Through Dangerous Terrain: A Guide for Trauma-Sensitive Pastoral Leadership in Times of Threat

By Jennifer Baldwin

When times of threat and uncertainty come, it can be challenging to know what to do or how to help. Through Dangerous Terrain provides a guide and map for how to understand the human threat-response system, how we connect in times of safety, and how to provide wise and informed leadership during and after threat or trauma events. Though it is written in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and offers some reflections particular to the viral pandemic, it can be applied to any experience of personal or societal threat. When we can more fully understand how human physiology detects threats and seeks safety, we can mobilize the gifts of our religious and spiritual traditions and communities to offer the community care that is essential for health and outside the purview of traditional therapeutic contexts. This book offers key insights from leading trauma care models (Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing, and Polyvagal Theory), neuroscience, and pastoral care to help religious and spiritual community leaders offer informed care, hope, and support in the face of threat and trauma.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Dec 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781725276871

Jennifer Baldwin

Jennifer Baldwin is Executive Director of Grounding Flight Wellness Center. She is the editor of Sensing Sacred: Exploring the Human Senses in Practical Theology and Pastoral Care (2016) and Embracing the Ivory Tower and Stained Glass Window: A Festschrift in Honor of Archbishop Antje Jackelén (2015).

Book preview

Introduction

Every book is written in a particular context—a time and place that shape our questions, our motivations for writing, and the answers we seek. This book is written in the first three months of the 2019 – 20 coronavirus pandemic. One of the challenges in writing in the midst of a global event is the inherent ambiguity of building the proverbial plane while it’s in the air. While I have a socially located sense of how this global event is impacting my location, I don’t have clarity on how it will unfold, how individuals, societies, or nations will respond in the long run, or how it will come to some kind of end or stasis. I started this introduction in March, reflecting on the beginnings of an exponential growth curve; now, just two months later, the number of confirmed cases at that time feels almost quaint. Likewise, I fear that when this book reaches your hands, the 4 . 8 million confirmed global cases (which feels so profound at this moment) may appear small in comparison in the too near future. Additionally, in just a few months, I have experienced my community move through affective responses of minimization of the threat, panic, adherence to public health mandates, fatigue, dismissal of public health recommendations, and lackadaisical approaches to protective behaviors like physical distancing and wearing masks. In many ways, it feels like time has slowed as we moved through shelter-in-place orders while our affective or emotional responses have moved more quickly. The combination of the distortions in our felt sense of the passing of time, the rapid cycling of affective and behavioral responses, and the ambiguity and uncertainty of what the near future (weeks, months, seasons, year) will look like in terms of daily life, social engagements, and educational and professional pursuits can certainly muddy the waters of our vision and plans.

While the individual features of uncertainty and grief for the loss of a way of life are not unique to this particular time and challenge, there have been remarkably few events that have impacted our global society so fully and quickly. In other experiences of threat or trauma, the primary impact of the event or experience is circumscribed to particular persons (e.g., car accidents, domestic violence, child abuse), families (e.g., domestic violence, sudden death, financial loss, divorce), communities (war veterans, community violence, natural disasters, systemic oppression), or nations (terrorism, war, economic depression). One of the unique features of the current viral pandemic is its global impact on public health, economic vitality, personal mobility, etc. No one is exempt from its effects. While each of us may experience different features of the pandemic to differing intensities based on our personal social location and resources, this threat has waves that affect all human beings and extend (positively or negatively) into the lives of nonhuman beings. This global threat event is leaving no area untouched and places us all in the midst of the same storm—there is no privileged position of the bystander.

The viral pandemic is a novel threat and differs from past viral outbreaks like Ebola, SARS, and MERS due to the scope of its impact; however, it also differs from other forms of threat like natural disasters, car accidents, or interpersonal violence in its invisibility. Psychologically, physiologically, and behaviorally, we are well equipped to avert threats we can see or sense. If we see a person shooting a gun in a threatening manner, we can hear the gun shots and take action to escape or duck for cover. If we track a hurricane coming toward our area, we can board up our windows and evacuate. When we encounter threats of interpersonal violence, we learn the cues of risk and take the actions—even if it is the action of freeze—to best shield ourselves from the full impact of the violence of the other. The challenge this viral mass threat generates is how to take protective measures against an invisible entity whose effects one recognizes only days or weeks after being exposed to it, if at all—for as we know, some of those infected may be vectors of transmission but remain asymptomatic. How do we respond to the invisible threat when our behavioral threat responses are geared toward threats that are detected through our external senses? When we are unable to externally detect threat, we can only look to our social and interpersonal connections for cues of safety or threat.

Human beings are fundamentally social creatures. Humanity’s sociality is both one of our richest strengths and most fragile vulnerabilities. At every phase in our development and at every level of our autonomic assessment of safety and threat, we intuitively and subcortically look to the others in our midst for signs that things are okay or not okay. We are not really all that different from the adorable and brilliant meerkats who have an intricate set of calls to alert each other to the presence of a predator and its proximity to the family. As a threat approaches and is spotted by the first member of the community, they utter an alert to the others to stand up and be vigilant. If the threat gets closer, the call shifts in tone to indicate greater urgency. Finally, if the threat does not recede, the call is issued for all members to seek shelter in the safety of their home burrows. Likewise, all mammals, including humans, have a built-in system for assessing safety or danger, in part based on the behavior of our fellow species mates. Some of the behavioral cues we use are explicit, verbal, concrete; others are implicit, subtle, and nearly imperceptible to our awareness. These subtle, nearly invisible cues are often the most powerful precisely because they function outside of our conscious awareness. They are often the visceral cues that inform our intuition, gut instincts, or spidey senses. They are the things we somehow know without really (cognitively) knowing. Throughout our life we are always assessing our degree of safety in part through subcortically attending to our social and relational cues. These cues can ease our hearts or set our nerves on edge.

Experiences of threat will induce protective responses. How each of us responds to specific moments during times of threat is the hybridization of a predictable series of behavioral protective responses and our individual prior experiences of which strategies effectively restored safety and which failed to adequately restore safety. When we are able to understand the progressive dynamics of protective behaviors and recognize their features in our own being and in those we care for, we are better able to orient ourselves to the challenges we face and return to resiliency and rest when the threat passes. Some of the ways we respond to stress and threat are pretty clearly identified in our popular discourse and general awareness. Most of us already know to be on the lookout for irritation, exhaustion, insomnia, eating too much or too little, lack of motivation, etc. However, some indicators are less well known or more difficult to identify. For instance, the feeling of getting numbed out, going into autopilot, or having a foggy head in stores and buying things we don’t need (or failing to buy the things we do) can be a sign of a behavioral threat response. Likewise, having a lot of motivation one day and then feeling totally unmotivated and finding it difficult to get out of bed or off the couch the next can be a sign of bouncing between two distinct threat responses. When we can map our protective responses in real time, we are more equipped to know how best to care for our self.

The importance and value of knowing our protective responses to threat is essential for us as individuals. It becomes even more vital when we are in positions of caring for others. As parents, care providers, or community leaders, we have accepted roles of responsibility to care, lead, and provide understanding and perspective. One of the most rewarding, unique, and supportive ways we can do this is through informed practices of co-regulation. Co-regulation is a capacity available to all mammals to look to one another for cues of safety or threat and to support each other in seeking safety and restoring resiliency. Hugs, caring eye contact, soothing vocal tones, gentle appropriate touch, and safe proximity of bodies are all common forms of human co-regulation. When we can utilize our presence and practices of co-regulation in alignment with an understanding and recognition of human threat responses, we can help those we care for to recognize, without adding judgment or shame, the ways in which they acted to facilitate their survival and offer the supportive care that matches their current level of threat response and activation.

While we are all participant survivors of the viral pandemic to some degree, there is and will be a wide range of how this global threat will impact us. Some of us will lose our life, health, or the lives of loved ones. Others will experience the shuttering of small businesses built with their blood, sweat, and tears. Many will survive financial hardship and loss of employment. All of us will grieve the loss of hoped-for plans, celebrations, rituals, and community connections. As we individually and collectively cycle through the emotions and accompanying body sensations of despair, hope, grief, gratitude, uncertainty, frustration, relief, and worry, we all carry within and among us both our resources for safety and resiliency as well as our conscious and subconscious assessments of threat. While not all experiences of threat will result in the generation of trauma responses, all experiences of threat, by definition, include stress and corresponding behaviors to mitigate the potential harm. Some of our experiences of and responses to threat may show up in ways that are relatively simple to recognize and resolve, while other responses may surprise us or fall beyond the ways that we already know work toward our self-care.

Experiences of threat are not inherently traumatizing. Threat experiences are a nearly unavoidable feature