Writing Prayers and Processing Trauma

In my occupation I encounter trauma regularly. It could be walking into a hospital room and seeing a person’s broken body that is struggling for life. It could be sitting with a weeping wife as CPR is performed on her husband in the next room. It could be stepping into a room where fifteen family members surround the bed of the family matriarch as her breathing grows steadily more shallow and her pulse weakens until it is non-existent.

Your job might not bring you into regular contact with that sort of trauma but life being what it is there is a 100% chance you will experience trauma. It might be the sort of trauma the comes from a horrific collective experience witnessed through a screen like a terrorist attack or a mass shooting. It might be the loss of a relationship, job, or the death of a loved one. Trauma and loss are universal human experiences and our hyper connected world guarantees that you will be more exposed to traumatic events across the globe than in generations past. Plus, the 24 hour news cycle means that those events will be constantly in front of your eyeballs thus repeatedly exposing you to the trauma. Does anyone else have the images of people jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center on 9–11 permanently etched into their mind? Those images will never leave me.

With trauma being a universal human experience, it raises a question. How are you processing that trauma. For many, trauma raises religious questions. People cry out to God and wonder how such evil could happen. It’s a classic…