Category: Biblical Counseling

When I was in college, I lived in off-campus housing. The apartment complex was pretty full, and sometimes I would have to park in a lot outside of the parking garage. One morning, when I was heading to work, I came out to find that my car had been broken into. The driver-side window was smashed, stereo stolen, and all my CDs were gone too. I was both a poor college student and an audiophile at this point, so they basically stole everything that I valued. I was crushed, and certain that my car insurance would not pay for it….

People often ask us what it is like to live in a Kwakum village. We usually respond by describing the day-to-day lives of our neighbors as sustenance farmers. We talk about their houses, methods of agriculture, the long walk to the field. We talk about their large families, most women giving birth to 8, 9, 10, or even more children throughout their lives. We talk about how the Kwakum people are a primarily oral people group, most (at least in the village) do not know how to read in any language. Sometimes we try to communicate some of the harder…

Recently I read a book called The Body Keeps the Score, which chronicles the growth in understanding of a psychiatrist named Dr. Bessel A. van der Kolk. Specifically, Kolk started to notice that trauma survivors, though incredibly different from one another, tended to respond to day-today stresses in similar ways. This led him to study the effect of trauma on the human body, and to find ways to help these survivors live normal lives. He shares the story of a veteran in the book that I will try to summarize here: A man came in for counseling. He had been…