19 March 2009

University Offers New Approach to Trauma Healing

Program works to free individuals and communities from destructive cycles

 

Professor Elaine Zook Barge explains how individuals and communities can overcome trauma and pain.

Professor Elaine Zook Barge explains how individuals and communities can overcome trauma and pain.

By Stephen Kaufman
Staff Writer

Washington — On a Sunday in December 2007, Colorado resident David Works witnessed the murder of his two daughters.

Works, himself shot when a gunman opened fire on parishioners leaving his church, will be coping with that loss for the rest of his life, but his training on how people react to trauma and how they can heal helped him move past natural reactions like a desire for revenge or survivor’s guilt.

At the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia, Works studied a model used in the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program to chart common reactions to trauma. It shows ways to break out of the victim and aggressor cycles that trap many, leading them to hurt themselves and others.

“Violence causes trauma and unhealed trauma causes more violence,” Elaine Zook Barge, program director for STAR, told America.gov. To put it more succinctly, “hurt people hurt people.”

EMU faculty and staff developed what Barge described as the “snail model,” so named because the diagram resembles a snail’s shell, “and because the work is slow, long, sometimes messy work.” It depicts three avenues of responding to trauma caused by human violence, natural disasters or other devastating events.

The victim’s cycle shows some initial responses to trauma: grief, panic, anger and physiological changes. “When we’re traumatized, our brains are made in such a way that automatically our lower brain takes over,” generating “trauma energy” from the chemicals and hormones being produced.

“This trauma energy is part of the fight, flight, freeze response which helps to protect us,” she said. The snail model begins with a focus on those effects, and healing begins with finding ways to release that energy.

Trauma theorist Peter Levine observed that when a wild antelope cannot outrun a predator but somehow escapes being killed, “what that antelope will do eventually is get up and shake, snort, skip, cavort, and run back and join … its herd,” Barge said.

The human body, similarly, is shaking and sweating after trauma. “You want to scream, you’re crying.” But instead, human victims are encouraged to calm down, which is the opposite of what their bodies want to do.

Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding offers training to U.S. and international students.

The trapped energy “is what causes us the ongoing nightmares and the ongoing hypervigilance,” she said. “If we could do like the wild animals do and literally get rid of some of this trauma energy, we would be a whole lot healthier.” Whether the answer is crying, shaking, dancing, playing sports or some other activity, “people need to give themselves permission to do … whatever they need to do.”

Unhealed and unaddressed trauma can cause individuals to hurt themselves or others, leading them to the aggressor’s cycle. Catholic theologian Father Richard Rohr said that “pain that is not transformed is transferred.”

“If I keep hurting myself or if I hurt you, then … I’ve become the aggressor and I’ve just created more victims who are hurting, and if they are not aware of what’s going on we could just keep this cycle spinning forever,” Barge said. “This could happen at the individual level, it could happen at the family level, it can happen at the national level.”

On the model, the way out of both cycles is labeled “Finding Safety, Breaking Free, Choosing to Live.” Just like the responses to trauma, the path to breaking free varies from individual to individual. Barge said acknowledging the pain, including mourning and grieving, is an important step. But for some, “it may be forgiveness that causes you to break free,” and fosters reintegration.

HEALING AND REBUILDING

When Works was confronted with his daughters’ deaths, he remembered the snail model and decided to use it to move through his pain.

“I told myself: ‘I can choose to lose my mind and go down the path of anger and retribution, or I can use the tools I’ve been given and my theology to find something good in this, to break the cycle. … It will not honor Stephanie and Rachel to be angry and bitter about this,’” Works said in the winter 2008 edition of EMU’s Peacemaker magazine.

Most use the model when they are stuck in one of the two cycles; Works was among the first to use it preventively. Less than one month after the shooting, he had reached a point at which he could meet with the family of his daughters’ murderer and begin the process of healing and reconciliation. “When I share this with my workshop participants I still get goose bumps,” Barge says.

Half of the center’s alumni came from outside the United States, Barge said, adding that although the program’s techniques are new, they are being used all over the world, ranging from Colombia, where alumni are using the materials to train others in trauma healing, to Cambodia, where a former STAR participant is involved with the joint Cambodian–United Nations tribunal that is prosecuting human rights atrocities committed during the 1970s. (See “Strong U.S. Support for Trial of Former Khmer Rouge Official.”)

The snail model “goes beyond the medical model we’re used to of trauma healing,” and it invites people in so they can directly participate in the process that addresses trauma, heals relationships and builds resilience.

More information is available on the STAR program’s Web site, which is part of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.