How Complex Trauma Impacts Spiritual Discernment

Episode 140 

In this episode, I explore how complex trauma affects our ability to make spiritual discernment by making it difficult for us to have "holy indifference". Often times we know we struggle to have that detachment we need to make a good discernment, but we don't realise that our difficulties may not be due to spiritual failings but because of the wounds in our embodied emotional capacity for authentic, secure love.

I discuss the importance of a secure attachment with God, the impact of trauma on our nervous system, how that affects our interior freedom, and how healing and integration can restore interior freedom in the discernment process. 

Watch this recording on YouTube.

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CHAPTER MARKERS
00:00 Trauma and Spiritual Discernment
04:43 What Discernment Isn't
14:28 How Trauma Impacts Discernment
18:26 How Healing Transforms Discernment

TRANSCRIPT
Available here.

REFLECTION PROMPT
Is your experience of spiritual discernment one of deep security and detachment or are you often anxious about "making the correct discernment"? Can you identify one way in which complex trauma has affected the way you approach spiritual discernment?

Chapters

• 0:00 Trauma and Spiritual Discernment
• 4:43 What Discernment Isn't
• 11:06 How Trauma Impacts Discernment
• 18:26 How Healing Transforms Discernment

Transcript

EPISODE 140 | HOW COMPLEX TRAUMA IMPACTS SPIRITUAL DISCERNMENT

[00:00:00] INTRODUCTION Even our desire, our attempt to discern God's will for us may, at least in part, be a trauma response without us even realizing it.

Hello everyone. Today we're going to be talking about how complex trauma affects our ability to make spiritual discernment.

[00:00:55] WHY SPIRITUAL DISCERNMENT MATTERS
Okay, so the overarching theme or topic on my channel, whether you're watching this on YouTube or you're listening to the Becoming Me podcast, is about becoming more and more our true self in Christ.

[00:01:06] Now this whole process of becoming ourselves requires many things, including, at each point of the journey, some ability to be able to listen to how God is leading us to His invitation to us, because this is a journey that we embark on in faith. It's not something that we do on our own, but it is something that we do in relationship with a God who loves us. Right, so in any relationship there has to be communication. And, very much especially in the Christian context that I live in, it is about being able to hear the soft prompting of the Holy Spirit, being able to follow God's lead, follow where Christ may be leading me, right, no matter at which point of the journey I may be in.

[00:01:59] So in my experience accompanying other people as well, once we cross a certain threshold in our relationship with God, we begin to desire the ability to know what God is saying to us or to be able to discern God's will. When we are just starting out in a relationship with God, maybe we don't even know about discernment - we just think our faith is about doing things for God, right? And then at some point maybe we begin to have an inkling that God doesn't so much want us to do things for him as to be in relationship with Him, and that in order to have that relationship with Him, we need to be able to listen to Him and to experience Him listening to us.

[00:02:47] TENSIONS IN SPIRITUAL DISCERNMENT
When I first began to take discernment seriously, it was a very mixed endeavour. 
Mixed in the sense of.. I loved God, I wanted to be able to do what He is asking me to do, but, there was always a lot of anxiety and fear. A lot of anxiety that I would not be able to do what He wants me to do, that what He wants me to do or that His will is going to make me miserable.

[00:03:15] Even though cognitively, I knew that God loved me.

But because of the whole you know, that whole dimension of you picking up my cross to follow Christ.. I’ve always known that discipleship entails the cross, right? So there's always also this.. fear that God's will for me is going to be painful, and so there's this instinctive repulsion or resistance. And at the same time, though, there's this desire: I want to be a good disciple. I want to be able to trust God. I want to be able to follow Him. So, that tension was so aggravating for a long, long time in my journey.

[00:03:57] And that's why today I wish to talk about what kind of relationship enables us to discern without undue fear, without that fear, and how does complex trauma affect our discernment.

[00:04:11] Okay, because complex trauma is something that I only learned about in the last few years of my journey.. But when I began to understand this lens, understand what trauma is and how it impacts me, then it helped me to look back at my experience of discernment and understand why I struggled so much in the earlier parts of my relationship with God - when I began to take discernment seriously, when I began to really desire to do God's will, so to speak.

[00:04:43] WHAT DISCERNMENT IS AND IS NOT
So a couple of things to take note of: When we are talking about discernment, especially in the Ignatian Spirituality sense of discernment of spirits, it is not something that is fear driven. Okay, we do not try and discern God's will because we are afraid of what will happen if we don't do His will. That's not, that's not discernment. Discernment is not coerced, alright?

[00:05:08] Discernment happens in a context of, you could say, two parties, God and us, who love each other freely and give of each other freely. So when we feel coerced in some sense to know God's will and to do it, that's actually not really discernment.

[00:05:29] And discernment is also not having a compulsion to make the perfect choice, even if we think that the perfect choice is like the holiest choice, or this compulsion to find out what really, you know, what God really wants so that we will do exactly what He wants in a very perfectionistic way. Okay, all of that is not what discernment is. But I'll confess that for a long time, that's how I experienced discernment. I couldn't help it. Okay, and that's part of the impact of trauma, which I'll get to later on.

[00:06:04] Now what discernment is, really, is a process that is love and trust led. Okay. So instead of fear driven, discernment is something that we genuinely desire to do because we love God and because we trust God, and we are curious, you know, in a sense, about the dreams He has for us, like, what dreams we want to dream together and what the next step is that God may be asking us to do. So it's led by love, and led by trust.

[00:06:36] Just imagine if you have an intimate relationship with a friend or perhaps a spouse, if you're lucky to have that kind of very safe and loving relationship with a spouse. When you are in conversation or dreaming together about, you know, what the future holds or what you wish to do together.. it is not something that is fear driven, right?

[00:07:00] If it's fear driven, usually reflects that there's something not quite right in that relationship or that you don't feel safe in that relationship. If you feel safe in that relationship, it will be trust and love led.

[00:07:12] Discernment is also freely chosen without duress, okay? Just as love really is something that must be freely given. You can't be obligated to love someone. That's not really, really love, right? Authentic love is freely given. So discernment, genuine discernment, which is led by trust and love, needs to also be free. And discernment is also open to an unknown future that we can't control.

[00:07:43] Now, when we are compulsed to find the perfect answer in discernment, usually it's because we're trying to control the future or we're acting out of fear. Genuine discernment is done, and is exercised in a spirit of: “I don't know what the future holds for me, but I can still proceed in trust to take the next step”.

So what is it that we need in order to be able to exercise discernment that way? You know, what we need really, is a secure attachment with God.

[00:08:15] HOW TRAUMA IMPACTS ATTACHMENT, RELATIONSHIPS, AND DISCERNMENT
Okay. So that's new language, as in that's contemporary language. Back when St. Ignatius wrote his spiritual exercises and his rules for discernment, there wasn't such a term of a secure attachment. That's modern psychology's contribution, I could say, you know, to this conversation.

[00:08:32] But I want to use this term because it's a lot more descriptive than just saying ‘a personal relationship’ with God. We can have a personal relationship with God, but that personal relationship is dynamic, right? So when I first started having a much more personal relationship with God, there was genuine love there, there was curiosity, there was a desire to grow closer to God, but there was also a lot of insecurity.

[00:09:00] I didn't have a secure attachment with God. I didn't have this language in the past. I didn't realize that that was the issue. I did find out a little earlier, well maybe like 15 years ago now, that I had a distorted image of God, right? But I didn't understand that that distorted image of God was one that came from an insecure attachment with God, and that that would taint my ability to love him and to discern without fear.

[00:09:30] Okay, so we need a secure attachment with God. And a secure attachment is one in which I know I am loved - not just in my head, but in my nervous system, in my body. It comes from experiencing love over and over again. It comes from experiencing God's unconditional love that even when I fail Him, even when I sin, even when I'm imperfect and messy, even when I do everything that I shouldn't, that love is still there for me right?

[00:10:04] That's what is required for young children to develop secure attachment with their caregivers. Realizing that they're loved for who they are, not what they can do or what they can't do. That is the foundation that's required for young children to develop, not just intellectually, but relationally and morally, spiritually, all of that. 

[00:10:25] And because so many of us didn't have that when we were growing up, we weren't capable of developing a secure attachment with anyone. So now we're getting to the area of healing because we can learn to develop secure attachment even though we didn't have that background or that foundation when we were little. Right, that's also the impact of trauma, usually because of complex trauma or relational trauma, we have never experienced what it's like to be in a secure relationship with someone, and so that impacts our relationship with God.

[00:10:58] So we need a secure relationship with God in order to discern authentically, freely, without fear, right? So complex trauma's impact on discernment is an insecure attachment to God.

[00:11:11] You may have heard or read about the different kinds of attachment styles and I'll invite you to maybe search this online and google it if this is new for you. Look for like, secure attachment and insecure attachment styles. So, some example of insecure attachment styles would be an anxious attachment or an avoidant attachment. Those are very different. Okay, or a disorganized attachment. Those are some examples of different kinds of insecure attachment styles.

[00:11:42] For me, I had an anxious attachment style with my caregiver, caregivers, and actually my whole life in my friendships and relationships. It was an anxious attachment style. I'm always looking out to see that the other party is not displeased with me.

[00:12:00] I need constant assurance and affirmation that they're not angry with me, that our relationship is okay, right? That's kind of like that's an anxious style. Anxious attachment styles can come across as being rather clingy or needy because we constantly need affirmation. I hated that about myself. I was aware enough that that was how I felt, and I tried really, really hard to not let that insecurity or that neediness show, right. But usually the more fear there is that you're going to lose that connection, the harder it is going to be to keep from expressing that insecure attachment style, right? So you become more and more needy, for example, if you have an anxious attachment.

[00:12:40] Now, I had an anxious attachment with God. I loved Him genuinely, but I was constantly checking in with Him because I'm so worried that one of these days without me even knowing, I might do something that would offend Him and that He would be displeased with me.

[00:13:00] All right, so that was the undercurrent of my relationship with God.  That was one of the huge ways that complex trauma impacted my relationship with God.

[00:13:08] HOW TRAUMA IMPACTS THE NERVOUS SYSTEM AND DISCERNMENT
Another way that complex trauma impacts us and impacts our ability to discern is that our nervous system, for a complex trauma survivor, our nervous system is often in fight or flight or freeze.

[00:13:24] Okay, so the technical term will be that we're often in hyper-arousal, which is often like fight or flight, or we are in hypo-arousal, you know, kind of shutting down, dissociating, just freezing. And, and the thing is for complex trauma survivors, these nervous system states are not just in response to, a current, present, like, danger because that's actually what it's supposed to do. What our nervous system is supposed to do is to alert us when we're not safe.

[00:13:57] When we have unhealed trauma in us, it's almost like, by default, our nervous system is often in that agitated, hyper-vigilant, stressed state. And this means that we are often in a capacity, or we are often in a situation, in a state, where we are in diminished capacity to act. Okay, there is diminished freedom for us to act because when we are in that fight or flight state in our nervous system. You know, a way to describe it would be, it is our lizard brain, the more primitive brain that's at the forefront, higher cognition is not really able to take place.

[00:14:40] So if our freedom is compromised, our interior freedom is compromised, then we'll be back in that situation where we're fear driven, where we feel kind of like coerced to find out what is it we're supposed to do, and maybe we're afraid of what will happen if we don't do what God wants us to do, right? Then we, we're not really capable of discerning.

So that's another way complex trauma can impact our ability to discern.

[00:15:06] TRAUMA, FEAR, AND LACK OF INTERIOR FREEDOM
That leads to this other point. The next point I want to talk about, which is, even our desire, our attempt to discern God's will for us, may at least in part be a trauma response without us even realizing it.

[00:15:20] Okay. So I said earlier, discernment actually is meant to be love led and trust led, right? It's, it's led from a place of freedom. It comes from a place of freedom of, “Lord, I love you and because I love you and I'm so grateful for your love for me, I want to know how you're inviting me to walk with you”, right? And, and that could be smaller things like, you know, it could be smaller things like what to plan for the weekend because there's nothing too small for discernment really. 

[00:15:55] Okay, you know, I think a disciple that has come to be more intimate with Christ often just likes to check in, you know, “how is it that you want me to spend the weekend?” Or if an invitation comes, we discern, “am I meant to answer ‘Yes’ to this invitation or ‘No’”, right? So these are kind of like smaller everyday things, but there could also be big things that we want to discern that have to do with maybe our career, studies, our entire life direction, right? State of life, personal vocation, all of these. All of these, no matter whether they're small or they're big, there could be a part of us that genuinely wants to know because we love God. 

[00:16:36] But often, and this is especially true for those of us who bear the imprint of complex trauma, our desire to discern God's will could also be in part driven by fear. And, in that sense there's this trauma response because we may be afraid if, “I don't find out what God actually wants me to do, and I do something that He doesn't want me to do, then that's bad”.

[00:16:58] Like that's bad in the sense of “God might be angry with me”, “He may punish me”, “I'll be a bad Catholic or a bad disciple”, or there could be some underlying fear that “bad things will happen to me if I don't follow God's will”. 

[00:17:12] This could be very subtle. It could be very subconscious. It's very common, especially if we are complex trauma survivors, or trauma survivors, right? So if that's happening without us realizing then again, we're not really free to discern. See, I mean, can you see how complex trauma can really, really mess things up? Or like, really impact our ability to discern without us even realizing it. 

[00:17:39] So when we are discerning God's will, even if it's just partly out of like a trauma response, we are trying to discern in order to try and control our lives rather than to surrender in trust, right? Because we can only surrender in trust not because it's an obligation or because we should, but because we trust God.. because we actually have that secure attachment with God, not only in our heads, but you know in our bodies, in our nervous system.

[00:18:09] So because we trust God, there could even be joy. And, there'll be peace in surrendering into the unknown because discernment is always only about the next step. It never tells us how everything is going to play out after we make this decision. So it requires a lot of trust. 

[00:18:26] HOW HEALING TRANSFORMS DISCERNMENT
So what difference can healing and integration make for discernment or for ability to discern? It goes to the root of discernment, okay, because it heals the foundation that we need to actually discern authentically. And that is our ability to build an intimate, secure, and trusting relationship with God that enables us to have or, more accurately I'll say, to move towards having what St. Ignatius calls holy indifference when discerning.

[00:19:00] Okay, so holy indifference, it's not indifference in the sense of, “I don't care”, or I have no, like, I have no preference or I don't care. You can have preference, we often do have preference, maybe one way or the other. But holy indifference, which is itself a grace, right? It's also a supernatural grace. I really believe none of this that we're talking about can happen without grace, all right? It's in cooperation with grace. But when we develop a secure attachment with God, then we become more able to have that kind of detachment to either choice that we may be considering. Because, we believe not just cognitively, but really we believe with our hearts and our bodies that God remains with us as we walk. And if let's say if we decide or discover later that we made a mistake, He's there with us. We can still course correct. 

[00:19:56] You know, to even be able to believe that requires a lot of security. Okay, and it's something that I certainly didn't have for many, many years. I used to be sometimes.. I used to be paralyzed with fear when there was a high stakes thing that I was trying to discern. 

[00:20:12] But then at least I could recognize back then that when I was so fearful about the possibility of maybe God wanting me to do something that maybe it's something that I really, really don't want to do. I could at least recognize back then that I was not free enough to discern, and that God was probably inviting me first to defer the discernment to a time when I am more regulated or less fearful. 

[00:20:38] Because after all, discernment is about being led by love, being led by trust. It's freely chosen without duress, and it's open to an unknown future that we can't control. Right, that's what discernment is. Discernment is not an end in itself, and it's not something that we do because we don't want to offend God.

[00:21:01] I mean, that may be how we go about it when we're earlier in our relationship with God, younger in our relationship with God. But like I said earlier, that's not really genuinely discernment.

[00:21:13] Discernment is not something that happens, um, like for example, you know a slave that wants to do the master's will because it's afraid of the consequences if it  doesn't. Our relationship with God, Christ, our relationship with the Trinitarian God, is not one of master and slave. You know, the images in scripture often is either that of a loving parent, we have images of both father and mother in scripture describing how God loves us, right? Or it's a friend. Jesus says that He calls us friends. And also there's often the imagery of deep intimate spousal love, right? These are all images of unconditional love, trust, you know secure attachment. 

[00:22:00] And the reality of complex trauma means that for many of us, we don't have that with God. Even when we begin to develop a personal relationship with God, it may be doubly or triply hard for complex trauma survivors to develop that secure attachment. And so that's where healing and integration come in. And that's a process that takes a long time. It's not something we can just flip on like a switch, right? It also needs to take place in God's time. 

So, anyway, that is what I wanted to share today because in my experience as well, I think there are a lot of people, there are many people who want to discern God's will, and they often struggle to. 

[00:22:50] But, they can't see that the reason that they're struggling is not just because they can't see, like they think they can't hear God, maybe, or they're frustrated because they don't feel like they have the level of certainty that they want, so they think they're still struggling to discern. What they don't realize is that they don't yet have that kind of secure attachment with God that allows them to proceed without undue stress and anxiety. Like even when the stakes are high and even when we do feel anxiety because it's human right? When you're stepping into the unknown, for example. 

[00:23:30] But where there is secure attachment, it's so much easier to experience that grace of surrender - and surrender that's not one of resignation, but really surrender that is even joyful, right. And to be able to practice this over and over again because discernment is never a one time thing. In fact, it's something that happens all the time. 

[00:23:52] The deeper we go in our walk with Christ, the deeper we go in our interior integration journey, the more we realize that practically at every moment in our lives, there is an invitation to listen to what the Holy Spirit may be prompting us. And, as we get more integrated, we will realize that there's always, there's also always this space for choice.

[00:24:20] When we're not yet healed, we can get very anxious at the thought that at every moment God may be prompting us with something or saying something to us, because there could be that fear that, “if I don't hear him right, and I don't do what He wants me to do, something bad will happen”. 

[00:24:35] But as we get more integrated, as we develop a more secure relationship with God, it becomes a joy because there's not so much the stress of, “Oh, what if I don't hear God right?”, or, “what if I don't do what He wants me to do?”. There's space. We don't always have to be able to say yes. God honours that because we're not perfect. We're in progress. 

[00:24:58] And, more important than our ability to be able to say ‘Yes’ to everything that we feel like God is asking us to do, is our ability to feel safe in His love. Safe enough to hear our genuine authentic answer, to be able to say, “Lord, if that's what you're asking me to do, I'm not able to do that yet. I'm not ready. I don't want to.”

[00:25:21] That honest answer, I think, honours God so much and honours that relationship we have with God so much more than an obligatory ‘Yes’ that is driven by fear because we are afraid that we'll be punished or that something bad will happen to us if we don't say yes. So I hope that that has given you a new perspective to discerning God's will, especially if you're a complex trauma survivor. 

[00:25:47] And, to begin to realize that by working on your healing journey, by working on trauma recovery, you are actually helping yourself move towards having greater ability and capacity to exercise, discernment of spirits, you know in a way that's peaceful, joyful and truly honoring of God and yourself. 

[00:26:09] So that's all I have for today. Until the next chat, bye!