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I Know That my Redeemer Lives: Relational Perspectives on Trauma, Dissociation, and Faith

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Abstract

This paper focuses the lens of multiplicity on patients’ religious experience in relation to the psychic realities of early or pervasive trauma, where dissociation is not just a normal means of self-regulation, but becomes an entrenched structuring mechanism through which the trauma survivor experiences every relationship, including any relationship to God. What might God or faith look like from the perspective of the traumatized self? This paper considers issues of multiplicity and dissociation as they affect the processing of religious or spiritual experience, with a few brief clinical illustrations, and offers a reading of the biblical book of Job as a metaphor for the inner world of the survivor of early trauma.

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Notes

  1. Translators note that the word “redeemer” here refers to an avenger of blood, which might also be translated as “vindicator.” It is important to note that the context of this passage is Job’s answer to his friends’ relentless argument. He says that God will punish them for their harassment of him (“If you say, ‘the root of the matter is found in him’; be afraid of the sword” (19:28b; 29a). In this sense, the passage reflects the survivor’s desire to “kill off” or punish self-states that torture from within. In my reading, however, I also see the way in which God is invoked as redeemer from the persecutor, which in Job’s experience is not only the friends, but God. This resonates with the multiplicity of Gods in the trauma survivor.

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  1. Fordham University Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, 441 East Fordham Road, Keating Hall, Room 303, Bronx, NY, 10458, USA

    Lisa M. Cataldo

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  1. Lisa M. Cataldo
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Correspondence to Lisa M. Cataldo.

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Cataldo, L.M. I Know That my Redeemer Lives: Relational Perspectives on Trauma, Dissociation, and Faith. Pastoral Psychol 62, 791–804 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-012-0493-5

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