Traumatizers

what if we let survivors tell us if we've done enough?

In 2008, a movie was released called, Flight Plan. It starred Jodi Foster as a woman who has just lost her husband in Germany and is returning on a flight to New York with her young daughter. Her dead husband’s coffin is in the luggage hold of the airplane. During the flight, Foster drifts off to sleep and on waking up mid-flight, discovers her daughter has disappeared. She starts asking people where her daughter is and, as any parent would do, she makes a lot of noise trying to find her. The tension escalates when apparently no one else on the flight, passengers or crew, believe she boarded the plane with a daughter.

No one believes Foster. This increases the trauma for her. People in power threaten her to keep her quiet, to keep her from disturbing the other passengers, to keep her from causing some sort of incident. Foster, naturally, feels like she’s losing her grip on sanity. She feels isolated, helpless, devalued, powerless. Even the movie audience is meant to be skeptical of her claims. By 2008, we had all been “Sixth Sense”d by more than a few movies. Maybe, we were meant to think to ourselves, she’s seeing dead people. Everyone on the flight not only doubts Foster but is actively opposing her search for her daughter and her experience of reality.

Someone has perpetrated evil and no one seems to care. What matters is getting to New York with as much sleep and as little disturbance as possible.

But the persistence of a loving mother pays off and eventually the evil doer is uncovered, the little girl is rescued and the plane lands in New York with the perpetrator taken into custody. In the final scene, the pilot walks up to Foster who is holding her still unconscious daughter, and offers an apology while they are sit in a hangar with all of the other passengers waiting for the FBI to question them. Finally, Foster stands with her daughter in her arms and walks towards a waiting emergency vehicle. All the adults look down as Foster makes eye contact with them on the way out. A little girl’s voice can be heard in the background, “See! I TOLD you she had a little girl with her.”

Imagine all that tension that story creates. Imagine the turmoil and trauma that Foster’s character has been through. And imagine a second ending.

The pilot comes to Foster and mumbles the same weak apology. “Sorry,” he says, “some mistakes were made.” And instead of the obvious shame he is weighed down by in the movie, he smiles brightly and says, “But here are some plastic pilot wings from our airline for your daughter when she wakes up.” Imagine how trivializing that would be to her experience and her memories of what just happened. Imagine Foster’s character reacted with shock, anger, frustration or even just stony silence. And then one of the other passengers piped up, “Just say ‘thank you’!”

Imagine another passenger jumping in, “Yeah, come on, he said, ‘Sorry.’ What more do you want?” And another passenger offers, “He said mistakes were made. You need to just set you and your daughter free by forgiving all of us for not believing you.”

It would suck as a movie ending but it would be an accurate representation of how the Church has responded to the women and men who have come forward to make charges against church leaders for sexual abuse and clergy abuse.

If you are a part of a denomination, or a ministry, or a network of churches, in which brave women and men have come forward and filed civil and criminal charges, please know that they have spent a great deal of their lives not feeling believed about their experience. Feeling isolated, helpless, devalued, and powerless. They have been made, in overt and covert ways, to feel as though they are the bad person, the harm-bringer, the criminal.

But also know this – there’s a very good chance you’ve never heard the actual story (or ALL of the stories) of what happened to them because that’s what institutions do. They take charge of the narrative, and they bank on the reality that, frankly, most of us want to snooze through this flight. We don’t like a rocked boat. We don’t like tension around the family dinner table. We don’t want to have to reconcile our positive experience of the stewardess who brought me an extra Coke and smiled at me with the discovery that (spoilers) she’s also a conspiratorial kidnapper on a trans-Atlantic flight. Or, in our church case, we don’t want to have to reconcile in our minds the memory of a pastor or ministry leader who shared something good with us and the reality they’ve done very evil things to someone else.

We have to own that our sad attempts to placate survivors and mitigate the potential damage the public awareness of their stories might do to our institutions only adds to the trauma of survivors and their families. The hubris of our institutions is seen in the way in which we think we should be able to tell survivors what an adequate response to their trauma looks like. It’s only shameful pride that dares tell a survivor what their healing should look like or what their healing should take or what the boundaries are for telling their story and being public about the harm that has been done to them.

Recently, I’ve watched firsthand as the response of the institution of my former denomination compounded the harm and trauma already done to survivors of clergy abuse, including sexual abuse. Sadly, they are not unique. This is how institutions most often seem to work. I live in Southern Baptist country, and they’ve been in the news recently for the very same thing. We can go down the list of the high-profile pastors and ministry leaders who have made the news lately for incidents that span YEARS – because it’s very seldom just once. And in all those stories you can be sure there are survivors who are being told or who have been told that they must be exaggerating, or they must have done something to draw unwanted attention or perhaps have a grudge against the perpetrator. Survivors are questioned – “are you sure it wasn’t consensual?” “Could the contact between their hand and your breasts have just been an accident?” “Did you maybe encourage him to pursue you in some way?” And by the end, survivors can feel just like Jodi Foster’s character and start to wonder what reality they are living in.

John Wimber used to say that you don’t have to tell people that you’re a prophet if you’re a prophet. Or an apostle. Let other people decide that’s what you are and call you that if they want to, but don’t give yourself the title. I want to suggest the same thing with the term “trauma informed.” Don’t tell people you are trauma informed or tell people you have a certificate in being “trauma informed.” Instead, post testimonials from the survivors you know and have walked alongside and offer a space on your website or cv or podcast where they can offer a grade on how “trauma informed” they feel you are. The proof is, as usual, in what we do, not in what we say we do. I am weary of hearing even one more podcast by an institution talking about how trauma informed they’ve become while I am in ongoing conversations with abuse survivors of said institution who are feeling more traumatized than ever. We leave these women and men feeling isolated, ignored, re-violated and like they can never trust a church person again.

Our first obligation surely must be to those harmed rather than to our institutions and institutional heroes who have done the harm.