I want to pick up where we left off uh from last uh from this morning in my session before we do that let's pray again father we're once again grateful that we can open your word and that it truly is living because you are a living God we are so grateful that you have given us answers in your word to Life's most difficult issues to our personal struggles whether it's Identity or sin issues Lord as we continue to to evaluate our own lives but also look to your word for answers I just pray that we
would be humble tonight and receive what you have for us and that we would graciously consider what is true and what is false and that you truly would be the god of comfort and the god of Hope in the name of Jesus Christ we pray amen when we left off in my session this morning we were looking at the example of of King David and we specifically looked at Psalm 38: 1- 22 uh to the point that one of the the leading psychiatrist of our time Dr Ronald P said that David went through so much
stress that he would have been diagnosed as mentally ill today sorry with a mental disorder I would argue graciously but firmly that David would disagree with that David had a lot more knowledge and understanding of what was true about life in Psalm 38 we specifically looked at David's own sin causing him that distress but I want to make it clear that David experienced other distresses or calamities in his life for example in 1 Samuel chapter 19 David was being chased and the threat of of being killed was was very real to him there's one uh
secular psychologist Named Dave grman uh Dave grman uh when I wrote uh my chapter on trauma for one of my books I interviewed two Army Rangers in the United States that's a a very prestigious group in the army army in fact their job was to travel around the world and to kill people these two guys actually worked as a team I asked them how many how many people do you think you've had to kill in the military and they said we've lost track they've had to kill people with knives they've had to kill people by
sniping and who knows what other ways and they recommended this book to me because I asked them how do you deal with all the trauma that you've experienced certainly we would say that that is traumatic to have to kill other people and they said this book has really helped us in fact it's used in all the US military branches Dr David gan's book is called on killing and he says that one of the greatest traumas or distresses is the fear or threat of dying so David went through that in first Samuel 17 he also had
to kill people in very close proximity another point that Dave Gman discusses in his Bookman that there's not a lot of trauma involved when the military bombs a city but the closer in proximity someone gets to the person they're killing the more traumatic it becomes and so having to kill by knife or by hand is is traumatic for the one killing as well and of course Samuel experienced that I'm sorry David experienced that in 1 Samuel in 2 Samuel 13 we discover that he had to endure and deal with his daughter being raped I can't
imagine going through that he endured his own Sons killing another one of his children in 2 Samuel 13-4 there's one particular case that we find in 2 Samuel 2 vers 12 through 18 that's really fascinating 128 and believe it or not there are a lot of people that experienced something similar to what David went through and that is the loss of a baby or an infant in our church right now we have five families that are going through miscarriages thankfully one of those has has gotten pregnant but now anxiety is an issue that we're dealing
with as as they anticipate this little one King David understands what it's like I I want to read uh 2 Samuel veres 2 through uh excuse me chapter 2: 12-8 tonight and notice how David responds to this second Samuel second Samuel this looks like Abner and Jo 12 through 18 mhm oh maybe it's not I think it's 12 oh 12 okay sorry no it's fine I'm just okay is it 12 and so it's starting in verse seven 15 yeah we're good how much of it do you want me to read uh 12 through 18 okay
I because starting in 15 is where you I'm sorry go through go through um well for fore for so you can see here that that when they went to tell David that the baby had died they expected him to possibly harm himself and so they were surprised when he instead prayed to the Lord and and went in ate and we could go on about David he experienced a lot of what we would today call trauma and this is just one of the many people in Scripture that we can do case studies on in Psalm 116
David expresses a mindset that he had and he specifically talks about how the the I quote snares of death encompassed him and he says that the pangs of sh or death laid hold on him and he says I suffered distress and anguish then I called on the Lord I know personally firsthand that when when we go through horrific events in our life it causes us to call unto the Lord and this is that distress and anguish that David was going through so I want to look at uh switch gears from scripture a second and look
a little bit more at this secular concept of trauma and if you can recall from this morning we looked at three basic elements of what trauma is in in the secular Realm and so I want to review those with us now first of all they would say it's an event or events that exposes either human fragility or human depravity in a profound and undeniable way uh but I would argue as as even I heard Dr Baker say today that the the contents of our heart are already there whether we go through that experience or not
uh if if truly events determined what we were and what how we F in life then the greatest remedies would be to go on vacation and go to Disney and do all these euphoric and hedonistic things but that we call Mania in bipolar so that wouldn't work either the second thing that secularist assert is that that it tests or undermines one Faith or phenomenology their their identity and they would argue that we know that that's true because it impaires their life the third thing that their description of trauma exposes is that none of us are
our own savior in other words the humanistic teaching does not work self- dependence self-reliance self-actualization self-esteem they do not save us uh so that that philosophy may seem like it's working when life is going your way but you're going to need real faith when life hits you between the eyes so how should a Christian view trauma there are essentially two ways that you can view trauma tonight and I don't get to choose for any of you first of all you can look at trauma as an experience that produces a disorder in the Survivor so they
would argue that if you are if you go through an experience that you are now disordered from going through that experience now we're not talking about Genesis 3 that we're all disordered if Christ is order they're talking about we are uniquely disordered or abnormal we're dysfunctional because we've gone through an experience the second way that I think is the biblical way is that all of trauma is actually normal experiences in this Fallen World and as scripture says those experience test our faith if I can say it this way life is disordered so we can look
at at people as disordered because they're not functioning after going through difficult experiences or we can look at the uh as life as being disordered let me show you how simple this this is post-traumatic stress disorder if a young girl is raped multiple times as a child we should expect that she will struggle if she doesn't find her identity in Christ if there are not protective relationships put in in her life if she doesn't have a worldview that can explain the sin that was done to her and be able to understand that despite man's sin
against her God is still good and still faithful she will struggle so why are we calling her disordered when she should struggle after going through that what is disordered is rape it goes against God's designed for Humanity the consequences of sin especially when sin is done in a vicious violent or or uh defrauding way will have influence and consequences a soldier who has had to kill in war should struggle with what he has experienced it's actually normal for him to struggle in fact I would say something's wrong with him if he didn't struggle through that
and so post-traumatic stress disorder essentially has has become a way to categorize people that seculars really don't know how to help it's easier to say someone is disordered that I don't know how to help than to actually help someone through the disordered nature of our fallen world depending on which of these you choose will lead us to another choice we can choose an evolutionary humanistic and materialistic phenomenology so some of the the theories that are out there are the poly vagal Theory the dith thesis stress model the basian theory of inference and essentially all of
this goes back to the body becomes The Sovereign of Our Lives again no one is denying that our body is affected by everything we do if one of you told me that my father had passed away while I'm speaking my soul would react but so would my body there would be a lot that that happened in my body such as probably collapsing and crying but my tears did not cause my sorrow it was an effect of how I was thinking and in the the experience of facing a truth and that's exactly what trauma is it
makes makes us face a truth about life that we don't necessarily know how to handle or we can accept a Biblical phenomenology which openly admits that we are both weak and wicked so I want to take some time just to briefly look at one of the specific theories a secular phenomenology uh this was published in Psychology today written by Steven Joseph psychology St Joseph and it's entitled what is trauma listen to what he says for so I want to clarify what he's saying because it can be confounding as he says again there's variance of these
two theories but the secular Theory first of all suggests that essentially trauma is the result of going through a what he calls stressor or experience he says this is not about judging whether the person has or doesn't have enough resources to get through it he's saying the event itself will cause the quote unquote trauma the second assessment or or approach in the secular realm is this that somehow the individual is vulnerable and that's why they're [Music] struggling this is entirely an evolutionary concept it theorizes that some people are genetically predisposed to suffer or are weak
versus those that are strong uh we certainly don't have time this week to go through the history of the mental health model that exists today but it's entirely crepan Emil kin founded it in in this theory was the eugenic theory that led to the Holocaust and sadly that has become the dominant theory of our day in in multiple multiple countries so they would theorize that you can have two people experience the exact same scenario and they respond in two completely different ways and they theorize even if they're biological twins that one of those people was
genetically stronger than the other uh listen to what the DSM defines as stress so let's break these three things down and again this is on page 829 of the DSM first of all they say it's a specific and non-specific response a person makes second of all they say there's got to be a stimulus event for stress to happen that disturbs his or her equilibrium uh third of all it taxes and I find this very interesting or exceeds his or her ability to cope this is exactly what the Bible says is normal it's why we need
a savior in fact if you read second Corinthians second Corinthians a major theme in the book of Corinthians is a Greek word aano it's our our human fragility or weakness in fact in chapter 12 Paul says in my weakness I find Grace in Chapter 13 we learned that Jesus himself became our weakness on the cross now I want to I want to make that clear to you tonight from Isaiah 53 when we talk about the atonement we typically talk about depravity and absolutely rightfully so you can't read Isaiah 53 and not see clearly that Christ
took upon himself our sins but I fear we Overlook the first part of Isaiah 53 we find out from Isaiah that Jesus was not only a Man of Sorrows well acquainted with it and rejected of men but justce say he took upon himself our sin the Bible says he took upon himself our sorrow you have it there yes go ahead and read that that section with the sorrow I I want you to understand that Jesus is our savior of oura Frailty and our depravity not just our wickedness and this is a point Dr Baker has
been making very clear with us this week that every secular system has to set up a savior in fact we read throughout scripture that Jesus does want to save us from our sin but he wants to save us from our suffering and our sorrow you say Daniel when will that happen Jesus says in this life you will have sorrows and we go to the second to last chapter in the Bible in Revelation 21y and we see that when we finally see him face to face all sorrow and tears and pain and death are finally done
away with I know in my own heart I deceitfully think that life should just be glorious it should actually be Heaven that's how deceitful my own heart is and as we're going to look at as we go through this this week the Bible's very clear that this world is incredibly broken we'll even see from Ecclesiastes that even at night our heart does not rest so let me use a popular uh figure or figures to explain the secular Theory one of my favorite words in Portuguese you ready for this Bim Bachman Batman Bachman so I have
the Batman and Ro uh the Joker here and I don't know if you've actually thought through the story of Batman and the Joker but it is literally the secular model of trauma both Batman and the Joker went through a traumatic Experience One decided to become stronger it was within him to become a superhero as nii called it a super mench it's to transcend Beyond normal essentially the other The Joker went through a traumatic experience and now he has mental struggles and and even does evil because of that now I realize there's different theories of trauma
informed counseling but this is actually one of the the main teachings of trauma informed counseling to look for how a person is responding and I'm going to show you this in just a second that this is actually being written on spefic specifically about mental disorders uh as I mentioned this is called the DI thesis stress model stress it suggests that there that some people have a predisposition to things like psychosis or bipolar and so that going through trauma elicits this this response that they have no control over uh let me give you an example from
Frontiers in Neuroscience concerning the neuro diathesis stress model stress stress neur me so they would say that childhood trauma as he says here renders the individual more vulnerable to developing schizophrenia and that's exactly the theory of the Joker now it's it was fascinating for me a couple years ago a new movie about the Joker came out I actually just recently watched it but when it came out psychiatrist wrote numerous articles about it some were really upset it was it was sad and humorous at the same time for me to read these articles because one psychiatrist
psychiatrist would say I hope people don't think this is what mental illness looks like and another prominent psychiat psychiatrist would say this is exactly what what trauma does and this is why schizophrenia uh is this is what causes schizophrenia and another article would come in if if you're working on a dissertation in in biblical counseling and your your uh school will allow you to do something that's not practical necessarily and you're writing a PhD this would be a really fascinating topic there is a ton of material on on the concept of the Joker so let
me show you another example of this theory in action the dith thesis Theory and this is in regard to bipolar disorder as mentioned in the psychiatric times psych times it says this just that phrase I want to look at another one concerning psychosis you can see this as a common way of thinking uh Brian Miller is actually the editor and chief over the Psychiatry construct for the psychiatric times over the schizophrenia yeah over schizophrenia Brian millery times so listen to what he says for for next next I'm sorry you you finished that uh this so
I really want you to understand this study this is June 8th of this year this is the editor and chief of the psychiatric times over the the concept of schizophr non psychiatric times and they did a major study on on does psychosis produce stress or does stress lead to psychosis and as you can see here he says overwhelmingly it's understood that stress precedes psychosis there's one thing he doesn't mention here is that stress often produces anxiety which produces problems sleeping and we're going to look at that in just a second uh let's look at another
quote from the schizophrenia Bulletin schizophrenia a psychiatric Journal just about the alleged uh schizophrenia construct EV so once again you can see and I I've got tons of quotes that that that reiterate this reality so you can see this di thesis stress Model come into play in fact I want to uh draw your attention to a very famous study called the Janine quadruplets in fact three weeks ago an article was published on this very thing and it was published on the psychiatric times psychatric times by Dr AIS afab who teaches at Ohio State University I've
corresponded with him a couple times and he's one of the uh psychiatrists that's very honest about the problems that exist and this is one of those cases where he published an interview uh exposing the problems with the Janine quadruplet studies so the uh the National Institutes of mental health in the United States they desired to do a genetic study years ago decades ago on uh twins but they needed twins that were both diagnosed as schizophrenic and literally about two weeks after they decided and committed the money to this project not just twins but quadruplets were
diagnosed as schizophrenic and as you can imagine they were incredibly thrilled and they for years and decades said that that this was evidence that schizophrenia is genetic but decades later they started interviewing these girls and found out a very horrific reality that each of these four girls were severely abused by their father they were also set up as the picture perfect family and traveled around and sang together their parents were uh cultish and very legalistic and even as they went off to college they experienced different uh sexual trauma in addition to what their father did
to them and so all of a sudden this this proof or evidence of of genetics got completely destroyed within psychiatry you hardly hear about the Janine qu quadruplets now unless you hear that trauma leads to some genetic defect or exposes some alleged predisposition to schizophrenia I want to end our time tonight talking specifically about sleep problems because this doesn't just explain biological problems that that are measurable it sorry it doesn't explain it doesn't just explain biological problems we're on time right we go to nine no worth the idea do we go to nine nine um
it also uh shows that that it can lead to other things like manic episodes or psychotic breaks and all of the literature shows that a manic episode and a psychotic episode are preceded by sleep deprivation or disg so let me give you an example as we begin to look at this concerning schizophrenia in the stress diis model and this is in the medical journal medical science science for so you notice they're trying to treat sleep problems and psychosis as two separate things and yet they realize that they're always Associated even pointing out that that sleep
causes the very things that they say or psychosis such as cognitive uh deficits if you and I don't sleep for two or three days we will enter into a psychotic state it is very common uh for people who do not sleep to enter into psychotic States and I want you to see how common sleep problems are and people who have gone through distressful events uh two years ago Frontiers in Psychiatry which is like a magazine of Cutting Edge Psychiatry published this article Listen to listen to the percentage that they say of people who go through
or allegedly have post-traumatic stress dis so you can see specifically he says that sleep disorders play a central role in the development and maintenance of PTSD and by their estimates 70 to 90% of people that have gone through trauma struggle with sleep they've been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder that is significant uh look what uh Dr Greenberg uh published in the British Journal of medical psychology even back in 1972 so over over 50 years ago we already knew that sleep problems can result from going through traumatic experiences and that sleep problems lead to psychosis in
fact we should expect it to do so that is is a normal and right healthy response to not sleeping uh an interesting study that was published in 2021 in developmental [Music] psychobiology the research actually shows that when you don't sleep your body maintains a high stress level whether you've gone through stress or not loud noises become even painful uh listen to what what they discovered in this research so the question then is what what is actually hindering people sleep after going through trauma and we'll start on this tonight and pick up uh uh in my
session tomorrow on this very topic about three weeks ago uh nature uh Neuroscience Nature Neuroscience excuse me published an article on this very topic and they suggests that anxiety is the factor that causes trauma and actually deteriorates the brain you said does what else causes deterioration even of the brain damage uh here's another example of this in in uh same week in medical press Neuroscience Psychiatry and psychology listen to what they say C don't miss what what they discovered they suggest that they have figured out what a normal brain looks like after going through stress
and he says because we've determined what is normal we can now know what is abnormal and don't miss what they say they've discovered is the abnormality alleged abnormality we found that such a deviating pattern was related to anxiety symptoms does the Bible talk about anxiety and and I would add is anxiety a normal response of human nature after going through stress Philippians 4 actually offers us an alternative to normal anxiety which goes beyond human understanding in other words it's normal to meditate on the on the difficulty that you've been through that's our human nature It's
Supernatural to think on The God Who is in control of all things we'll look at one more example tonight and we'll pick up uh on this tomorrow and this is in The Clinical Psychology review qu so here is a group of clinicians saying that anxiety and depression consistently arise as hindering people's sleep and as they point out that leads to psychosis tomorrow as we look more into sleep we're actually going to see what God says about meditating on his word day and night we're going to look at how anxiety affects us and how God has
designed our bodies to respond to thinking right [Music] our
