March 7, 2005 10am to 4 pm

Childhood trauma is not something I know about in an intensely personal way, but I have had exposure to my own family stories, to stories in the counseling context, press report stories, film – eg Rabbit Proof Fence -, and in particular the Bringing Them Home report* into the genocide of the stolen generation of our own indigenous people. All these have opened the door of awareness just a little on childhood pain and trauma and its legacy.

One of those stories is my mother’s. Her childhood memories are ones of neglect and abandonment by her church minister father. What she has not told us will probably go with her to her grave but our lives were woven around the stories of her and her mother’s and siblings’ abandonment, survival and confusion. At the same time she worked from her own story with our father to try and provide a safe place for her own children and for abused women from the Victorian Jail system. From 1958 – 1962 our home [The Open Door, mentioned in Tim Costello’s book “Streets of Hope” ] was a place she and my father had built to facilitate some kind of rehabilitation for these women. As a young child I was therefore exposed to the people most self – respecting middle class families never wanted to know about. I consider those years as formative for developing compassion for the marginalized and a social justice conscience.

My experience as an ordained ministerial pastoral counselor in local parishes over 18 years has exposed me to the sad fruits of abuse. My observation is that childhood abuse within the church community and in our conservative neighborhood communities in Queensland are stories that are not told easily or readily. Abuse breeds secrets. Once courageous people are able to tell their stories in a supportive context, there are some who appear to recover from the deep psychological damage quite dramatically and quickly while others’ stories grind on for years with little progress. As the bi-line for the film The Mother says “It can take a lifetime to feel alive.” My own sister as a non church goer suggested to me recently that in her view sometimes a strong conversion experience – a core value of the evangelical church movement she left years ago – can be the catalyst for life change in some abused people. From experience I would concur, but it is not always the case. In fact this core value is often used to manipulate and abuse people.

As a “post-evangelical” – a term now used to define those of us floating or maybe lost in the sea of faith believing in a far more encompassing [not-only- evangelical] but real, creative and loving God – I sat in a non-evangelical church Mass at St Mary’s South Brisbane on Sunday night [February 21] and listened as the priest talked about a young parishioner who had had a mystical spiritual experience while sitting in the mass some weeks ago. The experience stayed with her for about 24 hours. I am not sure if this has had any life changing or profound effect on her outlook on life or if it related to freedom from childhood trauma memories, but it is the kind of experience that can deeply and positively affect people in their quest for personal wholeness and freedom from their demons and trauma memories. From personal experience, it alters perspective.

The iconic Australian writer and Nobel Literature awardee Patrick White had such an epiphany too. In “Reasons of the Heart” Bruce Wilson talks about White in the context of a passion for a new spirituality that listens out for the epiphanies that appear in our everyday lives. White’s experience was that while taking a tray load of food to “a wormy litter of pups at his house he slipped over in the mud and rain and landed on his back: ” I lay where I had fallen, half blinded by the rain, under a pale sky, cursing through watery lips a God in whom I did not believe. I began laughing, finally, at my own helplessness and hopelessness, in the mud and stench from my filthy old oilskin. It was the turning point. My disbelief appeared as farcical as my fall. At that moment, I was truly humbled. “

Maybe there is some connection here with Virginia May’s intuitions and the power of epiphanies and art together to write new stories.

Given that I am convinced that these exceptional experiences are valid but, I suggest, a secondary path to the new stories that can be written, I set up a counseling service [in 1997] that would cater to young people [5 – 18 years] and their parents who were experiencing any kind of relational or personal conflict. As the service developed, and as the funding body looked at how to address abuse issues, abuse issues surfaced in the counselor’s case load. The service, Turning Points, is funded by the Queensland Department of Communities and continues to thrive under the leadership of its fourth psychologist and is to be funded to at least 2008. It has a very positive profile in the community.

As far as using art to understand the impact of childhood trauma is concerned, however, I have had little or no experience in this and so feel very much a learner and wonder how much I have to bring to this discussion. My interest in art, however, continues to be a deepening love affair. The arts spaces I assist in managing and developing in Jugglers Arts Spaces in Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley[ see http://www.cafejugglers.com ] has graffiti/or street art as one of its primary foci not only as beautiful art forms but as a means of developing programs for young male street artists. The graffiti sub-culture has its own customs, rules and traditions as any social group does, but we are yet to find out whether there are deeper secrets and maybe abuse stories that lead to some of the anti-social, dangerous and illegal practices these young men engage in. We have set up a program [gRafFic or the Art and Cultural Pathways Project] to work with young street art offenders that will address issues of anger management. The team involved in this project will mentor a small group of referred young men to see them move towards more positive work and life choices. The project has begun with one young man. We are dependant on funding for this project and have two submissions with Government bodies being processed.

But what of art and notions of spirituality to understand childhood trauma and to find a pathway to greater levels of wholeness in the lives of the abused?
What are my notions of spirituality and how can they be added to this discussion in a positive way?

It appears that one of the commonly held ideas about the church and Christianity in the community is that it is abusive and restrictive and a counterproductive force when it comes to wholeness or healing and well being. The shining examples that counter that view are people like Mother Theresa, and Tim Costello. The abuse in the church that has been so seriously rampant and hidden and secreted has been highlighted by the press and rightly targeted as a blight of cancerous proportions. More subtle forms of abuse [ eg mind control ] within fundamentalist groups are not given the same kind of profile but the damage is considerable. It is a trauma that is not specifically limited to children.

Unfortunately reports of the continuing good the church and Christian community has done has often gone underground in respect to the counseling and facilitation of the journey to personal wholeness. The search for spirituality, however, has not diminished and has in fact grown with large numbers leaving organized religion and pursuing the search for a more satisfying personal spirituality and a real connection with “god”.[ There is, however, the well documented counter growth of such highly organized phenomena as Hillsong and the Pentecostal movement. [See current issue of Marie Claire March 2005.]

In the just published God under Howard however, Marion Maddox suggests that a rejection of religion and religious institutions exchanged for the more apparent higher and more laudable pursuit of an inner spirituality can return a negative result:

She says: “As in other secular, western countries, a personalized, free-form and eclectic spirituality seems to be replacing commitments for and against religion. My students, who dread to be seen as ‘religious’ but are proud to be called ‘spiritual’, point to the wrongs religions have perpetrated; the wars waged, heretics burned, women and minorities oppressed and lands despoiled. We could level the same charges at many other longstanding human institutions, such as political parties, but religion attracts such criticism with unusual force. But religion has positives as well.
At their best, religious traditions carry the collective memory of generations of committed thinkers, trained and lay, devoting themselves to pressing human problems. The trial and error nature of individual, internalized spirituality has attractions, but it leaves every seeker reinventing their own wheel. Religions tend to have [a more or less]
systematized theology, carry institutional weight and have high-status spokespeople to publicize their message. Religions typically address social problems, not just offer self actualization.”
P162

Anecdotal evidence suggests that one of the problems for people coming to terms with childhood trauma is that church institutions in particular can well address social problems in the public arena but present such a face to individuals by virtue of their apparent complicity in the past or their intimidating size that they fail to be conduits of a process of healing and the journey into a fuller wholeness of life.

A recent Radio National program highlighted Corporate Psychopaths as predators whose deeper psychological narcissism make them unable to see the damage they are doing to the people they are manipulating. These people are known to be in places of business but the church and religious institutions have been and are rife with them. Such people appear wherever power is vested in charismatic leadership.

Is the individualistic inward focused spirituality a safer and more promising option then or is it just narcissism? How much can others be engaged in the process if there is a deep mistrust of organized religion – whether Buddhism, Islam, Christianity or Hinduism and those who represent it? And for those of us who care, what can we do to promote or mediate or facilitate the beginning of the journey?

I am going to take the position that people want to be freed from the memories and the damage that they have endured as a result of child hood trauma. That to me is a given that could be argued but I want to hold that as a given. People, if you like, are hungry for hope and for feelings of being at home in themselves and with themselves.

Then I am also going to take the position on more than anecdotal evidence that there are people who care and who can be part of the community of care that is essential to both understanding childhood trauma and facilitating the path of growing wholeness.

I do not think it is possible to journey along the way to a better life of sanity and love and peace and grace without a small group of amazingly loving and skilled people. As we have said, sometimes a mystical spiritual conversion experience is transformative, but I think that this needs to be held within the context of communities and families of love and compassion and listening powers to be validated and added to the mix of writing the new story.

To understand childhood trauma and to see some recovery, with or without art then, there we need people who want to change and those who want to be supporters and healing agents.

How can these two be brought together?

This sounds like a marketing question, and in a sense, I see the end of the brief of this discussion just that. “If art can facilitate a greater awareness of the ramifications of child abuse, how can this ‘facilitation’ be evaluated so that models of the ‘usefulness of art’ can be recommended and promoted in order to raise the awareness of important social issues? And utilized across disciplines?”

First, my notion of spirituality that is underlying all of this is that God is now here.God is NOW..Here.In Douglas Coupland’s 2003 book “Hey Nostradamus” his Cheryl Anway character struggles with this God is NOW here or God is nowhere as she faces her own death. My notion of spirituality is that always and at all times, God is now here. Not just in church or at mass or during meditation or at the heart of a rain forest or during Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion or in moments of sexual bliss, but she/he is now..here…

This of course poses some huge philosophical and other questions in relation to an abused child who was abused by the representative of the God who is supposed to be here and who did not intervene to help!

Second, my notion of spirituality is that the God I believe in is the most loving and personal of gods who loves every person infinitely more deeply than even the gentlest of hands and faces can be for us and is more than willing and able to be involved in the journey of growing wholeness and recovery from childhood or other trauma.

Third, my notion of spirituality is that she/he is present in those and through those who are most like her/him in their ability to listen and support, and that does not necessarily include or exclude the ordained priests, nuns or pastors.

Fourth my notion of spirituality is that she/he is present in acts of creativity.

So is there a connection between these notions and art and does that provide some signposts for Using Art to understand the impact of childhood trauma ?

First, let me suggest that taking these notions of spirituality into our practice as a way of seeing could bring some changes to ourselves and to those we want to see grow more and who we are intimately related with as family, friend or client. It could help us to be less intent on trying to bring change ourselves by our methodology or our own charisma. This is a challenge as we all have our own notions of spirituality and of the nature of God/god. If we can dispense with any necessarily Christian overlay, while still allowing Christians to pursue their notions of spirituality, even if not with us, I think that these notions have some application across a broad spectrum of views of spirituality.

Second, maybe our understanding of art as well as spirituality is what needs to be addressed here too. Our view of art has had countless influences and now in such a visually saturated world the lines of distinction between multi media, advertising, graphics and art are blurred. In Obey the Giant Rick Poyner discusses the blurring of the lines between the market driven economy, graphics as servants of the advertising industry, art and advertising.

For me this begs the question of what kind of art do we use to help understand the impact of childhood trauma. Is it painting, film, clay work, music or drama or a cross fertilization of genres?

For example, how do we evaluate the Start Talking campaign [Marie Claire March 2005] in the light of this when this graphics/advertising/campaign using media celebrities has the potential to capture imaginations and see positive outcomes? It is a campaign to raise the awareness of domestic violence against women and uses screen printed “Start Talking” graphics on T Shirts. Can a similar campaign help the public understand the impact of childhood trauma and be part of the journey of recovery for victims? Such social action campaigns as Clean Up Australia show what be achieved with the right idea at the right time.

Songs like This Good Earth and Native Born by Neil Murray on his 1996 Dust CD raise the awareness of environmental and indigenous issues so powerfully.
Films like Tracker and Rabbit Proof Fence raise the issues of the stolen generation and indigenous massacres.

Connecting notions of spirituality and art in raising the awareness of childhood trauma means planning some long term strategies. Along with this will be agreements on paradigms to use in respect of spirituality and art forms if a program or project is to be developed.

It has been shown that friendship and personal support from family and friend networks are essential as the first part of any project and public education.

Dealing with men who have been abused and traumatized appears to be characteristically more difficult or at least needs a different approach than for women.

Bibliography:

Reasons of the Heart Bruce Wilson 1998 Allen and Unwin.
Hey Nostradamus! Douglas Coupland 2003 Harper Perennial
Obey the Giant Rick Poyner 2001 August Media
God under Howard Marion Maddox 2005 Allen and Unwin
Bringing them Home Report
Marie Claire March 2005
Streets of Hope Tim Costello

*Sexual Abuse Many children experienced brutality and abuse in children’s homes and foster placements. In the WA Aboriginal Legal Service sample of 483 people who had been forcibly removed, almost two-thirds (62.1%) reported having been physically abused (submission 127 page 50). Children were more likely to have been physically abused on missions (62.8% of those placed on missions)
than in foster care (33.8%) or government institutions (30.7%) (submission 127 page 53).
Witnesses to the Inquiry were not specifically asked whether they had experienced physical abuse. Nevertheless, 28% reported that they had suffered physical brutality much more severe, in the Inquiry’s estimation, than the typically severe punishments of the day.
Stories of sexual exploitation and abuse were common in evidence to the Inquiry. Nationally at least one in every six (17.5%) witnesses to the Inquiry reported such victimization. A similar proportion (13.3%) reported sexual abuse to the WA Aboriginal Legal Service: 14.5% of those fostered and 10.9% of those placed on missions (submission 127 pages 51-53).
These vulnerable children had no-one to turn to for protection or comfort. They were rarely believed if they disclosed the abuse.
Rev Peter Breen ARMIT, MIR, BTh, DipDiv&Miss