Phil Rowlands

Hello, my friends!

Today, I want to explore the topic of PTSD and trauma. For those who don’t know, PTSD stands for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Just to open the can of worms, we can encounter this through the natural world as well as through the church.

When I was a young boy, I unfortunately experienced severe trauma from getting badly burned—3rd-degree burns to 30% of my body—and I was only around 2 or 3 years of age at the time. I spent a few months in the hospital recovering. Apparently, prior to that moment, I was a fairly placid child, but afterward, I was terribly unsettled, a different child really.

All this was back in the '70s, so many of the mechanisms we have in place today to try at least to understand disruptive behaviour in children and what might be a path to abating that were not a thing, so I just lived out of that, and life compounded from there, with much more trauma piled on through drug addiction, military service, and a myriad of poor choices in my 20s.

Up until the past 18 months, I had lived with severe anxiety all my life. Fortunately, I discovered—or really, God led me to—a GP naturopath who found natural remedies through compounded vitamins, especially formulated to treat me, and well, it worked a treat. After a lifetime of night terrors, they abated and never returned. I no longer get really anxious, and I don’t seem to get depressed any longer, well, not the spiralling sort anyhow, just the normal low mood on occasion, but that seems to be super rare.

I’m now in a place where my nervous system is still pretty thin on the ground, so I live in a self-procured—well, God provided in a way—utopic slow burn of an existence. I quite like and enjoy my life these days, far from all those days when I lived as a suicidal Christian, which was most of my Christian walk really until I had a revelation of Grace.

So, for me, I don’t do hard. I don’t take the mountain anymore. I don’t push through or throw caution to the wind. I just stay in the centre, I stay in the mellow yellow bit, the soft gooey centre in Christ Jesus. If I find myself in a position of getting rejected—not by just a random person or anything, but by someone in my world—I still have panic attacks, which is annoying, but they only last for a day, and I settle down. This has probably happened a handful of times over the last few years, sadly. People can be such people sometimes. Apparently, in the TV show 'The IT Crowd,' I never really watched it, but one of their favourite lines to say is, “People, they are such bastards.” I find it funny because it’s just so true, God bless them.

Thankfully for me, I found grace in 2017, July 23 actually, and I'll chat about that and how it happened another time, but coming out of legalism and religiosity was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It turned my life upside down and changed everything, including the state here in Australia that I live in, but all for the better, so, so glad about that.

When I first came into grace, I was really angry at all the pastors that perpetrated all their religious rubbish upon me for all those years, but eventually, I came to the place where I was just, well, they just don’t know, and I could scream at them all day long, and they would still most likely just keep preaching religion and heaviness upon people, as that is just the common course in the Church these days. Preaching a message of insufficiency and condemnation.

I find these days that I absolutely can’t tolerate or stand false teaching. It feels like I’m being abused in a way, like it’s being spoken over me, like it’s a fiery arrow headed straight toward me, like a blanket or covering coming toward me that I don’t want to receive. Over the last few months, I’ve had to speak out against much rubbish doctrine, and the heaviness I feel in those moments, having to deliver a message of “what are you thinking, why are you preaching that,” is a heaviness I really don’t enjoy. After those moments, I have to withdraw, come back to my sanctuary, come back to my little castle in the sky, my 5th-level apartment, a place where I feel safe and no one can touch me or press into my world uninvited, my super safe place with just Jesus and I, well, and one of my beautiful sons too.

I think all the trauma I experienced in life definitely affects how false teaching and false doctrine impact me when I am near it or close to it. From what I know, trauma lives in your body in a way and not just in your memory. We have reactions in our bodies that we have very little control over other than clinging to Jesus and praying our way through it. I’ve been involved in two churches in recent times that have many falsehoods in what they are preaching, and both in very different ways, one left-leaning and one right-leaning. Both destructive doctrines in their own way, one overpromises and the other under promises. I much prefer my centrist ideals. It’s all about Jesus, and He is both loving and holy. You can’t preach love without holiness, and you can’t preach holiness without love; they both work hand in hand.

For me, due to my life experiences and historical trauma, both through life circumstances and many years of toxic spiritual abuse at the hands of zealous religious but well-meaning brothers and sisters in Christ, I am not suited to putting the headgear on and putting up with wrong doctrine, as I’ll call it out every time, and the consequences are always harsh, lol.

God has made us all very differently and unique, one for this and one for that. Some people are outfitted and anointed well to work inside toxic situations and drip by drip bring the light and bring change, but for me, it’s all or nothing. I have a local church that I came up in grace through, and that’s where I’ll be revisiting over the next weeks and months, as it’s a safe place, with sound doctrine, but I choose now to hold loosely to fellowships as such. I prefer to let Christ be the centre of my life, and church and my brethren are peripheral to that because people come and go, but Jesus is with me for life and eternity.

So be blessed, my friends, a bit of a heavy one today, but if you are struggling with trauma, cling to Jesus, cling to Him who loves you, and if you think you aren’t much to God, you are wrong. You are everything to Him. He made you out of love, and He gave His beautiful Son Jesus to be made sin for you, so you could live in the inheritance of all of who He is. Let His kingdom shine in you, and let Him lead you, even in times of injustice and in times of uncertainty, for He always makes a way where there is no way.

Phil