Category: Biblical Counseling

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…