A ‘laboratory of love’
The Rev. Liz Walker discusses the help trauma victims can receive from folks who will sit with them and just listen
LOUISVILLE — PC(USA) pastor and former Boston television news anchor the Rev. Liz Walker presented what she’s learned from a community of trauma victims during last week’s episode of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to Walker’s 51-minute conversation with podcast hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe here.
In her recent book “No One Left Alone: A Story of How Community Helps Us Heal,” Walker, the former pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church in Boston, discusses the “Can We Talk? Community Conversations on Trauma and Healing” gatherings that go on at Roxbury Presbyterian Church and 20 other locations. People come to briefly share their stories around trauma, then sit down and listen to other stories.
When Walker began her pastorate at Roxbury Presbyterian Church, “the neighborhood was in the midst of a gang war. Our church wanted to do something more than the usual [advocacy for] improved policies or the allocation of funds,” she said. Church leaders decided to focus on “people in pain: people who had lost loved ones to gun violence, and people who sometimes commit violence.”
Some of the research they conducted uncovered “this notion of collective trauma: an entire community could be victimized by any violent act,” Walker said. “We usually think of war or natural disaster, but we saw this in our community.”
“The way we decided to deal with it was to invite people to the basement of the church — lots of good things happen in church basements — to talk about their pain, their experiences, their trauma, their violence, but to talk about it from an emotional standpoint, not to talk about it to fix it,” she said. “We’ve learned over the past 10 years that story sharing helps people feel not so alone, to process the pain they are in, and ultimately can heal a community — not heal in the sense of fixing things or resolving these issues, but healing in the sense of bringing people together and finding ways to work with each other.”
She described the community transformation that occurred as “soft transformation, that person-to-person transformation. It’s something I believe the church absolutely is primed to do.”
Catoe noted we sometimes downplay how valuable storytelling can be “because we want to see change happen with the snap of the fingers. Storytelling is therapeutic and it uncovers a lot of things we might not understand,” including “a nuance for how someone got to where they are.” He asked Walker about how people’s stories have enlightened the community.
The story sharing program began with a death in the church. A young member died as a result of gun violence in the neighborhood. He was out with his half-brother near his home when they were caught in a shooting.
When the young man was killed, “his family was devastated, as were his neighbors,” Walker said. “The church comes alongside the family and does the best it can to support this family. There’s a funeral, and we come over and sit with the family. But then we leave, and the world moves on — but the family is stuck in that moment of trauma. There are victim support groups, but there is always an expiration date on the support of families of homicide. The pain doesn’t go away.”
As she’s listened to people’s stories, “what I have learned is grief is a rollercoaster. Trauma can happen over and over again,” Walker said. This young man’s mother, a deacon and a leader in the church, “had already dealt with the funerals of lots of other people, but had never experienced anything like this.”
“She didn’t say she felt like God had deserted her, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with God,” Walker said. “That’s what we know about trauma: you disconnect from your neighbors, from yourself, and from your higher power, from God. That’s a bad place to be lost in, and it’s an isolating place to be lost in.”
“We have made the road as we’ve walked it, in many ways,” Walker told the hosts. “We’ve realized our nation is now full of traumatized people for all kinds of reasons. By sharing your story, you start breaking out of that stuck place.”
Doong pointed out that sharing one’s story “is not going to change the fact that a loved one is gone or that someone has experienced something very tragic.” But story sharing “does allow someone to feel heard and to feel connected, and sometimes that’s worth its weight in gold, even when it’s not something you can measure.”
Walker said they’ve also learned how trauma is compounded. “You may have had something that happened to you 20 years ago and you never dealt with it. Then something else happens or you hear someone’s story, and it puts you in touch with that thing that happened to you.”
It’s not about comparing trauma, she said. “We have people who come in and grieve natural deaths. We have people who come in and grieve the loss of a job and divorce and moves. It becomes a repository where people know they are in a safe space and can talk about what hurts them.”
It's not a conversation, she told the hosts. People get three or four minutes to tell “a little bit of their story,” and then they sit down. There’s no response. “We don’t want to put people in a position where someone’s trying to fix them,” she said. She called the core of pain and trauma and suffering “sacred ground. That’s how change happens and healing happens. Speaking your painful truth is much more powerful than you think. A basic part of it is someone else gets to hear it and doesn’t feel like they’re so alone.”
There’s “all kinds of research” on how stress from trauma can lead to diabetes, high blood pressure and heart attacks. “What I want people to understand is, poverty can cause trauma, but I don’t think trauma is limited to an economic or racial level. Trauma crosses all kinds of boundaries.”
The church can make a difference because “it’s an institution that still holds its sacredness and it’s an institution that’s trusted,” Walker said, adding that some churches must work on the stigma over people sharing their mental health struggles. “We’ve got to change our attitude,” she said. “The church can be so forceful in helping all of us heal. I think the church is a big frontier for change.”
Some people will come to the “Can We Talk?” sessions for months without saying anything. Others attend one time, share “and they never come back. I like to think of it as the Alcoholics Anonymous model for trauma. It’s open to anybody and it’s not proselytizing. It’s a safe space.”
Her book describes the program and includes “the lessons we’ve learned. It’s about figuring out ways to supplement what we do as people of God,” she said. “It’s a laboratory of love.”
Doong summed the work up this way: “It’s amazing what the power of sharing and listening can do for one’s soul, one’s mental health and one’s body.”
New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.
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