soon.'”
“This morning, he demanded, ‘When are you going?’ That’s why I called.”
I smiled and nodded, then said, “We can get you through this. Two generations of being wounded by ministry is the villain. Not you, and not your deep love for your children.”
It’s not unusual for people wounded by ministry to try working through it on their own.
They get stuck at ‘all you need is Jesus’ … never recognizing the healers and the helpers He puts in their path to fulfill, “Baring one another’s burdens”.
What she described is consistent with those who push through without truly healing … what I call the slow fade of unresolved trauma.
Then unresolved trauma becomes the same story with new chapters.
1. The soundtrack of our muttering reveals a nervous system still taxed with trauma.
“Come on now!”
“Oh sh*t!”
“Seriously?”
“Here we go again…”
Those statements reveal more than a bad mood.
They aren’t intentional.
They aren’t even conscious.
They’re simply our soundtrack — playing out loud.
It’s when your mouth tattles on your nervous system.
When trauma has taught us that the world is unpredictable … our words begin narrating unpredictability.
When our lives have taught us disappointment … our words begin anticipating it.
We are all prone to losing the ability (or maybe better said ‘the willingness’) to pay attention to the manifestations of our subconscious.
Every inconvenience begins to sound enormous as it slips out in quiet moans, sighs, and muttering — not because it IS enormous, but because our nervous system expected it to be enormous. It expects everything to be enormous.
“That’s it! That’s EXACTLY it!” my client erupted.
“By the time he leaves, we all think a dog barking in the neighborhood is going to blow the house down. Or some other enormous tragedy. But he was never like that before he lost the church.”
Sad … but I understood her wounded resolve.
“Do I have to help him heal from this too? He’s a grown man. He used to have all the answers.”
I nodded.
“Yes, he was wounded by ministry. And now you’re wounded by having to carry the man who was once your hero in faith.”
She wept as she began to understand … his wounds were now wounding her. And her children.
It’s one thing to become a wounded version of where we came from in our childhood. But it’s another one altogether when as a wounded adult … it seems the spirituality of our childhood becomes a lie.
2. Unresolved wounds from ministry are contagious.
Nobody accidentally says “Here we go again” or “You’ve got to be kidding me” two, ten, or twenty times a day without those words being attached to a belief.
Beliefs like:
- Life is hard.
- People let me down.
- Nothing ever works.
- Something will always go wrong.
Those beliefs were written during the most painful chapters of our lives.
The trauma may be over. But the narrative continues in every mutter … revealing the branding.
“Oh, my goodness,” my client said slowly. “I just realized his great loss of his church branded ME with things too.”
The lights were coming on.
“Don’t trust the church. They’ll disappoint you.”
“Keep your distance. Everything eventually falls apart.”
“No wonder I don’t really want to date.
Or get too involved in church.
Or let my kids get too involved.
They are missing out — and it’s because of my branding!”
I nodded and validated her courageous realization. “Let’s rewire those. They don’t have to keep running your life and affecting your children.”
“I need to get my oxygen mask on first,” she said. “For my sake and my children’s. Then if there’s oxygen left — I’ll get to my dad.”
“Great plan,” I assured her.
Please don’t think you can be around someone with unresolved trauma and not be affected. And despite your best intentions, you’ll pass those wounds on.
It’s why I do what I do — so that we can say:
Being traumatized by ministry STOPS HERE.
Reflect with me. If we call ourselves believers, we’ve ALL had our moment when our quest for faith filled us with the love of God … We experienced it and we knew it to be real!
And almost ALWAYS…that conversion is connected to a person or a place of ministry…
THEN if the person fails or the place is shattered/scattered … we’re left wondering if what happened to us was really real?
THAT’S traumatic. It hurts deeply and feels like tremendous loss, or even death.
3. Healing is about rewiring faulty branding and playing a new soundtrack.
When I was traveling and singing around the world, we sometimes used soundtracks … recorded music that created a symphonic sound far richer than our small band could produce.
When the soundtrack played beautifully, it was powerful. If it had warped … it was nothing but awful noise.
Deep wounds and trauma warp our soundtrack, how we think and feel.
Healing isn’t pretending life is wonderful.
It’s walking through the 7 steps of trauma healing — beginning with debriefing the truth of what happened.
Understanding how it has shaped our beliefs, our nervous system, our emotional home.
Healing is discovering that your nervous system no longer must announce danger every 5 minutes.
“I get it!” my client sighed.
“My soundtrack has been ‘Danger Zone!'”
We both laughed.
“I wonder how different it will be if I change the soundtrack to ‘Walking on Sunshine?’ My kids will think they got a new mom — and maybe it would rub off on my dad!”
She truly got it.
When you attach your spiritual well-being to the integrity of a person or a place or both and they “tank” …the trust that you gave to both will quickly turn into a downward pull toward total complacency. Or cynicism. Only healing and surrender can guide us toward the power of trusting again. And trust is the door to every freedom!
YOU can begin intentionally changing your soundtrack too.
You’ll start hearing yourself say things like:
- “We’ll figure it out.”
- “That’s disappointing, but it’s okay.”
- “Interesting…”
- “I wonder what God is doing here.”
Same traffic jam.
Same flat tire.
Same flight delay.
But a different nervous system.
A different emotional home.
A different life.
*****
A challenge for you for the next 24 hours:
Don’t monitor your thoughts.
Monitor your muttering.
For when you monitor your muttering your thoughts and beliefs are revealed.
Pay attention to the little phrases that slip out when you think no one is listening.
Because they aren’t just words — they’re clues.
Golden clues about the beliefs side your nervous system that have taken reign and thrive more each time we mutter. And each reinforcement cements you further in survival mode.
If you don’t like the soundtrack — the good news is this:
Healing doesn’t just change your story.
It changes the muttering.
And changing the muttering changes the lives of everyone in your proximity.
In a recent session, my client shared.
“I told my dad about our new soundtrack — that if it didn’t harmonize with ‘Walking on Sunshine,’ it wasn’t allowed, and everyone had the privilege of calling it out.”
Oh, the resolve in her eyes and tone of her voice when she share it with me!”
“In the first hour of his visit, my kids called him out several times. He looked at me with a growl: ‘So this is a real thing here?’ “
I said, ‘It sure is!'”
“After the kids went to bed, I shared how his ministry wounds had ended up wounding me — because he’d been the only pastor I’d ever truly known. The conversation went on for hours, ending with him apologizing from a place of sincere humility, and then praying for me.”
“It was a beautiful moment. It STOPS here. It won’t be passed on to another generation.”
Take the challenge.
Stop it from passing on.
Let the truth you lost become a new truth you’ve found.
Let the integrity that failed you become the integrity you follow.
Let their humanness become your every motivation towards surrender and integrity.
I thought about my client’s 11-year-old son.
He didn’t know he was describing trauma.
He simply knew Grandpa wasn’t the same anymore.
And because one courageous mother chose healing…
maybe he never has to become a man who
mutters,
sighs,
growls,
and expects the worst.
That’s how generational trauma ends.
One courageous person decides…
“It stops here.”