Experiencing a traumatic event can be utterly life-altering. Whether it’s surviving a natural disaster, living through war, or enduring abuse, trauma forces us to confront our lack of control in an uncaring world. The path to healing trauma’s deep wounds winds through the valley of the shadow of death. We need all the help we can get to take the first steps. For many, prayer provides a source of strength to begin that journey. Through prayer, we open our hearts to God and to the possibility of growth after grief.
The Struggle to Recover After Trauma
The mind protectively walls off traumatic memories. Their intensity threatens to re-traumatize. Venturing out from behind those walls means risking being overwhelmed. Early on, our main struggle is finding the courage to face what hurt us. The cold truth steals the vitality we need to heal. By turning to prayer, though, we invite boundless compassion into our lives. With God’s help, flashes of insight eventually penetrate the darkness shrouding our distress. When integrated with care, those insights loosen trauma’s grip. But without daily renewed strength, hope fades all too easily.
What Prayer Offers
- Invites God’s nurturing presence into suffering
- Allows safely engaging traumatic memories
- Receives comfort from scripture and devotion
- Gains reassurance through spiritual practices
Barriers to Healing
- Difficulty feeling or naming emotions
- Overwhelming memories and flashbacks
- Withdrawing from community and relationships
- Loss of sense of order, justice and control
As we contend with these formidable barriers, prayer provides a lifeline. Through prayer, we cry out to God from our deepest places of need.
Old Testament Examples of Prayer amid Affliction
Scripture testifies to prayer’s power for restoring the traumatized. After being sold into slavery by his brothers, Joseph persevered through dire trials before rising to rule Egypt. When reconciling with his brothers years later, Joseph highlighted God’s presence in his ordeal, saying “Even though you intended me harm, God intended it for good” (Gen 50:20). Having endured unjust treatment, Joseph grounded his resilience in trust that God could redeem even abusive harm.
Similarly, after the destruction of Jerusalem, the Psalmist lamented:
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion…How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1, 4)
Even in exile, the Psalmist cried out to God. Divine love offered the possibility of singing again, even in agony’s grip. When trauma strips life of meaning, prayer keeps our hearts receptive to glimmers of significance.
Prayer as a Practice Promoting Resilience
By repeatedly voicing pain and invoking blessings, prayer cultivates resilience from trauma. Consider the element of prayer:
Praise
Praise confesses God’s bigness despite suffering’s intensity. Trauma confronts us with the awful magnitude of what we’ve endured. But declaring “God is greater than this” asserts hope.
Remembrance
Bringing traumatic memories to prayer makes them more bearable. Voicing distress while held by God’s presence feels less overwhelming than struggling alone.
Awareness
Prayerful awareness lets us investigate trauma’s legacy within us. Where is the injury lodged in our bodies and spirits? Gentle attention, with God as witness, fosters self-compassion.
Petition
Through petition, we voice longing for consolation and justice. Naming specific hopes gives direction to the healing journey. Petition declutters trauma’s aftermath by articulating precisely what we need.
Yielding
Finally, prayer involves yieldedness—surrendering control to God’s care. Trauma confronts us with how little control we actually have. But yielding cultivates radical trust that God holds and keeps us.
By engaging each of these elements, prayer synthesizes trauma’s fragments into an integrated narrative. Integrating memories into coherency defuses their damaging intensity. In prayer, we dialogue with God about what we’re undergoing. And we hear God speak hope into despair—glimpsing light seeping through cracks.
Praying the Psalms to Voice Distress
The Psalmists excel at pouring out anguish to God. They freely voice betrayal, rage and confusion. Because the Psalms express such visceral trauma, praying them ushers our pain into God’s compassionate presence. The Psalms assure us that no sorrow lies beyond God’s care. Consider Psalm 13:1-2:
How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
This Psalms models raw lament before God. There’s no attempt to censor intensity. God invites our full humanity, with all its brokenness, into the divine embrace.
We see hope glimmering in Psalm 34:18:
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
Here, distress becomes an opening for encountering God’s nearness. Heartbreak initiates further intimacy, not divine distance. God stands ready to infuse hope into trauma’s void.
Overall, the Psalms assure us we can freely voice anger, grief or exhaustion to God without fear of judgment. Through prayer, divine love absorbs, sanctifies and transforms our distress.
Prayers from Spiritual Traditions
Across traditions, fixed prayers provide pathways for trauma’s tears to fall before God. Consider this prayer from the Catholic “Chaplet of Tears” devotion:
O Jesus, console me now, comfort my heart during all the time of my life, and especially at the hour of my death. O Joyful Host, intercede for me always!
By invoking Jesus’ presence amid trauma, this prayer cultivates trust that God hears our weeping. It envisions Christ welcoming our tearful hearts into paradise fully healed of agony.
Similarly, Eastern Orthodox “Jesus prayers” declare:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Praying these words reconnects us to the loving gaze of Christ. Jesus looks with mercy not contempt upon our guilt and woundedness. Bathed in divine compassion, trauma’s burdens begin falling away.
Across traditions – from Pentecostal spontaneous singing to Sufi mystics invoking Allah – fixed prayers accompany suffering people into God’s embrace. The words differ but the loving intent remains: summoning divine nurture to soothe and restore the traumatized.
Support for the Journey
Prayer offers needed sustenance for resilience after trauma. But prayer works best alongside other healing practices:
- Psychotherapy to integrate memories into narrative
- Support groups to overcome isolation
- Body-awareness to discharge trauma physically
- Journaling to explore emotional landscapes
- Creativity to symbolize meaning amid chaos
- Forgiveness as a way to relinquish bitterness
Prayer in isolation risks being overwhelmed by pain. But combined with skilled care, prayer invokes untapped inner strengths. Forging resilience in community, we realize we don’t recover alone.
A Closing Prayer
May God’s breath blow healing into places of deadness.
May Christ’s light illuminate hope in despair’s darkness.
May the Spirit gather people into places of sanctuary.
May love ease pain into pools of peace.
May prayers voice lament until comfort comes.