How Trauma Warps Our Capacity for Resilience

In my previous post, I recalled resilience training I attended through work. In it, our class discussed the "maintenance" and "repair" anchors we needed to remain resilient. A few of my coworkers mentioned drawing on their faith: prayer, Bible reading. I live in the US South, after all, the so-called Bible belt, home to Billy Graham and Bob Jones among many others.

I stayed out of this part of the discussion, not because I don’t believe, but because I'm still figuring out what I believe and how to believe it. I was away from church for more than 20 years, in large part because in my early life it was a source of both comfort and control.

I'm not alone in this. More than one-quarter of U.S. adults identify as "none," or religiously unaffiliated. Nearly half of "nones" identify issues with religious organizations, while about one-third identify problems with religious people, as having put them off religion.

Yet, as I noticed while researching the emergency management structure in the state I call home, I noticed how deeply entrenched religious organizations are within the response and recovery apparatus. To name just a few:

• Adventist Community Services offers goods warehouse management and distribution.
• Latter Day Saint Charities also provides supply distribution, along with cleanup.
• Long term recovery, including cleanup and rebuilding, comes from Lutheran Disaster Response, while Presbyterian Disaster Assistance offers volunteer housing during rebuilding.
• The Southern Baptist Convention Disaster Relief provides food service and distribution, muck and debris removal, and rebuilding.

To be sure, the majority of adults who do affiliate with a religion find great comfort in these relationships. Researching recent earthquakes in the Philippines for my graduate class, I learned:

Another significant response to the Cebu disaster came from Archbishop Alberto Uy, who advised the province’s Catholic congregants to remain clear of churches until they could be assessed for damages. Nearly 80 percent of the Philippines’ population is Roman Catholic, and Uy’s directive was a departure from previous disaster responses in which churches served to shelter storm refugees.

However, the directive was also nothing short of pragmatic. Churches in the region are hundreds of years old, having been built during Spanish colonization in the 1500s. Indeed, one Cebu church had partially collapsed following the earthquake, and a church facade in Davao Oriental was also damaged....

[In advance of Typhoon Fungwong], the Archdiocese of Manila urged schools, churches, and other institutions “with roof, safe space, rest rooms and clean [sic]” to offer temporary shelter to evacuees.

Clearly, religion and faith counts for a lot after a disaster, both for affected people and the volunteers who offer their assistance. Charity, or the act of giving to those less fortunate, is a core part of most organized religions. In its purest form an act of love – the sacrifice of time, money, and other resources to help other humans – charity in the Christian Bible is one of the three theological virtues. In Judaism, tzedakah (whose literal meaning is “justice” or “righteousness”) means that giving to people in need is correct rather than extra. In Islam, obligatory zakat and voluntary sadaqah charity form "an act of worship that reflects faith, compassion, gratitude, and social responsibility.... as a means of purifying wealth, caring for the vulnerable, and strengthening society."

With that in mind, churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship are often the best organized to meet mass-care needs after a disaster. They already organize meal trains, potluck luncheons and suppers for parishioners in need, homeless shelters, youth activities, and countless other ministries whose skills are critically needed after disaster.

In a lot of ways, involving faith-based organizations in the emergency support functions (ESFs) is a no-brainer. And yet, emphasizing these organizations risks alienating the very people they are organized to help. Indeed, the existence of "nones," with their negative interactions with houses of worship, tell a different story.

Filling a gap in emergency management literature

Not long before my first graduate class ended, my professor emailed an invitation to the virtual thesis defense of another student, Grace Freeman. Her topic, "Giving Voice to the Crisis of Religious Trauma: Implications for Mental Health and Trauma-Informed Emergency Management," fills a gap in academic literature on emergency management.

Asking, "... how can communities prepare for future crises if the trauma embedded within their group cannot be navigated effectively?" Freeman's thesis focuses on "high control" fundamentalist evangelical Christian groups, "whose structures, doctrines, and social dynamics create an environment where individual autonomy is markedly limited."

These groups differ from collectivism, she added in her thesis defense. High control groups may mimic the collectivist values of shared resources and interdependence for mutual survival, but the driver behind their sense of shared purpose and social interaction is to control the individual and maintain the institutional hierarchy.

Not exclusive to any single religion, Freeman observed, these controls are particularly intense and pervasive. They rely on chronic exposure, acute events, spiritual abuse and invalidation, punishment for nonconformity, shame, and misrepresentation that coalesce into what Freeman describes as "trauma formation pathways."

These pathways take a variety of forms, from exploitation of volunteer labor and the devaluation of women's labor in particular, to refusal of help for vulnerable people in need so that they can learn some "godly lesson." People who name the abuse are dismissed as having a "victim complex." And the overall stripping of autonomy creates in these victims a general sense of unworthiness.

Women, children and adolescent youth, neurodivergent people, and members of historically underprivileged or oppressed racial or LGBTQIA+ groups are especially vulnerable to these dynamics.

Because "religious trauma is a systemic architecture designed to erode agency and enforce compliance," through "repeated positioning of the individual as inferior or incapable," survivors' conditioned responses, wrote Freeman, persist long after they have abandoned their environment. "[T]hese people are adrift in finding their own identity... for years," rendering long term recovery reconstructive.

The impact of high control on disaster response and recovery

Having grown up in an authoritarian family structure, I found Freeman's thesis deeply validating. It also lent important context to, for example, WNYC's recent "American Emergency" series, which examined the many conspiracy theories around FEMA since its inception.

In particular, wrote Freeman, high control institutions carefully construct alternate realities:

Scientific consensus is dismissed as demonic. Medical diagnoses are rejected in favor of spiritual solutions. Historical knowledge is withheld, leaving members unable to contextualize their community's claims. Conspiracy theories flourish in this informational chasm and keep members in perpetual vigilance against imagined enemies.... If members cannot trust external sources of knowledge, they must rely entirely on the community's interpretation of reality. The "us versus them" dynamic is manufactured through systematic misrepresentation of outsiders. This dynamic is the primary mechanism of control, and it utilizes religious language to invalidate escape.

"In these environments, every shadow is a demon and every thought is a sin," Freeman said in her defense. "And this leads to a severe dissocialization and a quiet lowgrade hum of unworthiness... like tinnitus, barely noticeable on good days, but deafening on bad ones."

The end result, she said, is heightened vulnerability. "Survivors often struggle with impaired judgment, heightened mental health risks, and a profound distrust of authority figures," she explained.

Emergency managers may encounter these dynamics and their outcomes on multiple levels and in multiple forms. As I inferred from filtering Freeman's work through my personal experience, people suffering religious trauma might, for instance:

• Refuse to shelter in a church or to receive assistance from church groups.
• Struggle to ask for or even name what they need, or downplay the severity of their situation or the extent of their needs.
• Believe they / their feelings / responses are the problem.
• Fear the loss of resources, especially if they perceive their need as inconvenient to others.
• Experience decision paralysis.
• Refrain from dissent or critique of the system or institution.
• Struggle to reconcile conflicting pieces of information, as if unsure what or whom to believe.
• Seem more invested in obedience to instruction or direction than taking action.
• Get defensive or react poorly to perceived judgment or shame.
• Act or speak as if they are being constantly observed or judged.
• Defer to institutional interpretations of an event, rather than their own personal experience, even if the "institution" is not necessarily religious.
• Make statements that sound like resilience (such as reframing a traumatic event as a "blessing" or a "lesson"), but seem unwilling or unable to accept less positive feelings around the event.

These dynamics were particularly evident this past year in South Carolina, where a large scale measles outbreak was traced to closely knit Eastern European immigrant communities. Their vaccine hesitancy was linked, in one expert's view, to a complicated history with vaccines and government control under the former Soviet Union.

Ending the epidemic involved enlisting the aid of Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking public health experts who could address community fears in their own language and context.

Questions with no easy answers

In her thesis defense, Freeman offered several ways for emergency managers to address population segments with religious trauma. "We cannot simply hand off individuals to clergy during dangerous or unstable situations," she said during her thesis defense. "While yes, the church is a great source of aid, clergy hold significant power over impressionable people."

Instead, she recommended embedding trauma-informed practice throughout the disaster management cycle:

Mitigation: Audit existing protocols to identify potential triggers. "This includes reviewing shelter arrangements or relief programs that might inadvertently require religious participation," Freeman said.

Preparedness: Educate first responders, shelter staff, and volunteers to recognize the signs of religious trauma and "distinguish between healthy spiritual resilience and the negative religious coping often seen in religious trauma survivors," said Freeman, "such as interpreting a disaster as divine punishment, which is strongly linked to worsened PTSD, depression, and anxiety."

Response: Prioritize safety and autonomy. "Survivors often view authority figures, including medical personnel and faith-based relief organizations, as extensions of the abusive systems they fled," Freeman explained. "Care must prioritize bodily autonomy and provide clear explanations of procedures while also ensuring that survivors can opt out of faith-based programming without penalty. Shelter operations must guarantee privacy and strictly avoid religious activities unless explicitly requested by the survivor."

Recovery: Support survivors' rebuilding of their identity and trust, and help survivors navigate the complex intersection of disaster stress and religious trauma by connecting them with non-religious groups.

Yet, reading Freeman's thesis and listening to her defense, I realized I had questions that have no easy answers:

• Particularly in the South, how many emergency managers also grew up in and still practice high control paradigms because they are "normal"?
• Thus, how might the very "command and control" aspect of the incident response structure trigger survivors' helplessness and actually undermine the "whole community" ambitions of modern emergency management?
• How can emergency managers deliver care to people who need more help than they are receiving, but aren't yet ready to abandon their high control community?
• How can an emergency management effort address intersectional and generational trauma, such as high-control religious groups whose congregants have a history of racism or genocide, and thus for whom an "us vs. them" mentality is entirely rational?
• What are alternatives to "mass care" or at least delivery models that promote agency or reduce harm?
• How can volunteer organizations or grassroots organizers integrate survivors of religious trauma, who may need more handholding or mentoring before they feel empowered enough to take needed actions of their own accord?

Answering these questions in practice would require the development of new organizational relationships and community structures. Although a tenet of emergency management is to build relationships before you need them, the era of climate change is bringing more frequent and intense disasters.

In turn, this will require emergency managers to call on their relationships on an ongoing, continuous basis. And that will make it harder for the people within the structures to do the kind of reflective work that would drive meaningful change.

I don't have any suggestions, especially given how overworked and stressed out and exhausted it seems we all always are. Only this: we may simply need to figure out a way to start small. One contact, one conversation, one question at a time; making a practice, an atomic habit if you will, of challenging our own beliefs and assumptions.