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Trauma

19 May 2023

6 min read

What to do when life interupts

Mental Health Week acknowledges the many traumas and interruptions in life, notes clinical psychologist Roger Bretherton - who analyses how we might respond to them.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

A blurred exposure of a person under a hood turning their head to the side.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash.

For over a decade I worked, as a Clinical Psychologist in a service treating people who had suffered trauma. I clocked just under ten thousand hours of clinical contact with people who had been through the worst situations imaginable. One thing I learned during that time is that trauma often occurs to us as an interruption.

Most of us live our lives to some script, a set of assumptions of how we think things should be, our expectations of what is about to happen next - and trauma shatters those assumptions. Over and over again, people who had been through trauma told me how their view of the world had been violated. The narrative that defined their life, the story they thought they were in, changed genre unexpectedly. The romcom became a horror movie; the adventure became a hideous farce. The story called walking home at night turned into another one called being mugged. Driving to the supermarket became, having a crash. A day out at the beach, became delivering CPR. All of them illustrate how trauma sends an earthquake through our view of what we thought our lives were and, if we survive, leaves us in the rubble picking up the pieces.

In one fell swoop it gave an insight into why it is that trauma occurs to us, not just as an event or a set of events, but as an interruption to our whole sense of reality.

Back in the early days of researching AI systems one study illustrated the catastrophic effect that even the mildest contradiction of our expectations can have on our entire view of reality.

In the quaint old days, when Chat GPT was a nightmare for a future generation, an expert system was developed with one simple aim in mind: to identify birds. Such a simple task. The specifications of various species of animal were entered and, by applying a broad array of criteria, the system would indicate whether the said species was a bird (or not). But not all its criteria were accurate. One of the rules of thumb the system developed was: ‘all birds fly’. Which worked fine until it was required to categorize a penguin. In the first attempt it followed its own rules and concluded that penguins were not birds. But when forced by the programmers to categorize a penguin as a bird, the system went into meltdown attempting to reconcile the contradiction with its own criteria. To resolve the anomaly of the penguin being flightless and yet still being a bird, it concluded that no birds could fly. In one fell swoop it gave an insight into why it is that trauma occurs to us, not just as an event or a set of events, but as an interruption to our whole sense of reality.

The nightmares, the flashbacks, the apprehension, irritation and sense of foreboding, the numbing and the terror. All of these are an attempt to make sense of a world that no longer makes sense. Of course, it would be heartless to suggest that the agony of trauma is little more than a glitch in our information processing. Reducing it to a bug in our programming would conveniently trivialise the horrors that can befall human beings. I have no desire to sanitise or diminish the horrors that can haunt us, but trauma is at least this - a hiatus, a shock, an interruption.

The agony that intensifies our fears, depressions and compulsions is often the torturous comparison between who we thought we were and who we have become.

It is not just trauma that interrupts us. Life specialises in throwing wildcards and anomalies into our path. Just when everything seems to be going swimmingly, when we seem to know what we are doing, when the future seems mapped out before us, the unexpected and the unwelcome occurs. The best way to make God laugh, goes the saying, is to hand Him our five-year plan. I’m not sure I have ever spoken to anyone with insight into their own psychological distress who doesn’t to some extent experience their pain as an interruption. The agony that intensifies our fears, depressions and compulsions is often the torturous comparison between who we thought we were and who we have become. Our imaginary ideal self, the person we thought we would be, waltzes away into a future of freedom, light and joy, and leaves us behind in doubt and uncertainty.

Mental Health Week could in some ways be viewed as an acknowledgement of the interruptions in life. I can only imagine what has interrupted you. I can only hazard a guess at what it is or was that derailed the smooth trajectory of your predicted life. Was it bereavement or aging, sickness or betrayal, disappointment or assault, redundancy or financial ruin? Whatever it was, it may not be reversible. This is one of the reasons for the burgeoning of mindfulness practices in mental health treatment. We don’t just need a technology of change to help us get better, we equally need a technology of acceptance to be able to live with what we cannot change.

I’ve lost the ability to firmly believe that the future can be planned out, that the straight line into the next few years cannot be shattered without warning at any moment.

For me, the lockdown was an interruption from which I have never really recovered. I hesitate to say this because I worry I might be the only person who feels this way. I know it’s all supposed to be over. We’re back to work and acting like the world is rational and predictable again. But the great reset just doesn’t work for me. My mind is ready to go, but my heart just hasn’t got the memo. I’ve lost the ability to firmly believe that the future can be planned out, that the straight line into the next few years cannot be shattered without warning at any moment. There is a hesitancy in all my plans, an uncertainty in my ambitions. The solid arrow of time is dotted, if not broken. Experts in trauma call it the sense of a foreshortened future. The disruption of our capacity to self-transcend, to bridge ourselves towards the person we may become. Our once lucid image of a better self flickers and grows dim, no longer compelling or believable.

And if that’s not confession enough, I have another one. One that makes me sound like a rehab resident in a young adult drama. In the midst of the lockdown craziness, I was forced to slowly and reluctantly uncover a gift. Like a treasure buried in a field, or a priceless pearl concealed among the worthless tat of a car boot sale. Something so crashingly obvious and cringeworthily twee that I can hardly bear to put it in writing. Many of my plans and ambitions were imaginary, just plain illusion. I was no happier achieving them than I was pursuing them. But I started to glimpse, that if I could overcome the grief of losing them, I would be better off without them. If I could put words to it, I would say that I came to a deeper appreciation of grace – iit’s not a bad thing just to be. We can be so busy trying to become something that we fail to notice that we were before we even began. This has now become a daily contemplative practice for me. I call it being present to The Presence in the present. Somehow, I came to a deep inner settlement that I no longer needed to work to justify my existence, but could work out of a present moment in which my existence was already justified. I came to accept acceptance.

The bold museum reflecting a “moonlight” experience of the unseeable

Robert Wright visits the UK's only Faith Museum, in Bishop Auckland, and hears how its funder hopes to inspire reflection on the divine.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A art installaton showing purple and pink flame-like shapes moving in a darkened room

The Eidolon art installation.

It takes a moment to grow accustomed to walking in the dark of the long, steeply roofed room that houses Mat Collishaw’s art installation Eidolon. But the artwork’s impact is immediate. Two huge, moving images in the middle of the room show a blue iris flower. It is being engulfed by flames but not consumed. Speakers play, in Latin, a story from the Hebrew bible’s Book of Daniel in which three young Jewish men survive being thrown into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship the Babylonian king. The artwork is a rare successful attempt to capture in modern art the essence of Christ’s crucifixion and the Christian tradition of martyrdom, with its roots in earlier Jewish beliefs.

Watch Eidolon

Eidolon is one of the highlights of the UK’s first Faith Museum, a bold project opened on October 7 in Bishop Auckland castle, the historic residence of the Bishops of Durham. The museum forms part of The Auckland Project, a series of initiatives in Bishop Auckland, north-west of Darlington, being funded by Jonathan Ruffer, a Christian and successful City investor. Ruffer’s childhood home was outside nearby Middlesbrough. The new institution aims to tell the story of 6,000 years of faith in Great Britain, starting with the Gainford cup and ring stone. The stone, found 90 years ago 10 miles from Bishop Auckland, may date from as early as 4,000BCE. It features carvings regarded as the earliest evidence of religious practice in Great Britain.

Jonathan Ruffer.

A man stands in a formal dining room that has traditional paintings on the walls

Jonathan Ruffer, in Bishop Auckland Castle.

Ruffer, however, declines to link the museum’s contents to his own faith or an explicitly Christian message. He insists that he is merely seeking to advance discussion of faith in a society where it is little debated but remains a potent force. In the living room of Castle Lodge, his home in the castle grounds, Ruffer compares the contemporary taboo about religion with the very different mores of the 19th century.

“Nobody talked about sex in Victorian times,” he says. “It’s impossible to imagine that because the public world was silent on it, it was not as much a guiding force as it is today. I think that’s where faith is now.”

He adds that the 10-year process of establishing the museum has made it “absolutely apparent” to him why there are no other similar institutions.

“What is a museum for?” he asks. “It’s to gawp at things and if you think what is the subject matter of a faith museum, it’s God. In whatever form and shape that you believe that God to be, you cannot see that topic.”

The museum is nevertheless rich in sometimes poignant objects that the curators call “witnesses” of faith. They include the Binchester Ring, a ring with Christian symbols dating from the third century of the Christian era. The ring, found only a mile from the museum, is regarded as the earliest known evidence for Christian practice in Britain. There is a small slate, engraved on one side, that served as an altar for Recusant Roman Catholics while their Church was out in the cold and had to stay hidden during the Reformation years. The slate could be turned over and disguised as a normal roof slate when not in use. The museum has on loan the Bodleian Bowl – a rare example of a ceremonial vessel used by one of England’s Jewish communities before King Edward I expelled the group in 1290.

Ruffer says the impact of the objects – many on loan from other museums - comes from their histories.

“There’s a great power in the objects that we have,” he says.

Eileen Harrop.

A priest stands in front of lead glass windows and carved seats.

Eileen Harrop, entrepreneur priest and museum advisor.

Among the advisers on the museum’s establishment was Eileen Harrop, a Church of England priest originally from Singapore and of Chinese origin. She was appointed an “entrepreneur priest” in 2016 to work with Ruffer on The Auckland Project. Meeting in the castle’s former library, she says the museum avoids suggesting all faiths are the same, while also steering clear of Christian proselytising. Harrop, now the vicar of four parishes around Bishop Auckland, expects the museum to have a powerful effect on visitors.

“It allows for people to experience the God who led Jonathan here,” she says. “It allows for people to enter into all the different ways in which people can identify something about faith and then it’s up to God.”

A visit’s emotional impact comes largely from the new institution’s first floor, devoted to works created by contemporary artists exploring faith. Some of the most powerful exhibits are black-and-white pictures in which Khadija Saye, a young British-Gambian artist, explores possible uses for religious objects belonging to members of her family, some Muslim and some Christian. Saye lost her life in the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire.

A series of works by Christian painter Roger Wagner has proved particularly timely. The museum opened the same day that Hamas terrorists started the current Israel-Gaza war with their attack inside Israel. The paintings translate stories from the Christian New Testament to the contemporary, riot-scarred occupied West Bank.

Eidolon is among the works on the first floor. Harrop calls it an “amazing installation”, particularly for its retelling of the story of Daniel.

“It relates a story… of what was going on in that particular experience of the faithful person called and protected with his companions in relation with God and the power of faith,” she says.

Ruffer, meanwhile, shies away from expressing spiritual aspirations.

Asked how he hopes people will respond to the museum, he says: “I couldn’t care less – that’s up to them. I have many faults but a sense of wanting to tell people or persuade people how they should be is very low down the list.”

Yet Ruffer is clear that he received a clear, divine call to come to Bishop Auckland. He was first drawn to the area by his enthusiasm for Spanish art and his determination to prevent the Church of England’s Church Commissioners, then owners of the castle, from selling its prize artworks – life-size, 17th century portraits by Francisco de Zurbarán known as Jacob and his 12 Sons. The paintings, saved for Bishop Auckland in 2011 by a multi-million-pound donation by Ruffer, remain in the castle. But the Zurbarán link inspired Ruffer to establish a Spanish Gallery, dedicated to art from Spain, on Bishop Auckland’s Market Place.

“I came here really through a calling,” Ruffer says. “I felt the need really to drop everything and come up to somewhere in the north-east, to be part of a community.”

Ruffer’s engagement with the town deepened when the Church Commissioners announced, also in 2011, that they planned to sell the castle. Auckland Castle was formerly a seat of both ecclesiastical and secular power when the Bishops of Durham were prince-bishops – uniquely in England, both secular governors and bishops. The bishops lost the last of their secular powers in 1836. Ruffer bought the castle and transferred ownership to a newly established Auckland Castle Trust, which became The Auckland Project.

“I’ve heard from people who have through it who have said they can’t really put their finger on what it is, but they must go back again,”

Ruffer accepts there are issues with trying to capture the imagination of Bishop Auckland’s 25,000 inhabitants from inside a castle whose imposing entranceway symbolises its symbolic role as a seat of sometimes oppressive power.

“That sense of power is felt as a reality by people,” he says. “But it’s empty. Power has long since moved away from the prince-bishops and then the bishops.”

The castle’s unique history nevertheless makes it the ideal setting for the museum, according to Ruffer. Exhibits are housed both in a wing of the historic castle and a new, purpose-built extension. Ruffer says the castle was a far better place to site a faith museum aimed at raising questions than somewhere more explicitly linked to a specific faith such as a cathedral close.

“Auckland Castle has been intricately involved with faith for nearly 1,000 years and yet it hasn’t been a place of worship,” he says. “It has a chapel but it’s ecclesiastical without being a cathedral, church or minster. So it seemed to me that that made it very appropriate for a faith museum.”

The early signs, according to both Ruffer and Harrop, are that the new institution is encouraging reflection among visitors. Ruffer says the museum has responded to the “elemental need” for faith. He adds that the positive reaction so far vindicates the initiative to establish the museum, which he says has brought together objects and described them “without any directional guidance as to which works”.

Harrop reports that visitors seem to feel the need to experience the museum a second time after a first visit.

“I’ve heard from people who have through it who have said they can’t really put their finger on what it is, but they must go back again,” she says.

Ruffer identifies the museum’s power by saying that it gives people an easier experience of the divine than would otherwise be available to them. He compares the experience of encountering God through the museum to looking at the light of the sun as reflected in soft moonlight. That, he points out, is far easier than looking painfully and directly at the sun.

“The thing that changes people is to be confronted with something bigger than yourself,” he says.