Pastor’s Perspective: Trauma victims need help beyond the aftermath

For some time now I have been thinking and reading a great deal about trauma and its devastating impact on the lives of people who are its victims. Most recently the terrible fires in and around Los Angeles have made me newly aware of the importance of this topic. Although we who live in Orange County did not suffer directly, many of us have been indirectly affected by what happened.

One of my parishioners lives in Altadena and, though her house was not destroyed, she had to evacuate and has still not been able to move back into her neighborhood since all of the other houses on her street were consumed by the blaze. Moreover, two other churches with which our own is affiliated were burned to the ground: Pacific Palisades United Methodist Church and Altadena United Methodist Church. Our own congregation in Newport Beach has taken up a collection to assist with relief efforts in helping those two churches to rebuild their sanctuaries. Also, I learned from a Jewish friend of mine from childhood that his synagogue burned down. When I invited a professor at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena to come and speak to my church, he informed me that his house in the Eaton Canyon area had been destroyed, and he was unavailable to accept speaking engagements at this time. Those of us whose homes and places of worship were spared have not been unaffected by these devastating losses of others.

I remember the summer of 1968 when my family was faced with the real possibility of losing our house to a wildfire that was burning out of control in the mountains above Glendora in the San Gabriel Valley where I grew up. My father climbed up onto the top of our house with a hose and watered down the wooden roof in case sparks from the fire landed on it. My mother packed the essentials needed in case we had to leave. I recall that she put the photo albums in the car, since they contained her most precious memories. Everything else could be replaced — clothes, furniture, utensils — but not the photos. (In those days there were no cellphones to store our photos.) That night the five of us, my parents, my two brothers, and I, slept in our clothes in the living room, waiting for the police or the fire department to knock on our door ordering us to evacuate immediately. It was frightening and none of us slept soundly that night. Fortunately, we did not have to evacuate. Our house was spared. But the following winter our town faced another crisis caused by an equally destructive force of nature, flooding.

Since the wildfires had destroyed the trees and the brush on the mountain slopes, there was nothing to prevent the dirt from sliding down into our streets and houses when the powerful rains came. The massive mudslides destroyed 200 houses and killed 34 people. Sandbags and mud were everywhere. We couldn’t go outside without getting dirty. The Presbyterian church in our town was set up as the evacuation center for families who lost their homes. Volunteers took turns so that the evacuation center could be open around the clock for anyone in need of food and shelter. Our neighborhood was highlighted in a story printed in National Geographic magazine with a detailed report about the devastation of Glendora by the debris flows.

Back then, there wasn’t much talk of trauma, except perhaps in the technical books of psychologists. Today we know much more about it. We also know why it is so important to understand it in order to assist those who have experienced trauma.

Last year, at the annual meeting of ministers of the United Methodist Church in California and Hawaii, we heard a talk by Frank Rogers, a professor of Spiritual Formation at Claremont School of Theology, which is a seminary of our church. Rogers himself was a victim of trauma. As a child he had been sexually abused, and in a recently published memoir he narrated his journey of healing from trauma.

His riveting speech led me to read his memoir, and I began to think much more deeply about trauma than I had before.

I realized consciously something that I had long intuited but had never been able to put into words previously: trauma is an experience of something so devastating and horrible that the brain simply cannot process it. Yet once the traumatic event itself has passed, the unprocessed effects remain and leave their trace in the body’s memory. The Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, who is the world’s leading expert on trauma, succinctly captures this point in the title of his very illuminating book, “The Body Keeps the Score.”

After reading this book, I realized that my father had lived with untreated trauma. He had been a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. As an American soldier, he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and forced to walk miles with a piece of shrapnel in his foot. He knew that he would be shot if he couldn’t walk by himself. Once inside the prison camp, he languished without food and heat for six months until the end of the war. When another prisoner was caught stealing a piece of bread, the other prisoners in the camp were assembled to watch his execution by torture.

When at last the Soviet army arrived and liberated the camp, the Russian soldiers shot all the German prison guards in front of the prisoners. My father was only 19 when he lived through all these experiences. He never fully recovered his physical health. He died at 51 years of age. And, unbeknownst to him and those closest to him, he lived the rest of his life after the war with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. In retrospect, I recognize all the signs.

In Newport Beach and elsewhere in Orange County, we have many fine treatment centers that offer the possibility of healing and recovery from trauma. It isn’t something anyone has to do alone. Support is available. Two of my parishioners first came to our church as long-term residents of these treatment centers. One was healing from childhood sexual abuse and the other from a botched surgery that permanently ruined his digestive system. Victims of trauma need our help, not only in the immediacy of the traumatic event, but also long thereafter, in order that they may heal and have the possibility of living full lives undeterred by the long-term effects of untreated trauma.

Rev. Paul E. Capetz is the head pastor at Christ Church by the Sea in Newport Beach.