Triggers and Traumas: Preaching to More than the Choir
with Dr. Lisa Sethre-Hofstad
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
The Old Testament is replete with texts containing traumatic, violent, and disturbing language. Phyllis Trible rightly and famously labeled these "texts of terror." The people who wrote these disturbing texts were themselves survivors of trauma, defeat, and domination—multiple times over. The Prophets themselves—the focus of this article--contribute no small number of problematic texts to the collection, such as Ezek 16:35-42; Nah 3:1-7 and Hosea 2:1-23, which depict graphic violence and sexual abuse.
Given the canonical status of these texts, how should one preach and teach on them, especially in an age when many church leaders are striving to be "trauma-informed"? One well-intentioned strategy is to provide trigger warnings before presenting content that could retraumatize survivors. The intention behind such warnings is to care for victims of trauma by preventing them from encountering content that might be harmful to their wellbeing or otherwise hinder the path to healing.
Abundant research, however, demonstrates that trigger warnings are not merely ineffective but potentially harmful.
In the past decade, clinical language has increasingly crept into popular vernacular to describe common human experiences. Words like trauma, anxiety, and triggers, once the exclusive domain of highly trained professionals diagnosing specific maladaptive behaviors, now pervade everyday speech.
This linguistic shift has resulted in the overgeneralization of emotional discomfort into clinical narratives. But a certain degree of suffering is simply part of life, and learning to regulate negative emotions builds resilience. Unrealistic expectations of a warning before every stressor prevent the development of healthy coping mechanisms.
Moreover, couching normal distress in clinical terms can actually shape responses toward catastrophizing--assuming the worst-case scenario, reinforcing a traumatized identity, and increasing feelings of helplessness. Some studies even suggest that those prone to catastrophizing are more likely to develop PTSD from milder stressors. Believing that mere words can jeopardize one's safety or identity amplifies anxiety rather than alleviating it. Distress does not equal trauma, and our preaching needs to reflect this research-based conclusion.
It's crucial to understand that in psychological literature, a "trigger" refers to a specific stimulus for an individual with PTSD stemming from severe trauma. Triggers are often unique and unpredictable for each person. Significantly, the recommended treatment is careful, supervised exposure to desensitize the individual, not avoidance. Expanding the term to encompass a broad spectrum of human experience is both erroneous and counterproductive.
That said, the popularization of trigger warnings in American pulpits reflects compassionate intentions and decreased stigma around mental health - unequivocally positive cultural shifts. They represent an earnest effort to support trauma survivors by allowing them to avoid potentially retraumatizing content. But again, noble aims do not guarantee beneficial outcomes.
The data on trigger warnings is clear: at best, they offer negligible help in avoiding distress or improving comprehension; at worst, they intensify anticipatory anxiety and hinder recovery. They fail to reduce emotional distress and tend to keep individuals fixated on their stressor. Avoidance, while providing temporary relief, is an unsustainable long-term coping strategy that can exacerbate PTSD through sensitization. Trigger warnings also reinforce learned helplessness and an external locus of control, the opposite of cultivating resilience.
As Shelly Rambo observes in Resurrecting Wounds, trauma has become the "lingua franca of suffering" in our time, demanding both critical examination and an acknowledgment of why this language resonates so deeply. When preaching on texts of terror, then, how do we create space for healing and growth?
We propose the following strategies:
1. Be mindful of context and trust within the community. Consider the audience's readiness to engage with disturbing material and their awareness of each other's stories. Use that insight to help you understand a community’s preparation to engage disturbing biblical material.
2. Foster critical distance and engagement by inviting honest, even angry responses to biblical texts. Validate the horror depicted in the texts, and most especially if there are readers in your midst who have experienced similar forms of suffering. Grant clear permission for this as part of the healing journey. No responses are out of bounds. In service of these ends, we encourage leaders to draw upon biblical stories in which human beings argue with God (e.g., Gen 18:16-33; Exod 32:1-14; Matt 15:21-28). Stories such as these not only grant permission but encourage readers to think about themselves as crucial authors in the writing of their own stories.
3. Normalize mental health care within the church culture and ensure members know what support is available to them in the larger community.
4. Guide congregants in developing the capacity to wrestle with challenging texts and experiences rather than avoiding them wholesale. Acknowledge the reality of trauma while nurturing healing and resilience.
5. Utilize varied approaches like small group studies in partnership with mental health professionals to process troubling content with proper support.
Healing necessitates bravely encountering the "texts of terror" present both in scripture and in our own lives. As leaders, we don’t get to decide the pace at which people heal, but we have the ability to cultivate the context for it to happen over time and in its own way. Avoidance is never the goal.
By slowly and carefully building courageous, compassionate spaces to integrate these hard stories, we progress beyond shallow avoidance to a faith that embraces the depths of human experience. Through arduously, thoughtfully engaging the Bible's traumatic passages in the context of a loving community we can ultimately facilitate authentic post-traumatic growth and a more resilient faith.
Rabbi Shosh Dworsky is the Associate Chaplain for Jewish Life at St. Olaf College and the Associate Chaplain for Jewish and Interfaith Life at Carleton College.
Lisa Sethre-Hofstad, Ph.D.
Dr. Lisa Sethre-Hofstad has over 27 years of experience working in higher education as a faculty member and administrator at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. She brings a depth of background from the classroom as a psychology professor, and in both Academic Affairs and Student Affairs administration. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the northernmost university in the world, the University of Tromsø, in Tromsø, Norway.
The philosophical underpinning of her work is one that is student-focused, proactive, and holistic, leveraging her disciplinary expertise in human development, and actively resisting the deficit-based language commonly present in the current cultural narrative about today’s college students. She is passionate about transformational educational practices in higher education, gender equity, diversity and inclusion, and student development, and is actively engaged in the ongoing work of building partnerships across institutional divisions and offices to promote student achievement and success.
Dr. Sethre-Hofstad graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.A. from Concordia College, and earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Psychology from the University of New Mexico. She participated in the 2012-2013 Thrivent Fellows Program, an intensive leadership development program for Lutheran institutions, the 2016 HERS Summer Leadership Institute for Women in Higher Education, and in the 2019-2020 CIC Presidential Vocation and Mission program.
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