Excerpted from Break Every Stinking Chain by Denice Adcock Colson:
FREEDOM. We all want it, expect it, and even demand it. You’re probably free on the outside to come and go as you please, but inside you might feel trapped in a personal jail of depression, anger, anxiety or fear. Feeling chained to past wounds, recurring negative thoughts or relationships will keep you feeling stuck and inhibit that sense of freedom you crave. While in your head you believe that Christ brings freedom and that a relationship with God is the answer, you continue to struggle with aligning your emotions with this truth.
There are several myths that have been passed around in the Christian church—by which I mean the Body of Christ—about emotions, psychological wounds, and treatment for mental health issues. Many Christians have been afraid of psychology and counseling, believing that the application of psychological principles is always against God and against faith in Christ. In fact, some Christians still believe that any use of psychological training, research or counsel is heresy and should never be used! These same people, however, go to see medical doctors when they are sick, take antibiotics when they have an infection, and allow non-Christian doctors trained in secular medical schools to operate on them. As a Christian practicing for more than 34 years in the counseling field, this has continually confused and frustrated me.
“Science is thinking God’s thoughts after Him,” according to Johannes Kepler, the father of modern astronomy, a trained Lutheran minister and scientist born in 1571. He solved the problem of Mars (the fact that Mars appeared to move backward across the sky) and correctly identified that planets travel in elliptical orbits around the Sun and not in circular orbits around the Earth. He and most great scientists at the time, believed that God designed everything for us to be curious about, to study, and to try to understand. The false idea that Biblical truth and science were two opposite things was foreign to these great scientists. There is a growing group of Christian counselors, psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and pastoral counselors who agree that all truth is God’s truth. Many great Christian theologians concur, just a few of whom are Augustine, Thomas Aquinus, John Calvin, and a more modern theologian, Gaeblin. Remaining curious and attempting to understand how the universe works is our responsibility and a way of honoring God. That’s what the integration of psychology and theology is all about.
Psychology is the scientific study of human behavior. While it’s true that all bad human behavior can be ultimately attributed to our sin nature, specific human behavior requires specific explanations. Why do true Christ-believers still struggle with recurring interpersonal issues and even experience family splits and divorce? Why do famous and Godly theologians suffer from depression, hidden addictions, and even commit suicide? Why do Christians get divorced? Why do children who grow up in Christian families hate God or dismiss Him as adults? Some of the research on Christians and divorce or other family and health issues has been misreported. However, as a veteran listener to the stories of demoralized people, what they all have in common, regardless of their religious views or faith, is unhealed emotional and psychological wounds. Remarkably, many very intelligent and Godly people are oblivious to the fact that these past wounds are the source of their current emotional, psychological, spiritual, relational and even physical problems. Perhaps you too have bought the myth which I will address in chapter one, “If it happened when I was a child, it doesn’t affect me anymore.” This is not true, and it’s impossible! (Unless of course you received a brain transplant.) In chapter 1 I will present compelling research to support the fact that it does affect you—even 50 or more years later, and will impact you for the rest of your life But wait, there is hope for healing!
You might be asking yourself, “How did I get here? I thought the past was in the past.” In chapter two, I’ll introduce you to The Trauma Survivor Blueprint©, a six-stage process that explains how we go from wound to survivor, and become stuck repeating the same negative behaviors. I’ll also introduce you to a plan for healing, The Three Phases of Strategic Trauma and Abuse Recovery©. While this plan will assist you on your path to healing, it’s important to remember that this type of transformation takes time. It’s a process. Salvation is immediate, but transformation occurs slowly and over time. I think that what we call transformation is also the process of HEALING. In other words, healing from trauma is the means through which God transforms us. This means identifying the wounds in your life and allowing God to heal them from the inside-out. It is a different approach to change. Rather than changing from the outside-in, you are embracing your weakness and inner-wounds, and allowing God to do the changing from the inside-out. One participant in the class on which this book is based wrote, “For the first time in ten years of marriage, and almost thirty years of silence, I have begun to initiate conversations with my husband, family, friends and most importantly with God-about the trauma that has occurred in my life. My faith has begun to build slowly and I have learned the value of starting simply, which Dr. Colson so aptly teaches. As my faith grows, so does my hope. My hope to you, dear reader, is that you will experience the same.”
This book introduces you to a 12 stage process which gives you a roadmap to follow. Think of it like a GPS for moving through healing from emotional wounds. It will help you know where you are, and guide you to where you want to be. Chapters three through six will provide a break-down of the first phase of recovery and address the individual steps needed to begin your healing journey. Using psychological research and Biblical interpretation, we will look at five additional myths about trauma that have infiltrated society and the Christian church and disprove each. In chapter seven I will introduce you to the next phase of recovery and provide evidence as to why you should continue on. Of course, it is your choice as to whether you go deeper or stop here.
You can be free from the hidden chains of past wounds. God can heal the wounds of trauma. You don’t have to live with overwhelming depression, anxiety, fear, or anger. It doesn’t matter the size of the wound, any size wound hurts. Recently, my 14 year old daughter had a root-canal. I was in more pain watching than she was; she didn’t complain at all, before or after the procedure. In contrast, a few days before her root canal, my husband got some tiny cuts on his fingers, and he had to wear bandages on them for several days because the pain was so bad. It’s not the size of your wound, it’s the location. When that location is inside of you, it hurts, no matter how “tiny” it might look from the outside. Don’t dismiss your particular kind of wound because it’s not as dramatic as someone else’s. It still affects you and God still wants to heal it!
More about Integrating Psychology and the Bible
The Bible is the single most important book ever written. It is God’s Word. It has transformed the world, and it connects us to the most important person ever born on this Earth, Jesus Christ. It tells us who He is, how He relates to people, and the basic nature and history of human beings. The Bible tells us how we can have a relationship with God, the creator of all things, through Jesus Christ.
As I mentioned earlier, psychology is the scientific study of human behavior. Just like biology, chemistry, and physics are the study of natural laws and how to apply them through medicine or engineering, psychology is an attempt to understand why people behave the way they do and how to change bad behavior into better behavior. Mental Health treatment is the application of psychology, much like medicine is the application of biology, chemistry, and physiology. Without the foundation of the Bible, however, mental health treatment has no anchor, no foundational principles. If the purpose of applying psychology is to change human behavior, but everything is relative and there are no moral absolutes, then who determines what “bad” behavior is and why one behavior is “better” than another? Psychology doesn’t have an answer for that. The best they can come up with is that better behavior makes you feel better, improves relationships, and makes society more functional.
The problem with that is, societal norms, the rules about what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t, are continually changing. For example, in ancient Greece, ritualistic kidnapping of young teen boys and sexual liaisons initiated by an adult man with younger teen boys was common place and even encouraged by the boys’ father. In addition, rulers kept children of the same or opposite sex as sexual toys. In our modern society this behavior is widely condemned and illegal. Men (and women) who behave this way now are considered pedophiles and put in prison to protect the rest of society from their destructive behavior. Incidentally, there are people who are trying to make this type of relationship between adults and minors acceptable again. In fact, the sexual exploitation and sexual enslavement of children, also called “trafficking,” is actually gaining popularity, rather than decreasing. There really is nothing new under the sun! People treat each other horribly and have since Cain murdered his brother Able.
While the Bible does contain the answers to societal and individual problems, I think it is unfortunate that Christians seem to focus on global issues like organized human trafficking which takes place “out there somewhere,” but overlook the nearby predicaments of adults and children who experience abuse, exploitation, and even neglect in less obvious ways. Unfortunately, it has become commonplace in the church to, on the one hand, acknowledge the impact of something like human trafficking, but on the other hand, give the impression that divorce is something people should just get over. That not feeling loved by your parent or parents, or growing up with an alcoholic parent, or with a screaming parent is something that we should just forget about and overcome as if it were a small boulder in our path that we could simply climb over. Inconvenient and pesky, but no big deal. Instead of embracing people, we tend to judge them for their survival choices, like feeling sorry for themselves, using drugs and alcohol, sexual misconduct, inability to work, etc., rather than choosing to empathize with their pain and loss.
These “smaller” wounds are the very things that our enemy uses to devalue our faith, limit our growth, and block our roots from growing down deeper into Christ (Col 2:7-9). (Can your roots ever be too deep into Christ?) Many well-meaning church leaders have encouraged Christians to ignore these, to “just put them under the blood,” overcome them, or forget about them and focus on Christ, but this has only enabled the enemy to portray the Church/Body of Christ as unsympathetic and uncaring, and has contributed to shrinking the local church. At one conference I attended, a very compelling speaker instructed us to pretend we were at the airport and imagine taking our baggage to the handler (Jesus) and walking away. “It’s that easy!” she assured us. GIVE ME A BREAK! Give yourself a break! For most of us, it’s just not that simple, and telling us it should be easy only leads to increase our guilt, shame, and sense of inadequacy, further alienating us from the Body of Christ.
While we (Christians) will go out and demonstrate our love by bringing food and water to other countries, we avoid knowing the pain the person sitting next to us in church has had to endure. We don’t know why they don’t smile or won’t shake hands or hold hands during prayer time or avoid eye-contact or seem rude and aloof or use drugs or drink or whatever. I think this type of isolation in the Body of Christ must end if we are to have revival again! I mean REAL, exploding, outpouring, and insanely inspiring revival.
What would happen in our church if we bore each other’s burdens, as Christ commands us to do? How would our relationships change if we sincerely demonstrated interest in other’s burdens, without judgement, and were willing to share our own burdens? Both listening and sharing require the choice of vulnerability. It also requires us to identify the roots of our burdens—unhealed wounds—and begin to let God heal us in community with others, just like Paul talked about in Galatians 6. This book is my attempt at helping to initiate, support, and bring some organization to that healing conversation.
While salvation through Christ is what leads to immediate freedom from sin, transformation is an ongoing process. This book is part of the transformation process and seeks to meet you wherever you are. You may be wondering if God even exists and if He does exist whether or not He even cares about you and your personal circumstances. Or, you may be a Christian ministry leader, active in the church for years, leading others to Christ, praying, reading your Bible daily, but still find yourself stuck in emotional quicksand and not knowing where to turn for help. Whether you find yourself at either extreme or anywhere in between, this book and its guiding principles will help you move forward in the process of healing from the wounds that are keeping you stuck. Are you ready to heal? Let’s get going!
Break Every Stinking Chain! is currently available as an ebook on Amazon.com. A paperback version is coming soon!