Beyond “Pray Harder”: A Wounded Nervous System Isn’t Spiritual Failure

Camille McDaniel (00:02.134)
Welcome back to another episode of Christ in Private Practice. It is wonderful to have you here as always. And in this episode, we are going to talk a little bit about something that I think counselors have experienced at different stages of their journey, whether you experienced it in internship and grad school, whether you experienced it later in private practice, but

Many, especially if you work with individuals with grief and trauma, you have witnessed this. This is for the counselor who has ever sat in front of a client who may love the Lord, you know, their faith is very important to them. Maybe they, you know, they pray, they know their Bible, or they are a part of a

faith-based community, at their church, or even if they’re doing life groups and all of that, but somehow their body just simply will not settle down from some of the trauma they have experienced in their life. And it may be that there is, you know, a response that they give within the session that lets you know

they have gone into freeze mode. know, sometimes it comes over their face. Sometimes it changes in the way they’re sitting or breathing or any of that. And you may even find that when these things come up, whether you’re witnessing them in the session or whether they are telling you, your client is telling you of experiences.

that they continue to have that are deeply troubling to them because of their their faith and their belief system. You can kind of process this with them because they may actually be struggling with questions like if I really trusted God, then would my body still be reacting like this? That is a question that happens a lot. People wonder, know,

Camille McDaniel (02:19.252)
Is my faith really strong enough if I continue to have these reactions in my body? Is my faith really strong enough if I find that my mind goes into panic? You and so let’s kind of talk today about like what it means when we are working with somebody who has a wounded nervous system and we’re going to look at

why a wounded nervous system is not just automatically lack of faith, lack of any real good relationship with Christ or a major spiritual failure. Let’s take a look at the biology. Let’s look at the biological design of our bodies and how scripture actually honors our physical reality and the fact that

distress responses do occur in the human body and they have been occurring since the beginning of time. So, you know, where I usually, I want to start with taking a look where I usually want to go to is like scripture. So when you are working with your clients and you kind of start off hearing their concerns that maybe their faith is not

what they feel it should be and maybe they feel, I don’t know, maybe I don’t have, you know, the walk with the Lord the way I think. You can then start to show them that wait, having a very human experience is something that people since the beginning of time who follow the Lord, love the Lord have had. And it doesn’t mean that they love the Lord less, but it does mean that our human bodies are susceptible to

to certain things that that are going to show we have had certain encounters in this world that have impacted us greatly and our body shows it. So let’s start with an example of like Elijah. So in the book of the first kings, if you look in first kings and look in chapter 19 then you’re going to see the story of Elijah and Elijah is a man of great

Camille McDaniel (04:42.242)
faith right. Matter of fact we’ll see that he in in standing in his great faith and what God can do, he is witnessing and others are witnessing the Lord bringing fire from heaven and all of this is happening right. You know he’s over on Mount Carmel and all of this is happening and never been seen before but then what happens to poor Elijah immediately

after this wonderful display based on his faith in God and what God could do, he receives a death threat. After all of this happens, a death threat from Jezebel comes down, you know, and then the Bible says something happens after this death threat. He saw what was going on, he knew that there was a threat against his life.

Elijah arose and he ran for his life. So his first instinct was what? When we’re talking about biological functions and we’re talking about the field of psychology and counseling, to get up and the first thing you do is run, that sounds a lot like flight, doesn’t it? Right? He didn’t stop and pray and consult with the Lord and all of that, right?

He just saw fire rain down. But guess what he did? He ran and he kept running. He kept running into the wilderness. He didn’t stop. All right. And when you continue to read, it says like he ran into the wilderness and he’s this individual with humongous faith. But what did he do? He collapsed under a tree, a large tree. He just collapsed in the wilderness.

And he was like, that’s enough, know, Lord, take my life. He’s like praying to be relieved of this, to be relieved of the threats and all of the, I’m sure, immense tension and strain that comes with that type of threat from a person who has great influence at that. And so he runs and he’s just ready to die. And how does the Lord respond to that?

Camille McDaniel (07:06.104)
Does the Lord stop and talk to him about his faith in that moment? Does he stop and talk to him about how, you know, he needed to just have more faith or he shouldn’t have run or give him any other type of scolding in that moment? Now the Bible has many examples of different ways that the Lord responds, but let’s just look at Elijah. Does the Lord do that? No?

Look at how God responds though, in that moment, to this man who is thoroughly exhausted, stressed out at the very end of his rope, right? Because I mean, how far down the rope do you have to get before you say, Lord, just go ahead and take my life? He doesn’t, the Lord doesn’t lecture him. He doesn’t rebuke him for running. Matter of fact, instead,

What does he do but send an angel to him to help him sleep and to give him nourishment for his body? And in that instant with Elijah, God recognized that Elijah was just totally overwhelmed, totally overwhelmed. And that his

body needed the safety that rest and nourishment could bring and that’s what the Lord gave him. Before he asked Elijah to have any conversation about his mission and spiritually moving forward and all of that, he attended to Elijah’s physical needs. So

As we look at this example, we’re seeing that a great, great, I cannot stress, to have enough faith that you call on the Lord and he a fire down from heaven. mean, great man of faith, but yet he ran. In his humanness, he ran. And so that right there, when we look at that example, it helps us when we are talking with our clients.

Camille McDaniel (09:28.526)
for them to not be so harsh on themselves. I mean, you know, sometimes we can just lack grace for ourselves and just hold ourselves to standards that sometimes are above human nature. Because we’re holding ourselves to a standard of perfection. As we walk this faith journey in because we are

believers in Christ and because we love the Lord and we pray and we read, we should then be perfect. Now we can, we can get really, really strong in our walk, but we are not above temptation. In all things, we definitely need the Lord’s power and we can be more gracious with ourselves than sometimes we are. And so this is just one example.

that can help you to see that the Lord is not angry because you find that your body is responding. But the Lord wants to provide for your need and He is patient. And we can help our clients by also exhibiting that patience, not necessarily jumping right into explaining things for them, not breaking things down.

But when we see that they are decompensating in the session, we can just allow them rest. And when we see that they’re coming back to that rest and stabilization, and we’ll talk a little bit more about what that actually looks like in action, but then we can move forward.

then we can kind of ask things of them, ask them to process things, ask them to explain things. Elijah isn’t the only one whose body kind of told a story of trauma or distress, overwhelm and angst. Elijah does show us what it looks like to act out of survival. But let’s also look at King David. When you look in the Psalms,

Camille McDaniel (11:43.104)
it gives us language for how that might feel even on the inside. So Elijah showed us what it might look like in action. And David kind of describes what that might feel like. So we can almost imagine like what is our client going through on the inside? And some of you who are listening, you have been in your client’s shoes. And so you can speak for yourself of how it feels on the inside.

So in Psalm 31, we look and this is after David had been like hunted through the caves by Saul and he’s running for his life and imagine how stressful that must be, my goodness. You know and he describes in Psalm 31 not just a bad mood, this is not just like

It was a rough day with a lot of traffic. You know, no, he’s he’s talking about something way heavier, right? And he even says in that song, he’s talking about my eyes waste away with grief. Look at that language. My strength fails. My bones waste away. And you know,

kind of in that time, bones, you know, and strong bones, bones had to do with like vitality and life. And so he’s saying, my bones are wasting away. And so that tells you, kind of gives you an understanding of what he’s really going through. David is describing a full body depletion, full body overwhelm. And so we move from like Elijah and his frantic running to David and

his wasting away with grief and in his bones, right? This kind of shows like a picture, if you will, that is reflective of something that the psychology field describes when it talks about our nervous system, our automatic nervous system in action.

Camille McDaniel (13:48.926)
a it’s describing a very bodily function that the Lord placed within us to manage our feelings, our survival right but science has then broken it down and describing in more of a way that then we can say I see how how the Father has created this human system a little bit more now.

And so with the automatic nervous system, think of it as having like two parts. Think about car parts. You have like a pedal for gas and then you have a brake. And the sympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic part of this is the gas pedal, the go, go, go. This is where Elijah was, right? It is that fight or flight. And he was definitely showing flight.

It’s where adrenaline is dumped into our system so that you can actually get away from the threat. It’s protection, but it is also very exhausting. We have the other part of the nervous system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system. This would be the break. This is the part that helps us to rest. And sometimes,

if the gas pedal is slammed on, it’s like, you know, this gas pedal is not letting up, it’s stuck. The brake, the parasympathetic nervous system can sometimes act as an emergency shutoff. And that’s sometimes where you see the freeze or even collapse. And this is where…

you when you read about David and how he’s describing you’re like he’s worn out. He this is heavy depletion of the body right. Again people of great faith, people of great faith, people who walked and talked with the Lord

Camille McDaniel (15:59.308)
describing very human emotions and reactions. And so again, we have clients in front of us. It’s almost as though they have forgotten that the very people who walked with the Lord talked with the Lord and he talked back to them very audibly in certain cases.

sometimes in dreams, sometimes in visions, you but they had that type of close relationship with the Lord and even they had very human responses and reactions to distress and trauma that they encountered in their life. And this brings us to how do we handle this with care? You know, it’s not that we are

just helpless victims to our biology and the way that we have been constructed as human beings. We know that there can be ways for us to work through these reactions, which can give our clients hope, really. There are ways to work through these reactions. There are people who are doing it all the time. For example, there are many individuals like within the military or first responders.

where the very nature of their training is to help them to learn to command their thoughts so that they do not give way as easily to all of the bodily symptoms that are on high alert.

it’s really amazing to hear some of the stories that like military personnel might tell of survival of different things, war and being in war zones where their body is reacting but their training allowed them, their intensive training, I don’t even want to say that lightly, it’s almost like conditioning if you will.

Camille McDaniel (18:03.138)
has allowed them to stay very alert and present in the midst of their body reacting in all kinds of ways. So when your clients are like, what’s going on? Will this ever go away? mean, yes, there is definitely hope and there are definitely ways in order to help. And it doesn’t mean that you have any less faith or that you’re not as close. These are just human functions in response to.

traumatic events that have been experienced or have been triggered recently. And so again, we talk about this when we’re talking about working with our clients who have experienced these things. We want to also help impress for them that the average person, the average person experiencing deep distress or serious triggers that are coming back up are not trained.

to control the amygdala, right, from going all haywire and having all kinds of alerts blaring. It’s not that we just should know how to do this just because we have faith, right? You know, our faith is not like a genie in a bottle. You know, our faith is a continuous journey and walk and relationship as we continue to draw closer and closer to the Lord and learning how.

to get a handle through the walk with Christ and through the treatment modalities that are integrated with our faith, your client then gets stronger and stronger and is able to better handle some of the triggers and responses that will come up. So, you know, as counselors,

we realize that when a client is in that alarm state, if you will, it’s not about ignoring God’s promises on purpose but their system is just simply prioritizing survival in that moment. And our job is to not tell them to pray more

Camille McDaniel (20:13.23)
or to just trust harder, have more faith, obviously that’s not going to be helpful. We can again, take a look at how the Lord even handles his children, you know, as a guide, because that’s not helpful. And even our training, clinical training, tells us that that’s not going to be something to do. But then what does it look like? What do we do when a client happens to be very flooded in front of us in this session? Or if a client comes to session

talks about their experience in the public or at home where they got very flooded. So if they happen to be in session, then one of the things then that you want to go to is you want to help regulate them before you start getting them to to think analytically.

So if you notice that their breathing is becoming more shallow and faster in pace or maybe their breathing is slowing way down and you notice that maybe they’re holding their breath or they start to check out, disassociate, they’re not really with you, they’re here in body but it seems like they’re somewhere else right? You know we don’t want to have anyone trying to analyze just yet but we want to take the angle that

was taken with Elijah. Let’s create safety first. So it might be something like saying, you know, I can see that right now it seems as though this memory has brought up something very heavy for you. I notice your breathing has changed right now. Let’s just take a pause. Let’s just, let’s just feel your feet on the floor.

Let’s just inhale and feel the air fill our lungs. Let’s do that together, you know, so you help them know they’re not in this by themselves. You can have some people, you know, do really well to ground and create safety by using five senses. It doesn’t work with everyone. I actually have some clients that that does not work with, but there are many people who it does work with to help ground them.

Camille McDaniel (22:27.458)
by using the five senses so have them actually name a few things that they can see in the room or that they can hear, you know, or that they can feel or they can touch or they can taste. You know, again, it starts to bring them back to the here and the now.

and helping them to understand and you can even say that say it out loud if you feel that this is also warranted based on your clients reactions that you’re here with me we’re in this office we are in a safe space we are not back in whatever memory just came up if you happen to be doing telehealth then you can describe it as we are here over

the Zoom call together. You are in a safe space. No danger, no hurt or harm is there with you. We are talking together. And so let’s take another deep breath and remember we are safe here together on this platform. We are not back in the environment of your memory. Again,

once that person starts to settle, once their body starts to really anchor, then you can start kind of doing a little bit more analysis. Then you can start to

even bring in faith but do it gently you know so it might be that you start to say as your body starts to find a comfortable rhythm with your breath again just hold on to the truth that the Lord is near the brokenhearted he isn’t rushing you he’s sitting there with you he’s waiting patiently with us

Camille McDaniel (24:32.27)
just take another breath you know so you can kind of again allow it to be integrated overall and it can be then a strength for them as they are continuing to settle into being grounded again. So again you don’t have to choose um

your client doesn’t have to choose whether they are going to be like, you know, have faith or I’m going to have these experiences that come up in my body. It’s either or. Well, no, the goal is to reach not having such strong reactions in your body, but having faith is its own separate experience apart from what your body might do.

when it is triggered and the goal is to continue to integrate and lean on your faith as you are working out different goals and different type of treatments so that your body releases and allows itself to feel safer and safer and safer so that it doesn’t have to react. And that is a process. That is a process.

And so that’s the thing that we want to as counselors just be reminded of, that we are stewarding a wonderful individual in front of us, a complex, you know, human being, because the Lord built us with many layers and complexities, and that sometimes that human gets wounded.

And we don’t have to be afraid to learn about the science of the body because that only just highlights how awesome our Lord is and what he has created. And then learning how to help that body and mind to find safety and find comfort and find release of the experiences that were set out to do them harm.

Camille McDaniel (26:50.51)
and we are turning it around where they can be victorious. So again, I hope that this episode has given you much to consider and think about even within your own practice and as you are helping clients who question their faith because of things they have experienced in the ways their body is reacting.

In our next episode, we are actually going to be joined by Dr. John King. He is going to talk with us about the long road of recovery and especially recovery of traumatic events in men. And we are going to walk through.

everything from the beginning to the end of success. So I hope that you join me again next week for another episode. And I thank you greatly for continuing to share these episodes with those that you know who are both colleagues and well established in the field, as well as those who may be in grad school studying to be in this field.

I greatly, greatly appreciate it. So until we meet again, God bless.