Trauma Survivor to Thriver

Today, I want to talk about trauma. No two people experience trauma in the same way. Each person’s trauma response or the aftermath of trauma, is uniquely different. If we both broke our arm, our breaks would not be identical, the extent of our injuries wouldn’t be identical and our treatment, given the severity of our respective injuries or preexisting conditions, will be uniquely tailored for our respective needs. This is true of all trauma related injuries – physical, mental and emotional.

I’ve spoken to and worked with hundreds of individuals who have experienced trauma, from childhood developmental trauma to relational trauma, and the one thing that I can honestly tell you is that your personal experience cannot be compared to someone else’s, and your healing journey is not a competition with “other” people.

No, we don’t just get over it, we grow through it. Healing from a traumatic event, a traumatic relationship, or childhood trauma — for all of us, requires two things: Post Traumatic Growth and a resilient position, a thriver position. We’ll talk about these two later but for now I want you to understand something about trauma that is critical for the thriver mindset.

Remember, a thriver mindset is not our condition, it’s our position. Our position is our identify in Christ and, the immovable and unchangeable beliefs we hold to be true about who we are. The thriver mindset doesn’t make us immune to pain, it prevents us from being defined by what happens to us. It prevents what happens to us from redefining our truth, our identify, our purpose and our destiny. Trauma isn’t who we are, trauma is what happened to us.

Walk with me through a biblical example of the effects of trauma and the importance of our thriver mindset. The bible tells us that Elijah was one of God’s most powerful and anointed prophets. God was present in Elijah’s life in significant ways. Elijah walked with God, had a relationship with God and God used him to do mighty works. You will find out that holding on to your thriver mindset is not easy to do just because you walk with God, believe in God and have victories with God.

A thriver mindset is not tested when we’re winning, a thriver mindset is tested when we’re faced with a challenge, a tragedy, a battle that overwhelms us. This is what happened to Elijah. Not long after one of Elijah’s greatest victories, he received a letter from Jezebel promising to take his life. Now just before Elijah received this death threat, God had used him to slay over 400 idol worshiping prophets who challenged the power of God. Elijah knew God was with him. Elijah knew the power of God and he knew that his position was that of an anointed prophet of God. But when Elijah received the death threat, he was traumatized, and overwhelmed with fear and grief. Believing he was all alone, Elijah thought he had no help and Jezebel would make good on her promise to kill him. Elijah was so traumatized by Jezebel’s death threat that he ran for his life. 

Exhausted from running, Elijah sat down under a tree and prayed to God to take his life: “Elijah was afraid. He got up and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba of Judah, he left his servant there. But he himself traveled for a day into the desert. He came and sat down under a juniper tree. There he asked that he might die, saying, “It is enough now, O Lord. Take my life…” (1 Kings 19:3-4). Did you see Elijah’s thriver position be overcome by his condition? Just like Elijah, when we’re under attack, when we’re in the battle, when we’re overwhelmed by whatever we’re faced with, our thriver position can be weakened. Trauma attacks our powerful position, our identify, and our immovable truth — to cause us to leave our position.

When we’re under attack, we feel just like Elijah. Our attack might be different, our trauma might be different, our trauma might have come from childhood or a relationship but the effect of Post Traumatic Stress feels like an attack – mind, body and soul. Let’s pause for a second and address something that many struggle with while their under attack: you don’t automatically heal from trauma because someone apologizes. You don’t overcome PTSD/CPTSD because the perpetrator has “moved on” or “put it in the past” or wants to reconcile. Likewise, an apology accepted doesn’t mean the damage is corrected. The two are mutually exclusive. Your healing is not for reconciliation with the perpetrator, your healing is for reconciliation with yourself. Healing isn’t for them it’s for you. Your healing doesn’t begin and end when they forget about what they did to you. 

What God does next with Elijah will help us to understand the role a thriver mindset plays in our Post Traumatic Growth and Resilience. Resiliency is basically our ability to recover, and post traumatic growth is the result of the work we do to recover. The key to resiliency and post traumatic growth is a thriver mindset or recovering our thriver mindset. God’s initial response to Elijah wasn’t what you might think. God sent Angels to Elijah to tell him to rest, eat, eat some more and rest again. Self-care is the first step to recovering our thriver mindset. Self-care is not always simple, it’s not always easy but it is essential to regaining our thriver mindset.

After Elijah was strong enough from self-care, God sent Elijah to a cave. While there, God asked Elijah, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:9). In other words, God was asking Elijah who are you, Whose are you? You see, God knew Elijah’s position was being attacked. Elijah explained to God what he believed to be his death sentence. God put on a display of His power in front of Elijah to remind Elijah that his condition is not his position and that God’s power is the truth that establishes his position. God went on to tell Elijah that he was never alone in the fight: “Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him” (1 Kings 19:18).

Before God could help Elijah recover his position, He had to remind him of what his truth was. But before Elijah could hear the truth, be reminded of who he was and who God is in a battle, Elijah had to rest, eat, rest some more and eat again — self-care. Sometimes, before we can start our healing journey, jump-start our healing journey or take our healing to the next level, we have to prepare our mind for the truth. The truth about who we are and the truth about who God is. The truth activates our thriver mindset, our thriver mindset activates our resiliency and our resiliency gives us the courage and the determination to do the work that results in post traumatic growth. 

As a child, I grew up in an abusive household. Abuse on top of abuse, day after day, year after year for nearly two decades. My mother was the target, I was collateral damage. Anytime a parent is abused, the children are abused by proxy — collateral damage. There was never a day that went by that we were not under attack. My father was a narcistic raging alcoholic who terrorized, traumatized and made sure that we lived in a house of horrors. Not a day passed that my mother and I knew what was going to happen next, or when the next crazed, drunken tirade would erupt. We lived like caged animals. Hunger, fear, anxiety and stress were the good days. You’ve probably heard this saying, “The body keeps the score.” If you’ve not read the book by the same title, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, pick it up. It’s an excellent read.

As a product of childhood developmental trauma, like any trauma, I can tell you that the body definitely keeps the score. I struggled in adulthood to recover from my childhood, for years. It wasn’t until I stopped and realized that I was fighting from my condition — what happened to me, as opposed to my position, I had neither the courage or the determination to do the right work to recover from my childhood. Whether your trauma is from a childhood experience, an event, or an intimate relationship, before you can begin healing you have to recover your truth, your position. The Bible declares, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23). Courage, determination and thoughts for our recovery flow from our position, our thriver mindset. This is why self-care is so important to a thriver mindset and our healing journey.

Trauma recovery is never easy. It takes work, patience, gentleness, and truth. It can require help, support, therapy/coaching and of course, time. Feeding the thriver in you by fanning the flames of your truth, prioritizing self-care and trusting in God’s strength to be with you in the battle, will empower your position to overcome your condition. You are not a victim, you were victimized. You are resilient, you are more than a conqueror and with a thriver mindset, you will recover well with faith, prayer, patience, work and time.

For today’s challenge, I want us to use Elijah’s story to look at those things that will help us to recover our thriver mindset to heal forward.

Patrick