Trauma-Informed Spiritual Care: Interventions for Safety, Meaning, Reconnection, and Justice
Trauma pervades every part of human existence. From birth to death, there is no moment in which a human being is completely immune, with experts estimating that a majority of people will experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetime.
Danielle Tumminio Hansen offers a dynamic exploration of how trauma affects not just the physical and psychological lives of sufferers but also their spiritual well-being. Taking a feminist and intersectional approach, she considers how trauma challenges people both individually and collectively, while looking at tools spiritual caregivers can use to respond to it. Integrating theological wisdom with cutting-edge psychology, she offers targeted interventions to help trauma survivors restore their sense of safety, construct meaning, and reconnect with their communities. She also considers how restorative justice can be a tool to help trauma survivors voice their experiences and receive accountability in community.
Tummino Hansen constructs a crucial resource, at once searingly honest and hopeful, that belongs on the bookshelf of every pastor, chaplain, and faith leader.
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Danielle Tumminio Hansen is a professor of spiritual care at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She is a prominent researcher on the intersection of trauma, theology, and contemporary life, and is the author of multiple books, including Speaking of Rape and Conceiving Family.
This book meets many needs as a textbook for spiritual care courses and clinical training for chaplains and religious leaders in any tradition. It focuses on the unique ways that spiritual caregivers can use a narrative approach to trauma care based upon Judith Herman's time-honored process of helping survivors practice safety, remembrance, mourning, and meaning-making. Its accessible language builds upon scholarship in pastoral care and research about the impact of trauma on the body and spiritual struggles. It describes a step-by-step approach that caregivers will want to return to over and over again in spiritual care of trauma. --Carrie Doehring, Clifford Baldridge Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling, Iliff School of Theology
The day before I opened Trauma-Informed Spiritual Care, I replayed the traumatic last minutes of my father's life, and grief took up residence in my heart. Danielle Tumminio Hansen's book gave me new language to reconnect with self, life-giving rituals to mourn, and theoretical frameworks to salve my healing wound. For this resource that moved me from head to heart, I am grateful. I give thanks that care seekers, therapists, and spiritual caregivers who pick up this book will take a similar journey. --Gregory C. Ellison II, executive director of Fearless Dialogues, and associate professor of transformative leadership and communal care, Emory University's Candler School of Theology
Trauma-Informed Spiritual Care is an insightful, readable, and practical text that provides deep wisdom through accessible prose. Danielle Tumminio Hansen has written a gem of a book, ideal for courses on spiritual care, for CPE reading lists, for chaplains, religious and lay leaders, and others who seek to expand their capacity for spiritual care. Her invitational narrative style and easeful integration of theory and practice offer examples and case studies, activities and diagrams to help readers understand the effects of trauma and how spiritual care can support the journey to healing and justice. --Pamela R. McCarroll, Jane and Geoffrey Martin Chair in Practical Theology, Emmanuel College, Victoria University in the University of Toronto
This is a much-needed, deeply informed, accessible resource for guiding spiritual care providers privileged to walk beside survivors of trauma. Tumminio Hansen skillfully interweaves theoretical and clinical guidance that chaplains and parish clergy alike will be able to engage and employ. Importantly, she illustrates how experiences of embedded oppression, such as racism and sexism, amplify other forms of trauma and must inform practices of restorative justice and care. I highly commend this resource for MDiv and DMin classrooms and for ACPE, VA, and military chaplaincy training programs. --Nancy J. Ramsay, director of the Soul Repair Center, and professor emerita of pastoral theology and care, Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth, Texas
