Faith-Based Trauma Counseling: A Pastoral Guide to Healing Wounded Hearts (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798182389914)

A man came to a pastor's office one afternoon. He was a strong man who had served his country, raised his children, and led his business through storms most people never face. He sat down, looked at the floor for a long time, and said, Pastor, I do not know why I cannot sleep anymore.

That is where the story begins. Behind that sentence was a wound. Behind the wound was another wound, older and deeper, that he had never spoken to anyone.

Trauma is not a weakness. Trauma is not a lack of faith. Trauma is the way a person who survived something terrible keeps surviving long after the danger has passed. Memory resides within the body. The mind remembers. The spirit holds onto memories. And the church, the very place where most people first cry out for help, has not always known what to do with pain so heavy.

Faith-Based Trauma Counseling: A Pastoral Guide to Healing Wounded Hearts was written to change that reality.

Dr. Alexander L. Redd is a Liberian-born pastor, theologian, and counseling psychologist who has sat in pulpits, hospital rooms, prison waiting areas, and kitchen tables where the coffee grew cold while someone tried to find words for pain. In every one of those rooms, he brought together the best of what Scripture teaches and what trauma research has proven, not to water one down for the other, but to let both serve the wounded together.

The pages ahead are for pastors who want to know what to say when a widow tells them she cannot sing anymore. They are for counselors who walk with survivors of war, abuse, grief, betrayal, and spiritual harm. They are for lay leaders sitting in small groups with people carrying wounds they have never spoken aloud. And they are for anyone who has ever, where is God in my pain?

You will learn what trauma does to the body, the mind, and the spirit. You will read about lament, that ancient and honest language the church has largely forgotten, and how to use that language with the people you serve. You will walk through the story of Job, who lost everything and refused to lose his honesty before God. You will find practical tools held together by the conviction that Scripture is the most trustworthy anchor a wounded soul can hold.

Dr. Redd speaks honestly to the caregiver as well, because the people who carry the wounded carry wounds of their own. He casts a vision of the local church as a trauma-informed community where grief is welcome in the worship service, hard questions are welcome in the small group, and the wounded find a table already set for them.

No quick fixes live in these pages. No five-step program. But honest answers do. And so does hope, not the brittle kind that shatters when outcomes go wrong, but the resurrection kind, anchored in a Savior who was wounded, who wept, and who still came out of the darkness alive.

The wounded deserve a church that is ready for them. Dr. Redd will help you become that church.