Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You
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Healing the Community | MASCON 2019
Licensed therapist Najwa Awad describes how trauma can impact faith and how our communities can begin to heal.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. During the past decade, we have really been pushing the importance of mental health in Muslim communities. And we've been talking a lot about anxiety, a lot about depression, and de-stigmatizing getting help, letting people know that it's not haram to go and seek treatment. And in these talks, we focused a lot about anxiety and depression. However, the missing piece in our discussion is trauma. And it's not to say that all anxiety and depression is caused by trauma, but a lot of anxiety and depression is caused by trauma. And so if we are overlooking this piece, then people are not looking at the root cause of what distresses them. And so we are not able to get treatment effectively or comprehensively. So it's really important for us to know what trauma is, how it affects us as individuals and groups, so that we can be more proactive in coming up with a plan to heal ourselves and the community. So when we look at the definition of trauma, trauma is a psychological or an emotional response to a deeply distressing event. And so what is traumatic for one person might not be traumatic for another person. In fact, you might have the same trauma twice in your life, and in one part of your life, it might affect you, and in another part of it, it won't. And so it really varies from person to person and throughout the span of your life. When we typically hear about trauma, we usually hear about PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder. That's when there's a lot of impaired functioning, there's nightmares,
hypervigilance. The person really has a disturbed, can develop a disturbed view of viewing the world. However, in my practice in working with people who are Muslim and not Muslim, my experience has been that the average person with trauma doesn't walk around with PTSD, meaning that you don't have to meet this significant criteria of PTSD to have trauma affected you in your life. Most of the people that I see in my office who have some sort of trauma actually present more as anxious or depressed. They might be sad, they might be chronically have anxiety. And so people are walking around with these symptoms, not really know what's going on. And just to show you the significance of why it's important to know when you have trauma and when you don't. They did a study with children, and particularly children with ADHD. And upon further evaluation, they found out that these kids with ADHD actually didn't have ADHD. They actually had symptoms of trauma. And so I do believe in ADHD, and I believe that sometimes it's significant enough to warrant medication. But in this situation, these kids who seemed hyperactive, were not able to follow directions, were not able to concentrate in class, they were being misdiagnosed with something that they didn't have. So if you think about it, say that they had developed a 504 or IEP, those are interventions in school as a result of the ADHD. And so you have these well-meaning teachers trying to put an intervention in place. And so while intervention might be useful, it's not going to address the root
cause of the issue. And in some situations, imagine that these kids who are presumed to have ADHD, and they don't. So the teachers are trying all these interventions and they don't work. And so they're like, okay, well, let's put them on medication, which I don't think is wrong in some cases, but in this case, it would be right. So now you have a child on medication for something that they shouldn't be on. So it just goes to show you the importance of us knowing when there's trauma and when there's other issues. So what does trauma, how does trauma affect individuals? First, it causes a lot of distress day to day, like I mentioned, anxiety, depression, but it also prevents people from living to their full potential. So not only are people walking around suffering, but also the potential that they have, they're not able to reach it, that potentially they can go further in life than they think they can. And then also what trauma does is it causes cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions is an unhealthy way of thinking. And so when you experience trauma, sometimes it can alter the way that you look at the world. So for example, say that you were robbed at gunpoint. And so now because of it, you feel like the world is unsafe. Someone's coming to get you. You can't leave the house. And so it starts to alter those cognitions that you wouldn't ordinarily have if the trauma didn't happen to you. And this is really important, especially for us Muslims to take into consideration, because they found that a group of people with PTSD, it not only causes cognitive distortions,
but it also can cause unhealthy ways of thinking about religion. And it doesn't just apply to Islam, but to other religions as well. So sometimes the trauma can be so detrimental that it can start to cause doubt or even a person to leave the religion altogether. So an example of that might be a boy who grows up in a Muslim household and everybody prays, everybody fasts, but his father beats his mother. And so he grows up with maybe a disturbed view of Islam and he thinks, okay, when I get older, I want nothing to do with this and I want nothing to do with Islam. So that's a good example of trauma being the root cause of someone having doubts in their faith and then leaving. Or another example might be a woman who was sexually abused or molested. And so as a result of her trauma, she develops these cognitive distortions. All men are bad. Again, everybody's out to get me. And so perhaps over time, she begins to, just the way there's toxic masculinity, there's toxic feminism too. So maybe she starts to embrace it and then she starts to have views that are contradictory to Islam and then she eventually, she leaves Islam. So these are examples of how sometimes trauma can be that little seed that leads to doubt and people leaving the religion. So of course, not everybody who leaves Islam has trauma, but it's really important for us to grasp the significance that it can have on our faith. So how can we deal with trauma? Individually, it's very important that we get the help that we need. If you suspect that you have trauma or you've experienced trauma, and studies
show that about 64% of adults have had at least one adverse childhood experience. So that doesn't even include adulthood. So more often than not, you are more likely to have had some traumatic experience in your life. So if you do feel like you have trauma, it is a specialty within the field of psychology, please feel free to go and get counseling because it can have an effect on your day-to-day functioning and your relationships. And through Yoclean Institute, my colleague, Sara Sultan, who's also a therapist, we came up with an 11-part series on how trauma impacts faith. And with each chapter, we address a cognitive distortion. We go really in-depth into psychology so people better understand their emotions, their thoughts, and their patterns. And even at the end of each chapter, we have a workbook-style section so people can, on their own time, work through some of the traumatic experiences that they have. So this is not a substitute for therapy, but it's a great place to start to explore if that is something that you're interested in. If you have a family member who has trauma, please encourage them to go to treatment. Just because it's not something that you would think is traumatic, it doesn't mean it's not traumatic for them. So it's important that you are not a barrier for your own loved one's treatment. Now how do we heal trauma collectively as a community? There is something called trauma-informed care. And what that means is that it's a paradigm, it's a mind shift that you assume that everybody that you come across in your day-to-day interaction has had experienced some kind of trauma. And
the research supports this, right? So it's having the perspective that everyone around you has their own struggles. And that by creating institutions, organizations, whether it's misogynist schools or even smaller scale kind of organizations, that we, through trauma-informed care and this assumption, that we can create safe environments, culturally safe, emotionally safe environments where people feel that, where they can feel like they have the ability to heal versus be re-traumatized. Because when you have cognitive distortions, everything negative kind of confirms your biases. But when we set up these institutions where people feel safe, when they feel like there's a sense of transparency, when they feel people are honest and they are valued, when they feel like there's a sense of collaboration, then instead of continuing to re-traumatize people, we are coming at an angle that we can be a healing source. So what does this look like? So for example, if you are in a message and you have a particularly difficult person or a group, instead of, and not that we should be doing this anyway, but instead of antagonizing them, instead of calling them difficult and avoiding work with them, you would do the opposite. You would assume that their behavior is purposeful and that they're being difficult for a reason. And by that, instead of further perpetuating whatever cognitions that they have, which that's, trauma is invisible. So we only see the effects of it. We don't see what's going on in the person. So you assume that these difficult people are operating perhaps from a place of trauma.
And so instead of getting into conflict and gridlock with them, you come from a perspective of collaboration. Okay, this is a triggering or an upsetting event. Maybe you can pull them to the side or have a special meeting with them and say, okay, what's going on? How can we work together to solve this issue? So now you're promoting a culture of healing versus antagonizing them. Another way that we can see how this can play out in a community level is schools. So perhaps you have a Muslim school and you have these kids that keep getting in trouble time and time again, right? So if you want to have a trauma-informed perspective, you can continue to discipline them. And it's not to say that these children shouldn't be accountable for their behavior. But if you come from a trauma-informed perspective, you say, okay, there must be a missing piece. Perhaps these kids have some kind of trauma or there's something going on at home that's preventing them from doing well in school. So instead of continuing to suspend them and maybe expel them, you would recommend them to the school counselor, or maybe you would send them to a local therapist in the community. So it is a mind shift in that you're trying to create environments that promote healing instead of continuing to push what we're already doing. And this doesn't just apply to Muslims, but applies to non-Muslims as well. We know that there are people who are out to get Islam, but we can also assume that some of these people who are anti-Muslim perhaps were traumatized, not necessarily by our own doing. It could be by things they've seen on the media. And so by us taking a higher road with these people, we would facilitate communities for healing
instead of continuing to perpetuate the myths that they already have. So if you are an institution, you can look up trauma-informed care and do research. And it's very easy to incorporate some of these policies. They're really all very congruent with Islam, collaboration, transparency, valuing people's opinions. And it can make a tremendous impact for your local community. And when we talk about trauma, it sounds very daunting, like there's so much work to be done. But the research shows that some people with trauma actually end up better than they were before. So some people get significantly worse. There's something called post-traumatic growth, where some people actually end up getting better or not. They don't go back to the original baseline, but they actually turn out better than they were before the trauma. So when we take that perspective, we know that there is a lot of hope and a lot of room for growth, especially if we facilitate that individually and as a community. So to summarize, if you are suffering from trauma, please consider getting help. They actually have research recently. And they found that, so say you're like, OK, I've been traumatized, but it's not even worth my time. They found through certain studies of epigenetics that especially in men, they haven't found it in women, but that if you are a man and you've been traumatized, it leaves markers on your DNA. It doesn't alter your DNA, but leaves markers on it. So you can actually inadvertently pass it to your children and your grandchildren. So if you don't want to do it to yourself, you don't want to get healing for yourself, consider doing it for your future offspring. If it's a family member, please encourage them to get help, because it can really tremendously impact their well-being
in a meaningful way. And so I'm assuming a lot of people here are professionals. Please consider looking up trauma-informed care and trying to integrate some of those policies and procedures into your framework, because it can make a big difference. And if you're not part of an organization, just consider taking the higher road. It sounds oversimplified that you assuming that everybody has a load to carry, but it can be very impactful just you being kind to others and assuming that they are coming from a place of pain versus just being difficult and stubborn. Okay. Je vous demande.
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