A few years ago I read the book “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk. Dr. van der Kolk is a psychiatrist who has been a leading researcher in traumatic stress disorder since it first became a diagnosis. He began his work treating soldiers in the wake of the War in Vietnam. His insights into the human brain and body and understanding of how trauma affects people on so many different levels have been helpful to a lot of people. I read the book in conjunction with a small emerging church group that was meeting in our church building and I got to know some of the other members of the group more closely through their reactions to and the things they were learning from the book.

Dr. van der Kolk tells the story of the first person he treated after going to work for the Veterans Administration back in the 1970’s. This person was a Vietnam veteran who had terrible nightmares. Dr. van den Kolk had previously studied nightmares and had done sleep studies and knew about treating those who suffered from nightmares. He prescribed medicine for the veteran to help make the nightmares go away. A couple of weeks later, the veteran came back and Dr. van den Kolk asked him, “So, how did the medicines work?” He responded, “I didn’t take your medicines, because I realized I need to have my nightmares because I need to be a living memorial to my friends who died in Vietnam.”

Through this experience and many other experiences treating people who had gone through terrible experiences, Dr. van den Kolk learned how we humans carry with us trauma and memories of pain in our hearts and minds and bodies. We become living testimonials for the experiences of the past. The pain and trauma we have experienced are carried with us in a very real way and have physical manifestations long after the initial trauma.

Researchers now know that the effects of trauma can be transmitted to children and grandchildren. In the case of major traumas, for example the Holocaust, the traumatic stress can be even greater on the second generation than it was on the first.

The book offered to me important insights and began to open up a deeper understanding of how to relate to the victims of trauma. At the time I read the book, I had collected over a decade of experience of working as a suicide first responder and my work with suicide survivors had led me to becoming a law enforcement chaplain. I was touched by the reactions of coroners and their assistants to suicide cases. I would arrive at the scene of a suicide and before I was even able to meet the survivors and begin working with them, I would be given a description of what the coroner had experienced, often in graphic detail way beyond what was required to give me the essential information to work with the family. Often, when interviewing officers for follow-up work on the case, I would get a second or even a third dose of listening to descriptions of what had been witnessed. I became aware that the officers were holding in their reactions to what they had seen. They had learned to avoid taking their work home and sharing their stress with their families. Their social lives often were invested with other officers and when they let their hair down and talked about their work it was usually with others who had similar experiences. The descriptions of trauma invoked more descriptions of trauma in a cycle that gave them little release for the tension they were holding. My role as a chaplain often involved simply listening to those descriptions.

Over time, as I became more involved with law enforcement and began to assist with crime victims and officers as well as suicide cases, I gained a bit of a reputation in the department as one who would show up at an investigation, but who didn’t need and didn’t want to see the victim. I told the officers that I had seen enough bodies and experienced enough. Since my role didn’t require me to make direct observations, I left that work to others. The truth was that their descriptions of what they had seen were often even more graphic and upsetting than the actual scene.

My few years as a chaplain certainly didn’t make me any kind of an expert in trauma, but I did learn how dramatic its effect is on not only those who are the direct victims of traumatic events, but also on those who have witnessed trauma. You don’t have to be the victim of a violent crime to have that crime make a deep impression on you.

Now we find ourselves as a nation and and as a world in a situation where nearly everyone has been touched by trauma. The pandemic has left so many victims. Over five million deaths have occurred worldwide; 783,000 deaths in the United States. There were 69 deaths from Covid in Washington State yesterday. We all have lost friends.

The effects of this pandemic will play out for years, perhaps for generations. What we know is that even when we don’t speak openly about trauma, our bodies have an amazing capacity to remember. What is more, we develop an amazing loyalty to the victims. As survivors, we feel a deep need to keep their memory alive.

In this context, I have been thinking once again about the story of Dr. van den Kolk’s first Veterans Affairs patient. His loyalty to his comrades - to those who had died in Vietnam - was so deep that he voluntarily endured painful and distressing nightmares. As his book title reports, “The Body Keeps the Score.” We hold trauma in a physical way.

Friends, we are all in this together. We are learning from a set of circumstances that the world has not previously experienced. Past pandemics haven’t had the kind of real time reporting that we have known. All of us have witnessed a great deal of trauma and stress. But this isn’t the end of the story. As Dr. van der Kolk reports in his book, human beings are amazingly resilient. We will get through this experience together. And the first step of processing the trauma is telling the story.

We each need to find those with whom we can share the trauma and tell the story.