Stephen Barkley
The last few years have been traumatizing. Karen A. McClintock notes that these years include “millions of worldwide deaths and lockdowns due to the pandemic; job losses; food insecurity and houselessness on massive scales; exposed racial injustices; political and social unrest” (1) Add to this increasing natural disasters—wildfires, hurricanes, and tornado, and you have a growing number of traumatized people.
Circumstances like these call for pastors who understand trauma and how to care for those suffering from trauma while protecting themselves. McClintock’s book is an excellent primer to this field. She suggests that clergy adopt the principles of trauma-informed care written by the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration known as “The Four Rs of Trauma-Informed Care” (16):
- Realize trauma’s impact on individuals and groups
- Recognize the signs and symptoms of trauma.
- Respond to trauma with supportive services.
- Resist retraumatization by creating safe, supportive, and collaborative partnerships with victims/survivors.
McClintock covers many areas of trauma-informed care that pastors must be aware of—secondary trauma, retraumatization, and trauma transference, to name a few. Throughout Trauma-Informed Pastoral Care, McClintock instructs readers to be aware of their own physiological condition as they examine traumatic situations. She offers many meditation and breathing strategies to help mitigate the somatic impact of trauma.
There is a tension in pastoral care. On the one hand, pastors are (usually) not trained as professional psychotherapists and should certainly not dabble in it—people’s lives are at stake! On the other hand, pastors are often first-responders, arriving on the scene when trauma sets in. Pastors arrive at accident scenes, hospitals, and family breakups. Pastors should absolutely learn the basics of trauma-informed care in order to avoid causing greater harm as they offer crisis care and refer deeper psychological issues to the experts.
McClintock, Karen A. Trauma-Informed Pastoral Care: How to Respond When Things Fall Apart. Fortress Press, 2022.
