PSYCHOLOGY OR CHRISTIANITY?

The National Institute of Mental Health defines PTSD this way: "Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a disorder that develops in some people who have experienced a shocking, scary, or dangerous event." Furthermore, the Institute suggests, "It is natural to feel afraid during and after a traumatic situation. Fear is a part of the body’s 'fight-or-flight' response, which helps us avoid or respond to potential danger. People may experience a range of reactions after trauma, and most people recover from initial symptoms over time. Those who continue to experience problems may be diagnosed with PTSD."

In terms of helping someone suffering from PTSD, the Institute offers these suggestions for sufferers : 

• Seek out support from friends, family, or support groups

• Learn to feel okay with one’s actions in response to a traumatic event

• Have a coping strategy for getting through and learning from the traumatic event

• Beg prepared and able to respond to upsetting events as they occur despite feeling fear

• Work with a mental health professional who has experience treating PTSD

• Try psychotherapy, medications, or a combination of psychotherapy and medications

• Psychotherapy (sometimes called talk therapy) includes a variety of treatment techniques that mental health professionals use to help people identify and change troubling emotions, thoughts, and behaviors

• Exposure therapy helps people learn to manage their fear by gradually exposing them, safely, to the trauma they experienced. . . . This therapy can help people with PTSD reduce symptoms that cause them distress.

• Cognitive restructuring helps people make sense of the traumatic event. . . . Cognitive restructuring can help people with PTSD think about what happened realistically.

Friends and family may be helpful, but my experience has shown that non-combat relations don't understand PTSD, even when you explain it to them. These folks often create more problems than they solve. Christian friends who mean well sometimes think they must quote Bible verses at non-Christians and believing veterans that may make us feel worse. For instance, in the 1970s, two Christians who saw me struggling emotionally flippantly quoted 1 John 4:4: "Greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world." Another Christian saw me standing in the church vestibule, struggling with PTSD/depression, and said to me, "Hey man, smile. We don't want visitors coming in here seeing people emotionally down." I had been a Christian for a few years but was relatively new to the faith. My diagnosis of PTSD by the VA was thirty years in the future. Those were some of my most troubling days, comparable to combat.

Various support groups have not helped me. Groupthink aims to get people talking about their present lives, their failures, and how best to live now. Suggestions from group members are of little help since few of the members have any real answers. Suppression of complex past battlefield events was routine. The future is rarely discussed. The facilitator may also have troubling issues they won't discuss or don't know how to deal with. This means they haven't discovered how to "fix" themselves. Their answers/suggestions/discussions that don't work for them won't work for us. 

It may be helpful to know that everyone in the PTSD group suffers from the same malady, but the group doesn't lend itself to finding truthful, objective answers that conform to reality. Facilitators are often anti-Christian or indifferent to Christ. PTSD groups didn't recognize or discuss the brain changes from traumatic situations in combat, much less identify, promote, and apply an alternative answer to psychology, a spiritual solution: the Person and work of Jesus Christ. 

Psychology seeks to redirect the mind's negative thought patterns by focusing on self as the source of change. In this way, suicide will hopefully become less of an option during anxiety and depression. Psychology believes it can help us

• feel okay with our actions in response to a traumatic event

• develop a coping strategy for getting through and learning from the traumatic event

• prepare for and respond to upsetting events as they occur despite feeling fear

Psychology shifts the focus from the real source of help, Christ as Lord of all life and death (Christ doesn't exist in psychology or is merely tolerated as one of many solutions.), over the problem, traumatic stress, and our unproductive mental patterns when triggered by events. The battleground is the mind, according to the psychologist. Conquer the mind and its flawed thinking, and the problem is half solved. 

What about the heart, the inner man, or the inner self? According to Arlin Cuncic, writing for verywell mind ("What Is the Meaning of the 'Inner Self'?", October 23, 2023), the physical organ, the heart, is not irrelevant to psychology regarding behavioral changes. The heart is an organ containing "an intrinsic nervous system that exhibits both short and long-term memory functions" whose "neurons play a pivotal part in memory transfer." It "functions as an endocrine organ" and "secretes oxytocin, commonly known as the love or bonding hormone." 

"Previous studies have linked negative emotions, including depression, anxiety, and anger, to a heightened risk of heart disease." Beyond this, "the leading cause of death among people suffering from schizophrenia is coronary artery disease." Laura Kubzansky of the Harvard School of Public Health has "found that optimism cuts the risk of coronary heart disease by half." (Thomas R. Verny M.D., "The Significance of the Heart-Brain Connection Inside the secrets of the heart." Psychology Today, February 4, 2022.)

The Protestant Reformation (1517-1685) has inadvertently provided us with a unique way of understanding PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) that conforms to reality. How can the Reformers speak to the combat veteran or wife of one about their often debilitating situation? Biblical Reformation theology meets our soul's deepest needs through the grace of the Gospel or the Good News of Christ. This good news empowers us as we live, not as victims of a soul-crushing disorder, but as God's justified and adopted children, gradually becoming conformed to Christ's image and made willing servants by the Spirit of Christ living in us in vital union with the Son of God who loved us and died for us.

How else can Reformation teaching help us understand PTSD and its place in our lives? Scripture tells us that all our circumstances, good and bad, originate in the eternal counsels of the Triune God. Nothing can occur in our lives beyond Christ's Kingly authoritative control. There is, of course, great mystery here. God decreed our traumatic stress for survival on whatever battlefield He has ordained for us. He determined all the events that would surround us on foreign battlefields or when our spouse came home dragging his combat-negative experiences through the front door, but this time as a traumatized person.

This knowledge alone can fortify a person's stress with eternal significance. God Himself had a great purpose for us when He decreed and then personally altered our cranial organs to assist us during combat. God, motivated by His eternal love for us, purposed to place us in those terrible circumstances so that we would change, often for the worse. God, for His part, decreed from all eternity past, ensured the effects of our combat experiences would lead us to the end of ourselves and come to salvation in Christ. Why? He had chosen us to share in the spiritual blessings Christ won for us through His Son, Jesus' perfect obedience to the law. These and many more reasons are why God chose you and me to experience PTSD. 

PTSD can be compared to a tool, like a pair of pliers or a hammer. God uses this "tool," if you will, to drive us to the Person and work of Christ on our behalf. Pliers squeeze and force stubborn nuts off of bolts. Hammers beat nails into submission. For most, PTSD drives them farther from God. The Gospel becomes the smell of death for many struggling and losing their external and internal battles under the weight of their experiences. For others like myself, PTSD has become the gateway to the aroma of life, the Gospel. Christianity presents the world as it is, with God as the Creator, Governor, and King who has ordained all things for His glory. 

You see, sin has made us "stubborn nuts" that won't turn to Christ unless forced. We are nails that need to be beaten into submission by God. Nuts and nails are made of ferris material, which rusts when left out in the elements. Pretty soon, the rust becomes so corrosive that the nut can't turn, or the nail breaks off when hit. Through traumatically stressful situations, God squeezes men's cranial limbic system components, the amygdala, hippocampus, pre-frontal cortex, etc., causing their makeup, size, and volume to change. This divinely sovereign and stressful transformation alters our identity from what it was before the stress to what it has become: sullen, angry, anxious, fearful, and depressed. Many of these vets, First Responders, and housewives will be diagnosed with PTSD. Daily rebellion against God ought to result in every veteran being diagnosed with the worst case of traumatic stress possible. For lawbreakers like you and me, the question is never, why am I suffering so much? Instead, as sinful creatures, we ought to ask why aren't we suffering more. Why are we enjoying goodness and pleasure, seeing how we knowingly and justly deserve God's wrath? 

God shows His love generally to all men by causing the rain to fall on them and the sun to shine. God manifests His saving love on those He has chosen for Himself from eternity past. God chose to love us, not because He foresaw we would choose Him, but because it pleased Him to do so. Mercifully, a small percentage of the population has PTSD. 

The Holy Spirit may reveal a Christ-focused understanding of our difficulties over time. That is His prerogative. Nevertheless, all traumatic stress works for good because God first loved us, and we, in turn, love Him. Traumatic stress becomes the vehicle or tool through which God conforms us to Christ's image.

Such knowledge provides meaning to any stressful situation because we discover Christ is at the center of our lives. Over time and through the Spirit's transformation, we give God more and greater thanks and praise.

Christianity, on the other hand, sees the mind as the gateway to the heart because the issues of life flow from the heart (Prov. 4:23). “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders" (Mt. 15:19). “The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?" (Jer. 17:9). According to the Apostle Paul, the mind must be renewed if our lives are to be transformed (Rom. 12:2).

The following psychological aims are not compatible with God's purposes for Christian veterans, etc.

• feeling okay with our actions in response to a traumatic event

• The Scriptures of the Bible emphasize divine, objective truth more than human subjective emotions. It doesn't matter what I feel about my actions when triggered during a firefight or when stateside. Feelings that vary are irrelevant because I am prone to respond to a trigger appropriately one day but not another. The point is that God sees me united to Christ, who has done all things well on my behalf. God is no longer angry with me because I am in Christ.

• developing a coping strategy for getting through and learning from the traumatic event

• Coping strategies are also subject to human emotional fluctuations. There's nothing wrong with rehearsing how I will act if or when certain unexpected situations arise. However, I know that my ability to respond varies daily. An inadequate or overzealous response can lead to self-recriminations, self-loathing, anxiety, and depression. How a situation is handled is up to me, so there are too many variables. 

One benefit of union with Jesus Christ is resting in Christ, who learned obedience through the things He suffered. It is His suffering that matters in events that pertain to traumatic stress, not mine.

• preparing for and responding to upsetting events as they occur despite feeling fear

• Perfect love casts out fear. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline. Again, there's nothing wrong with preparations for "upsetting events." I recommend it. However, I know myself well. I am subject to disappointing days where I don't behave as I had hoped or practiced. Even when no one sees my responses, God sees my heart, filled with too much remaining wickedness. I cannot disappoint the Lord because I am in union with the Son of God, with whom He is well pleased. The fear that I experience is most often from Satan, whom Jesus defeated on the cross and at His resurrection.