How Can We Help Victims of Trauma and Abuse? (Questions for Restless Minds)
How Can We Help Victims of Trauma and Abuse?
How you can support survivors with the hope of Christ.
Chances are that you know someone who has experienced trauma—or you’ve experienced it yourself. So how can you respond wisely, carefully, and helpfully?
In How Can We Help Victims of Trauma and Abuse?, Stephen N. Williams and Susan L. Williams draw on their expertise in theology and counseling to equip you. A truly useful response must be informed, not just well-intentioned. Before we can aid in recovery, we must gain a deeper understanding of trauma’s emotional and spiritual implications. Discover how Christ is the light and life that defeats darkness and death.
Order all 17 volumes in the Questions for Restless Minds series.
Praise for How Can We Help Victims of Trauma and Abuse?
Profound, insightful, compassionate, and practical. This book weaves together the latest scientific and professional knowledge about psychological trauma and abuse with deep theological and pastoral wisdom. The complementary backgrounds of the authors provide a unique, cohesive, and authentically Christian perspective on these critically important topics. Essential reading for pastors and Christian lay-people who wish to support the many victims of abuse within our congregations.
—John Wyatt, Emeritus Professor of Neonatal Pediatrics, University College, London; president of the Christian Medical Fellowship
These two authors, deeply immersed in trauma counselling and theology, have accomplished a task which few would attempt. They have given us an in-depth analysis of the emotional, physical, relational, and psychospiritual impacts of trauma in the lives of those wounded by it, written from a Christian framework of understanding. It is brilliant. Meticulously researched and imbued with experiential and reflective wisdom, their writing cuts new ground in probing the distortions caused by trauma in people’s experiences of reality. It also offers challenges to the church to deepen its own response to victims of abuse and trauma, and even further, to seek for itself a more open, receptive relationship with the God who heals.
—Elaine Storkey, author Scars Across Humanity
This is a well-written, well-documented, and very important book on a major concern in society and the church today. Abuse and trauma are nothing new, of course, but they have become rampant. This book can help the church understand and become active in helping those who are victims of this very heartbreaking epidemic. The authors masterfully combine the empirical, scientific, statistical, and clinical data with careful articulation of biblical and theological truth about the realities of life as fallen and corrupt people in a fallen and corrupt world.
—Richard E. Averbeck, professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Questions for Restless Minds series
The Questions for Restless Minds series applies God’s word to today’s issues. Each short book faces tough questions honestly and clearly, so you can think wisely, act with conviction, and become more like Christ. Edited by D. A. Carson, the series covers a wide range of topics centered around critical questions many Christians wrestle with today.
Learn more about the other titles in this series.
Praise for the Questions for Restless Minds series
“This generation of Christians inhabit cultures that sometimes reject not only biblical revelation about reality but also the reality of reality itself. The Questions for Restless Minds series poses many of the toughest questions faced by young Christians to some of the world’s foremost Christian thinkers and leaders. Along the way, this series seeks to help the Christian next generation to learn how to think biblically when they face questions in years to come that perhaps no one yet sees coming.”
—Russell Moore, public theologian, Christianity Today
If you’re hungry to go deeper in your faith, wrestle with hard questions, and are dissatisfied with the shallow content on your social media newsfeed, you’ll really appreciate this series of thoughtful deep dives on critically important topics like faith, the Bible, friendship, sexuality, philosophy, and more. As you engage with some world-class Christian scholars, you’ll be encouraged, equipped, challenged, and above all invited to love God more with your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
—Andy Kim, multiethnic resource director, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
- Introduction
- What Is Trauma?
- What Is Abuse?
- Childhood Trauma
- Major Implications of Traumatic Abuse
- Christian Reflections
- Title: How Can We Help Victims of Trauma and Abuse?
- Authors: Stephen N. Williams and Susan L. Williams
- Series: Questions for Restless Minds
- Series Editor: D. A. Carson
- Publisher: Lexham Press
- Publication Date: 2021
- Pages: 112
- Format: Logos Digital, Paperback
- Trim Size: 5x7
- ISBN: 9781683595113
Stephen N. Williams is Honorary Professor of Theology at Queen’s University, Belfast and is author of The Election of Grace: A Riddle without a Resolution?
Susan L. Williams is a pastoral counselor, specializing in acute and developmental trauma. She received her PhD from the University of Ulster for narrative research carried out in the intensive care unit at the Royal Hospital in Belfast, subsequently published as Life after a Critical Incident in Hospital: An Exploration in the Language of Trauma.