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CONTEXTS & CULTURES

Moving Identity beyond Story:
Spiritual Journeying with Trauma Survivors
Margaret F. Arms
I

used to believe our stories define our identity and that tradition we claim as our spiritual home, which nation
we are what we have experienced. It took me a long claims our cultural identity, which political party identi-
time to realize that there is a “we” who experiences fies our social and political selves, and which race defines
and lives our stories, a “we” who is more than the our racial identity.
For spiritual directees who have experienced trauma,
stories and experiences themselves. The implications
of this awareness have been profound in my work however, the traumatic experience frequently becomes
as a spiritual director—with all my spiritual seekers, but the overriding identity by which they experience the
especially with those who are trauma survivors.(In this article, totality of self and soul and spiritual being. In the case of

at times I will use the phrase “traumatized spiritual directees” childhood abuse, the identification of self with the abuse
or “traumatized spiritual seekers.”) I have discovered that as can be a superglue bond. In short, traumatized spiritual
traumatized spiritual directees disengage their identity from seekers often have little sense of a self beyond their story.
their stories, they have been able to clear space in their souls They have a hard time imagining or experiencing them-
to see the Divine at work in their lives, in their world, and selves as more than their story. They are, in their under-
perhaps as importantly, in themselves. standing, what happened to them, and furthermore,
God was nowhere to be found in the midst of it. Not
Stories are not unimportant; indeed, they are an essen- only was God not there then, God has little if anything
tial part of our experience as humans. They tell a great to do with them now. In their understanding, God did
deal about what we have lived and done, and what has not care about them. Some traumatized spiritual seekers
been done to us. They tell us of family and culture, of may see that God exists within others and cares for oth-
values and worldviews. Our stories, the remembrance and ers, but they think God abandoned them—or worse that
retelling of them, say much about belonging. Stories and God thought what happened was appropriate because
experiences are, in a sense, the crucibles in which “who they were so bad.
we are” lives. At best, our story home is what the poet Many years ago, a woman came to me with a history
David Whyte calls the “House of Belonging” into which of horrific childhood abuse. When I asked her to describe
we invite loved ones to abide for a season or a lifetime. herself, she said she was a despicable, filthy, disgusting,
These story homes, these houses of belonging, welcome ugly little girl frozen and encased in a block of ice. She was
and nourish the growth of our psyches, bodies, and souls. so tied to her traumatic experiences that her identity was
At worst, our story homes become prisons that shackle, literally frozen in her story. When I asked where God was
entrap, and shrivel our psyches and souls. Sometimes our in that experience, she said God loved everyone and would
story homes can harm us to the point where we can no like to love her but she was too ugly and evil for him (and
longer survive. In either case—nourishing or crippling— God was definitely a “he” for her) to love, however much
story homes can become the ground of mistaken identity. God might wish to love her. Other spiritual directees have
Our story homes are important, but they do not tell us described similarly bleak images of self, such as being
who we are at core. We misunderstand the role of these encased in mud that could not be washed off or as a tiny
story homes when we mistakenly believe, consciously or black dot.
not, that we are our story homes. As a spiritual director, I listen for the work of God in
the lives of wounded souls who come in search of spiritual
The Spiritual Block of Self as Story healing and connection. I listen as my spiritual directees
To some extent, we all identify ourselves with our sto- struggle with issues of forgiveness, of suffering, of God’s
ries: We experience ourselves as what we do and what has providence in their lives, of images of God distorted
happened to us. We think our identity lies in which faith by traumatic experiences, and of the basic questions of
“Cataclysm” — Mary Southard
Volume 20 No. 3 • September 2014 49