Helping Others Heal Starts with Your Own Heart: Rebecca Taguma on Trauma, Lament, and Healing Together

Trauma Healing Institute and Restoring Hope Senior Director Rebecca Taguma visited MercyCast, Raleigh Sadler’s podcast about compassion, for a conversation about how God uses ordinary people to help others heal from trauma, grief, and loss. Read on to read highlights from their conversation, or listen to the whole episode here.

Raleigh Sadler: What first opened your eyes to the reality of trauma in people’s lives?

Rebecca Taguma: My first introduction to this issue of pain, and not knowing how to respond, or how to help, is when people who were friends would say, “Hey, this really bad thing happened.” Going through a divorce; someone I was close to died unexpectedly; a tragedy happened in my community. And I would feel stuck: How do I, as a follower of Jesus, respond lovingly?

I was attracted to the curriculum because of the experience of my neighbor—encountering friends and family who’d experienced hard things, or people who were deeply traumatized with complex trauma, and not knowing how to respond. I went and did the training.

Raleigh: How did it feel?

Rebecca: Surprising! I went in thinking, “I’ve been doing ministry; I know how to do this stuff.” But the way THI training works is that you experience a healing group yourself, as a participant, and then you learn to facilitate those groups.

That’s not how a lot of us slide into ministry! A lot of us want to come into ministry without any vulnerability, without having recognized or dealt with our own experiences. We want to help other people.

I get it: we’re driven by our experiences, because we understand the needs and the deep pain, and we have the compassion of Christ to help our neighbor. But having to recognize my own traumatic experiences, my own need for healing, was the first step in being prepared to help others.

And nine years later, I’m the director of the Trauma Healing Institute and the Restoring Hope ministry at American Bible Society.

Raleigh: Is it a tough sell to tell people, “you need to work on your own stuff before you’re ready to help others?”

Rebecca: I shouldn’t admit this publicly, but we’re kind of sneaky about it. We tell people, “If you’re going to facilitate the curriculum, you need to understand how it works.” But the truth is, you’re actually recognizing your own experiences of trauma, and beginning or continuing your own path of healing.

As a helper, you are in proximity to trauma, grief, loss, pain; you take that into yourself. You need to have some really good skills for dealing with it! Even licensed clinicians are required to see a therapist themselves, in most places.

From a theological perspective, God does not let us get away with stuff. He cares about our hearts. If you’re going to use your caring for your neighbor as a way to deal with your heart, you need to be willing to be vulnerable. We do this stuff together. You don’t get saved because someone else saves you; you get saved because you have an experience of salvation in Christ. It’s the same with healing: you have to do the work yourself.

Raleigh: I don’t like admitting I don’t have it all together. I grew up in the Church; I can totally hide my vulnerability! We don’t want to show that we can be hurt. But Christ came for broken people, and I’m one of them, and that’s okay.

Rebecca: Jesus suffered with us. The call to be a Christian, a little Christ, someone like Christ, means you can’t avoid the pain—either your own or other people’s. The difference is that we are not Christ; we are human, so need to be really tethered to the One who can carry us through.

A lot of Christian folk, especially in America, don’t have great theology around suffering. Suffering is not a cultural value. Our obsession with youth, with looking a certain way, with avoiding death and suffering and pain—there are cultures that embrace those things, maybe too much. But we really avoid it. That seeps into the American Church.

I grew up in a church where you just rejoiced. “Rejoice in the Lord always! Say alleluia, amen! Move along, don’t ruminate on the painful thing!” But it turns out that those painful things are often the things that draw us to Christ—and draw our neighbors to Christ. If we’re open to that, if we’re willing to sit with our own pain and other people’s, with Christ, it’s very powerful.

One of our lessons is about grief; we look at the practice of lament, deep in the Christian tradition and deeply Biblical. We look at the Psalms that are laments: David is crying out, angry at God, really steeped in his own pain and sorrow. And God seems to think that’s just fine! That’s a powerful thing for us.

Raleigh: God motivates vulnerable people like you and me to love other vulnerable people by becoming vulnerable for us. It’s invaluable to have people who are guides who can say, “That thing that scares you is nearer to the heart of God than you might think. You’re on the right track.”

Rebecca: I think about Jesus’ journey toward the Cross—all of the people he meets along the way who try to pull him away from the calling that the Father has for him. It’s easy to be pulled away by the pain that we know we’re going to face; Jesus himself said, “Please take this cup, God; I don’t want to do this.” He’s sweating blood because he is so afraid; he knows what’s coming, he knows the pain he’s going to experience.

A lot of us see the pain ahead of us and say, “No thank you.” But when you see what God has for you on the other side—! It doesn’t minimize the experience of pain, but it’s a powerful, transformative thing for ourselves, for our nearness to God, and for other people around us, to see the fruits of those hard things.

Raleigh: In a very gentle way, you’re dismantling the Messiah complex that drives us toward being heroes. A lot of us want to go in and “save people.” But when we’re actually neighbors, our hearts have to be open; we have to be vulnerable, and that’s scary.

Rebecca: It hurts, and it’s uncomfortable! We’re steeped in a culture that avoids discomfort on every level. We need to care for ourselves well, because we are not Jesus. We are still human, and we need to care for our vulnerability, gently—returning to Scripture, returning to community that keeps you safe and healthy.

Raleigh: How do we care for ourselves well?

Rebecca: One thing you can do to care for yourself is to revisit the painful things in a safe environment, with safe people you know you can trust. Scripture is pretty clear that God desires us to be in community with each other.

Raleigh: When we’ve gone through something, we push people away—we don’t want people to see us like that. There’s a natural inclination to go away from people to heal on our own, to self-soothe. But we just end up spiraling. The counterintuitive aspect of the Gospel is that you find your healing in someone else—not only Jesus, but his people. You can go to someone with your heart in your hands and say, “Walk with me, help me.” How have you seen that work?

Rebecca: The central idea of what we do is that God cares deeply for us. We live in a fallen world, so we’re going to be wounded in our heart, and God cares about that. The goal is to find safe places where you can connect with other people around the wellbeing of your heart, your soul, your innermost being.

That’s what trauma does: it isolates us. We’re convinced that no one would understand, we’re at fault, and we should be ashamed. Those are lies of the Devil! When we’re not connected, we’re vulnerable.

Raleigh: How would you encourage our listeners today?

Rebecca: The encouragement I take from my experience in trauma healing ministry is: You can do it. God is faithful. You don’t have to be a professional or a pastor. You can really hurt people by being insensitive and unsafe; but also, it’s not hard to learn to be a safe listener. It just takes a few skills and a little bit of guidance. You can be someone who is trusted by others! Learning to be a safe listener who knows when to lean into God and allow God to take care of me, and when to lean toward others who are feeling isolated—you can do it. It’s not that hard!

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