Dru Johnson (00:00)
you ever thought about the book of Job that Job might be a trauma survivor? Well, I hadn’t either. This week we have Dr. Michelle Keener, who is both a licensed therapist and she’s also an Old Testament scholar, she wrote this book on Job as a trauma survivor called Comfort from the Ashes.
where she explores through kind of a trauma lens how Job and the long sections of Job that nobody likes to read might actually be about Job healing. ⁓ And it has all kinds of amazing and interesting ways in which it’s connected to even church life or ⁓ Jewish community. So we’re gonna talk about that a lot. I’m gonna ask her lots of my own nitpicky questions about trauma ⁓ and PTSD, and we will get to the bottom of this. What is Job ultimately about?
If this podcast is of interest to you or it helps you think through things or helps you in any way, you can like and subscribe and you can give us five star reviews. Otherwise you can keep your little four and three star reviews to yourself. If you want to give to the project, you can at thebiblicalmind.org slash give. And if you’re a recurring donor of $20 a month or more, you get a free book, a collection of essays from our fellows and scholars on prophecy and poetry. Now,
to Michelle Keener.
Dru Johnson (01:23)
So what kind of hurdles or confusions or misunderstandings do you see with people just about the book of Job in the church?
Michelle Keener, PhD (01:32)
misunderstandings about Job in the church. So when I shared with a friend of mine that I was going to be doing my dissertation research on trauma in the book of Job, ⁓ he looked at me and said, I know Job. says I’m God, you’re not. So shut up. And I was like, ⁓ that’s our takeaway from the book of Job. Interesting. So I think there is a lot of that underlying feeling of, ⁓ Job spends a lot of time complaining.
Dru Johnson (01:47)
Wow.
Michelle Keener, PhD (02:00)
and then God shows up, smacks him down, and then Job has to carry on like nothing ever happened. And I would say I don’t think that’s what we see in the book of Job.
Dru Johnson (02:05)
Right.
Right. This is gonna sound random. Have you seen the movie Tree of Life? ⁓ okay. Well, put that on your list. ⁓ It’s Terrence Malick’s. I will warn you, it is like two and a half hours long and people either love it or hate it, but it is actually an exposition of the Book of Job with Brad Pitt and Sean Penn in it. But it’s very self-consciously. I mean, it’s…
Michelle Keener, PhD (02:14)
I have not.
Okay?
Well, that’s fascinating.
Dru Johnson (02:37)
It’s very intentionally exploring the book of Job if it were produced in the 1950s in Texas, if that’s what happened.
Michelle Keener, PhD (02:45)
That is a very specific. That’s a very specific genre right there. But okay, no, I’m going to write that one down.
Dru Johnson (02:50)
It’s a, it is an amazing
movie, but it frustrates a lot of people because there’s no narrative at all. It’s just, it’s almost like an impressionist painting, even like the camera, like does a lot of sweeps where you just kind of get this there and there. But even the, well, I’ll be very interested. I also almost like have you back on after you watch this movie to see what you think about it. And there’s like, he flashes quotes from Job up on the screen. ⁓
Michelle Keener, PhD (02:58)
Mm.
Dru Johnson (03:20)
But they even have a part where like the whole movie stops, I don’t want to give too much away, and it goes back to a cosmic creation in about 20 minutes of just working through creation. ⁓ The beginning of the universe. Yeah, and then pops back into the storyline. I mean, there’s no storyline, but pops back into the 1950s or early 60s in Texas. So anyways, that’s going to be a must watch for you. ⁓
Michelle Keener, PhD (03:33)
That sounds awesome.
I’m not sure if my husband’s gonna be happy with our movie night selection, but I’m excited for it.
Dru Johnson (03:51)
Yeah,
you just kind of have to tuck in and go along with it and at the end you’re just left with an overwhelming impression which in many ways I feel like that’s what some of the Hebrew poetry that’s what it does it just just overwhelms you with impressions right? ⁓ Okay so that’s all my stuff we’ll set all that stuff to the side. ⁓ Okay, old Job oldest or youngest book in the Bible for you or and does it matter?
Michelle Keener, PhD (04:04)
Mm-hmm.
Does it matter? No, I don’t think it matters. If I had to come down on a side, I would put it older. I don’t feel confident to say the oldest, but I would put it older.
Dru Johnson (04:22)
Okay.
⁓ Is that because of classical biblical Hebrew or just because of what it’s doing functionally?
Michelle Keener, PhD (04:38)
⁓ Some of the Hebrew, yes. ⁓ Some of it when we are looking at Job being a character who is not an Israelite and existing kind of in this role that we’re seeing clearly before the temple is established, before we’ve got the Levitical priesthood going on, and then looking at some of the connections with other ancient Near Eastern literature, ⁓ where we’ve got we have other examples of this sort of dialogue.
Dru Johnson (04:47)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (05:07)
suffering man literature. So I would put it older ⁓ rather than newer, but again, not confident to say, yes, this is for sure it predates everything.
Dru Johnson (05:19)
But it is Joe. Job is a dude quad dude. He’s just a guy who exists in the world, right? Yeah Excellent and Going back to that question of what people mistake with job. ⁓ Mean my feeling is that most people read the first couple chapters and then the last couple chapters and they don’t know what to do with the other stuff So what do you do with the other stuff? Why do you think it’s meaningful?
Michelle Keener, PhD (05:24)
just a guy. Yeah.
So I think that’s actually probably a really good way to describe it because one, the beginning and the end are both narrative, which are a lot more fun and a lot easier to read. And then you get to three through 42. And it is so much poetry. And it feels very and it is very repetitious and really kind of heavy. And there is a lot of I don’t understand why do we keep talking about this, what’s actually happening. And so it is a little bit like, let me just skip to the end and see how the story wraps up.
Dru Johnson (06:08)
Hmm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (06:13)
But for me, coming at it from a trauma perspective, that messy middle chaos is vital to understanding what’s happening in the text.
Dru Johnson (06:22)
Yeah, okay, so say more about that. Two things flash in my mind. One, I wonder if we’re ever talking about people who are just listening to the text being read versus trying to read it for themselves and parse out all the meaning in every last sentence. And then two, is that process of reading through or hearing these texts, how does that work in a trauma survivor that would be different than anybody else?
Michelle Keener, PhD (06:49)
Yeah. So I mean, both really good questions, right? ⁓ A little bit, maybe if we think about people who suddenly find themselves is starting in chapter three with the poetry, it’s almost like shifting from I’m reading a novel to I’m reading or listening to Shakespeare. That’s it. That’s a huge jump. Right. That we’re asking people to make. And then it just goes on and it goes on and it goes on. And there is so much of it. Right. And and from that trauma perspective, part of what
Dru Johnson (07:05)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (07:20)
I would suggest makes that poetic middle kind of off putting for a lot of us is because it really is reflecting the experience of trauma. Even when we read it, that we have to be willing to sit with it and we have to be willing to kind of verse by verse, line by line, go through this process, which even in our daily lives, if we’re sitting with someone who is suffering, if we ourselves are suffering, what do we want to do? We want to skip to the end.
Dru Johnson (07:35)
Mm.
Right.
Michelle Keener, PhD (07:50)
We just
want to skip through, hey, can we just skip this part and get to the happy ending? ⁓ And we do that in the church, right? Like, hey, I know this is really bad, but there’s going to be a testimony out of this. We want to hear your victory, OK? Do we want to hear the lament? Do we want to hear the pain? Are we willing to sit with that? And so my guess is that’s part of why all of this poetry is so kind of ee for people.
Dru Johnson (08:17)
I just keep coming back to Tree of Life. We’ll have to do 10 minutes or something. After you’ve watched the movie, I want to come back and talk to you again because I think, because you are naming some of the insights that come up in that movie. ⁓ Yeah, kind of, mean, culturally we can diagnose this like we’re microwave people. We like to cook everything very fast. We like to skip, you know, that kind of, you’re still hung up on that. We don’t have a lot of patience for that. ⁓
Michelle Keener, PhD (08:25)
It’s a deal.
Dru Johnson (08:47)
Are you a licensed therapist? you do, okay, so you’re a therapist. Sorry, I didn’t mean to slam whoever might not be fit in that category. But you are a therapist and I assume you deal with people who have various traumas. What does it tell you that people need to sit with things, with their body? Like what is the purpose of the sitting and thinking very slowly through all of, not just trauma, but like,
Michelle Keener, PhD (08:49)
Yes.
Dru Johnson (09:17)
know, one of the things that’s interesting to me about Job is that anybody who’s been through a trauma knows, like, the friend who comes along and tries to reason with you about what happened to you, and how sometimes that’s helpful and sometimes it’s really not. So I guess maybe how do we identify with Job if you’ve been through a trauma, and is that what Job is trying to do, or that’s just a happy coincidence of the text?
Michelle Keener, PhD (09:42)
Yeah. Well, what’s interesting, if I can share kind of a little bit of the backstory on why I even did this research, is I was in the final year of my coursework for my PhD and I was doing ⁓ an Old Testament writings class and I was supposed to be writing on the Psalms. And then I entered that season of suffering and I went through this really awful, terrible season and I had those friends, right? ⁓ but you know, God never gives you more than you can handle.
Dru Johnson (09:57)
Mm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (10:11)
And God works all things for good. you you just kind of hurry up and get to this happy ending. I was like, this is terrible. And this is not helping. And so I reached out to my professor and said, Hey, can I write on Job instead? And she, after she let warned me that, know, I’m not going to give you extra credit because you’re changing your topic. That’s fair. Totally fair. But she said, have you ever considered looking at trauma and the book of Job? And as soon as I started doing that.
the text started to make sense to me. And it is for that very reason you brought up that we look at Job as a man who is suffering, who is in this experience of trauma and he’s trying to make sense of it and his friends come alongside and not only are they trying to rationalize it and explain it away, they’re trying to put the blame on Job. Job, if you would just say you’re sorry, all of this will be fixed.
Dru Johnson (10:41)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (11:08)
And so it becomes this kind of two pronged battle where Job is trying to make sense of the universe. He’s trying to make sense of God. He’s trying to make sense of his place in the universe. And he’s trying to deal with his friends who are constantly telling him, this is your fault. And if you would just pray more, if you would just believe more, if you would just do more, then everything will be better.
Dru Johnson (11:29)
Hmm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (11:34)
And it was this incredibly powerful moment to see all of these factors coming together in this ancient text. And so how long have we as human beings been experiencing this? That where we are today, we can look at the book of Job and be like, dude, been there, right? Yeah.
Dru Johnson (11:49)
Hmm.
That’s brilliant. It just occurred to me in your explanation that how you read Job is, know, how people read Job is also how a lot of people read the Old Testament light of the new, right? Like, I don’t really need to know Jesus is coming. all you know, like this is this is all interesting stories are horrifying. Right. ⁓ So what do we need? Yeah. So going back to that issue of sitting with suffering, what
I mean, why do you suppose in your practice that humans have to physically, physiologically walk out trauma, you know, in daily life? Like, what’s going on? Like, what does that tell you about creation and us as creatures that we can’t just go, okay, God has a good plan, check, all right, let’s go, right?
Michelle Keener, PhD (12:46)
Well, I mean, that’s such a big question, right? There is so much emerging research right now on kind of the neuroscience of trauma. And we’re really starting to understand what happens physiologically, what happens neurologically when we encounter a trauma-inducing event. And what it’s showing us is that trauma is an involuntary response, right? I don’t get to choose how I’m gonna react to this.
Dru Johnson (13:09)
Alright.
Michelle Keener, PhD (13:13)
car crash or this diagnosis or this abuse. It is hardwired into my body and into my brain. And that means it was put there by God. That means that our trauma response is part of the divine design for us as human beings. And when we can start looking at it as not so much something to be fixed, because that implies, you’re doing something wrong.
Dru Johnson (13:25)
Anyway.
Michelle Keener, PhD (13:40)
but rather something that exists to protect us, to help us survive, and to help us move into a different understanding of the event. Suddenly it becomes a tool, and maybe gift is too strong of a word, but it becomes a positive tool that we can use to process things that we should never have had to experience in the first place.
Dru Johnson (14:07)
I never thought about that this physiological response in a broken world could still be a kind of a skill, a resource of some sort. think ⁓ thinking of post-traumatic stress, the kinds of things that trigger, and again, I’ve read Van der Kolk and I only have a pop psychology ⁓ understanding of these things. ⁓
But the triggering that happens is so feels so profoundly deep and uncontrollable and, you know, non volitional at kind of every level. I also wonder, like, okay, there is a real lack. Correct everything I’m saying here, but there seems to be a very deep lack of agency when these kinds of things happen to you when the initial trauma happens to you. ⁓ And then of course, any kind of triggering of the event feels like completely out of control.
And that just doesn’t feel good on lots of different levels. And so I wonder like why the kind of the time and the walking it out, and by walking, I just mean our body needs time and we need to do certain practices over time that’ll help. Like how is that helping us with something specific like the triggering events?
Michelle Keener, PhD (15:25)
I mean, that’s a great question. So one of the hallmarks of trauma is that it is, it’s an event that overwhelms our ordinary coping capacities. It is by definition, something that we don’t know how to process. That’s what makes it trauma, right? If I step on a Lego, I know how to deal with that. I might be angry. I might be in pain, right? My son’s going to get grounded, maybe, but I know what to do with that.
Dru Johnson (15:47)
Hmm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (15:54)
If I am in a life threatening accident, that is a completely different situation. so neurologically, we end up kind of shifting out of our executive functioning, logical, rational brain into the, the, we might call the survival brain. Or gen genuinely the only instinct is how do I survive this situation? And that takes precedence. That means we no longer process memories the same way we process narrative memory.
Dru Johnson (16:23)
Yeah.
Michelle Keener, PhD (16:24)
That’s why a lot of times people, look back at that event and I can’t remember it all. I just remember pieces and fragments. And that is not a failure on the part of a person. That’s what your brain was supposed to do. But because of that, that’s one of the reasons why triggers become so powerful. Because there is something that reignites those memories that have never been integrated and processed. And it takes us right back to that moment.
Dru Johnson (16:30)
Right.
Hmm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (16:50)
and all of those feelings, everything that was necessary to survive is now suddenly in the present again. And it feels real because in our brains it is real. And so to your point about walking it out, there is, there has to be a process of how do I reintegrate these memories? How do I take it out of this survival zone and into narrative memory?
Dru Johnson (16:57)
Mm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (17:20)
where I can choose when I wanna think about it and when I don’t. And that is a big part of the trauma healing process.
Dru Johnson (17:30)
Yeah, the, you know, Bezel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, which I’m sure, I just assume it probably has problems with it like everything does, you know, but it was very helpful for me to think through some things. One of the things that was very ⁓ enlightening is he says like, look, I was having veterans from Vietnam do talk therapy, and I seem to be doing more harm than good by having them talk about it. And so when you look at the book of Job,
it seems like it is a book where they’re trying to do talk therapy in some way, or rationalization therapy. Do you connect those two things together, talk therapy and what’s happening in the book of Job?
Michelle Keener, PhD (18:08)
I do but kind of for different reasons. So one of the common complaints I hear about the book of Job and it was one that I had for many years is why do they keep going around in circles? Why do they keep saying the same thing over and over again? Why couldn’t it been the friends say one thing, Job says one thing, God shows up and we’re done. But there is what appears to be a very intentional structure, right, in terms of these dialogue cycles and when they break down. And to me,
Dru Johnson (18:11)
Okay.
Hmm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (18:38)
That is actually a pointer to trauma because we see repetition, which tends to be very present in trauma processing. Because every time we go over it again, it’s giving our brain another attempt to resolve the issue. ⁓ so repetition, especially for maybe believers, church leaders who come alongside people who are in trauma, we need to be prepared for them to say the same thing over and over and over again.
Dru Johnson (18:53)
No,
Hmm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (19:06)
and
recognize that that’s part of the healing process. ⁓ And so I do think that that in the book of Job kind of points to the trauma processing. But to your point, it also points to the fact that sometimes just talking and talking and talking is not gonna work. Because where does Job actually find his resolution? It’s when God shows up, right? God shows up, and there’s more dialogue, God’s talking, he’s got a lot to say, but it’s when he encounters the presence of God.
Dru Johnson (19:28)
Right.
Michelle Keener, PhD (19:35)
that he is finally able to leave the ash heap and what appears to be resolve the trauma.
Dru Johnson (19:44)
I imagine that a lot of people, they were thinking about their own traumas in light of Job, they would say, okay, I just need God’s physical presence to manifest to me to be in absolute awe and fear for my life. And then I’ll be good, right? And maybe you could imagine somebody just praying for that to happen. So short of that happening, what do you think is a good Christian spiritual therapeutic encounter that we can learn from Job here?
Michelle Keener, PhD (20:13)
I mean, I think it points to the fact that we find so much healing in the presence of God, right? And maybe he is not going to show up in our living room in a whirlwind, which is probably a good thing. But as Christians, we can always be pointing people to and ushering people into the presence of God. Now, but what does that look like? Does it look like church fellowship? Maybe. Does it look like just sitting with someone?
Dru Johnson (20:25)
All right.
Michelle Keener, PhD (20:41)
when they’re crying? Does it look like showing up and cleaning their house and cooking them a meal, taking care of their kids? What does it look like to actually help point people to that healing presence and power of God? And in the church, are we making space for that? Or are we communicating to people, hey, once you get it figured out and you feel better, then come back. Or do we have space for anger? Do we have space for lament? Do we have space for confusion in our church?
Are we communicating that, it is okay to be upset? It’s okay to be angry at God. It’s okay to not understand what’s happening. And we want to welcome that and let you know that that is still a part of the body of Christ.
Dru Johnson (21:24)
Okay, on that point, I’ve got a rant here that I want you to assess. And it’s, you read the Psalms and it’s very clear that people are questioning God saying, where are you? What are you doing? Why would you do this to me? Why would you allow this? They’re blaming God for a lot of things. They’re mad at God. And then sometimes they go, okay, but I’m going to trust you, right? And then sometimes they don’t, know, Psalm 88 is like, personally, it’s very comforting to me. I don’t think it is to most people, but…
Michelle Keener, PhD (21:28)
Go for it.
Dru Johnson (21:54)
darkness is my only friend like really rings true in some cases I I feel like churches because they stay away from that material in the Bible They don’t ever emotionally prepare people like so my students when I when we actually go through laments They’re very uncomfortable with them and they do not like the way the psalmist are speaking and they feel like irreverent and wrong and they just have no place to categorize it so I almost feel like if we just included
this material from the various places we find it in scripture, we could, I don’t know if it’s emotionally prepared, but people would have words, the sentiment, the, ⁓ as the space, the safe space to do this. Does that critique that?
Michelle Keener, PhD (22:40)
I mean, I love it. I think it makes so much sense. ⁓ One of my favorite things to do is I take a lot of this material that you see in Comfort in the Ashes and I provide trauma trainings for churches, for church leaders and say, hey, here’s some suggestions. This is what trauma is and here’s how you can help ⁓ respond to trauma survivors. But part of that is also how do you create that trauma equipped ministry? How do you create that space? And some of it is exactly what you were saying.
Dru Johnson (22:52)
Hmm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (23:09)
We need to, and maybe it is prepare people, maybe that is the right way to phrase it, but to let people know just because you’re in this building, just because you’re a Christian, just because you have faith in God doesn’t mean that life’s gonna be perfect from here on out. And I think too often we perhaps unintentionally communicate the message of hey, you raise your hand, sign the card, walk the aisle, come to the altar, and your life’s gonna be great now. And that’s just not.
always true. And the Bible tells us that cover to cover, the Bible tells us in this world, you will have trouble. Right. And and so to communicate to people that the only thing we are really valuing are the victories, the happy endings and the testimonies, we’re doing a huge disservice. Because then when the trials do come, they’re on people are unprepared. And then we start feeling, ⁓ is this my fault?
Did I do this because I didn’t pray enough, I didn’t give enough, I didn’t serve enough. And that is a really painful place for people to be. And I would suggest it’s theologically inaccurate. So how can we do a better job of making space for all of those lament feelings and anger and confusion and all of that?
Dru Johnson (24:15)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Mmm.
⁓ It almost sounds like you’re saying ⁓ don’t create a church that is just basically Job’s friends, ⁓ but actually come alongside. I wonder too, like the testimony is such a powerful thing in the tradition I became a Christian in as well. And everyone, I mean I can maybe count on one hand in the last 30 years when I’ve seen it happen where somebody gave a testimony where they said
I’m just mad at God and I don’t understand what to do with all this hurt and that’s where I’m at right now. And people said, amen sister or amen brother. It’s like there’s no place for that. It’s only when you get through it that it seems to be the only appropriate place for it. So maybe including that, I feel like that’s what the Psalms are. They’re testimonies of people who are at that moment, right? Okay.
Michelle Keener, PhD (25:27)
Yeah.
Absolutely. I would agree with you 100%. I mean, one of the most powerful things I ever saw happen in church, and it happens to be the church that I’m a part of now, ⁓ our pastor just got up one day and said, hey, I am really struggling right now. There was a lot going on with medical diagnosis. There’s a lot of things happening. And he said, I’m really struggling.
and I really need you as my church family to pray for me. And it was so powerful to see people come forward and pray for the pastor. And it struck me as how willing are we in the church, especially people in positions of leadership, to be able to have that level of humility and to be able to say, I struggle too sometimes and I don’t have all the answers.
Dru Johnson (25:58)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Michelle Keener, PhD (26:21)
and what that then modeled for the church, I thought it was incredible.
Dru Johnson (26:27)
It’s crazy that this is just not every day. This isn’t just Tuesday at a church, Like what you’re saying in some ways is not rocket science at all. It’s just the way we ought to exist in the world, but it does feel like we’re far away from that. A lot of church settings. What do I know? I’ve only been to a few churches. ⁓ I am interested in what you think about, I don’t know what to call it, the ubiquity of trauma talk.
amongst people my children’s age. They’ve all been trauma. And of course, some of them have been traumatized, right? Legitimately traumatized. To the point now when I talk about depression, anxiety, or trauma in class, I put the DSM-5 up on the screen and say, when I’m talking about these, this is what I’m talking about, right? ⁓ But I wonder if it’s muddied the waters of the conversation ⁓ for you, even as a therapist, where people are over identifying or misidentifying.
Michelle Keener, PhD (26:59)
That is fair.
I think it has been good and bad, or maybe I should say helpful and not helpful. There’s my therapy language. Is it helpful or is it not helpful? Because on the one hand, it is normalizing things that had been kept silent for a very long time. I look at my parents’ generation, they would never have these conversations and especially not in public. On the one hand, the normalizing of that language and the normalizing of acknowledging
Dru Johnson (27:30)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michelle Keener, PhD (27:54)
when we’re suffering and we need help, super helpful, that’s awesome. On the other hand, it runs the risk of minimizing and devaluing genuine trauma, genuine depression, genuine anxiety, right? Because essentially if everyone is traumatized, then no one is traumatized, is kind of what we run the risk of. And so it is a little bit of a push-pull tension.
Dru Johnson (28:15)
Right.
Michelle Keener, PhD (28:23)
where we certainly don’t want to see, and because it’s my area, I’ll focus on trauma. We don’t want to see trauma kind of stuffed back into a little dark box, which is on the super nerdy side. When you look at the history of trauma studies, that’s what tends to happen, right? So Freud brought it up, started noticing some really scary things about his peers, and it was shuffled to the side, right? Yes. And then…
Dru Johnson (28:48)
Is this his Venetian women?
Michelle Keener, PhD (28:52)
⁓ You know, World War One, World War Two, we start to see it resurge, but then it gets squashed down again. And then now we’ve got like Vander Kolk and the post Vietnam era, and then Judith Herman bringing that in with ⁓ domestic violence survivors. And that’s kind of where we are now. And so we don’t want to run the risk of repeating that cycle and saying, well, there’s too much talk about triggers, so we’re just going to ignore it all. But there is room for this discussion of
Dru Johnson (29:17)
Right.
Michelle Keener, PhD (29:21)
we need to probably have a bit more honesty and nuance. ⁓ You hey, your teacher told you to put your phone away. ⁓ You’re not traumatized. You’re mad, right? But you’re not traumatized. And so bringing it into the conversation and being able to, as you said, with the DSM even, ⁓ being able to say, this is what we’re talking about when we use these words. That I would suggest would be helpful.
Dru Johnson (29:45)
Yeah.
Michelle Keener, PhD (29:48)
to keep the conversation going, but also to be a little bit more clear in what we’re talking about. Sorry, that was my rant.
Dru Johnson (29:53)
Yeah, accurate, right? ⁓ No, no, no, that was great because I
think there is a cliche in this language. And in fact, I just implore my students, like, if you feel really nervous when you walk into a room with a bunch of people you don’t know, you don’t have anxiety necessarily. You’re just anxious. You know, if your boyfriend or girlfriend broke up with you and you’re not eating and you know, you’re
in bed all day, you’re probably depressive, but you probably don’t have clinical depression, right? And by the definition. I don’t know if I have, so I say, you know, we’re all depressive and anxious in various ways. I don’t know if there’s an alternative word for trauma or traumatized, because like you said, I had to stop a student once, I was having coffee with her and she said, my mother used to make me eat my vegetables, you know, fastidiously and I’ve been traumatized by it ever since. And I was like, look.
Maybe you don’t like vegetables or whatever, but that’s not traumatizing. I didn’t know what the other word would be though. ⁓ Distressing, I guess maybe.
Michelle Keener, PhD (30:56)
distressing is a good word.
Yeah, it’s a tough one because I mean, trauma, again, it has just become so widespread and so widely used. Yeah, we don’t really have a better one. Yeah, distressed, you know, you were upset, you were hurt, you were wounded. I like wounded. I use wounded a lot actually, now that I think of it, working with clients, I do use wounded a lot. ⁓ Because it conveys, right? That yeah, you were hurt. And it still hurts.
Dru Johnson (31:15)
Yeah, that’s a good one.
Yeah, it doesn’t go away. It’s got to heal. Yeah, that’s a great metaphor. ⁓ And there might be even some neurological truth to it. I mean, who knows? ⁓ Yeah, I also think about, you my dad was a Vietnam vet. All my friends when I was growing up, their dads were Korean War Vietnam vets. you know, I was in the drug wars in ⁓ South America when I was in the 90s.
Michelle Keener, PhD (31:26)
Might not be trauma. Yeah.
Dru Johnson (31:54)
And it really has dawned on me that children experience their parents PTSD, like it’s worse or it’s at its greatest peak. If you’re just experiencing normal PTSD from normal traumas, like I say normal, like run of the mill trauma, run in the middle PTSD. I experienced that as my, and I look back now, I’m like, that was PTSD. Like my dad was free, you know, that like, that was clearly PTSD.
But ⁓ I didn’t recognize it at the time. And then you grow out of it, I mean, I think for most people, especially combat veterans, 20 years later, you’re better than you were, right? And I have a very good friend who has severe, severe PTSD from his time in Afghanistan. But he’s better. He’s better than he was a few years ago now, right? And so I wonder if you have any experience with that kind of generational
maybe I feel guilty as a parent, my kids were experiencing what I was experiencing when they were the youngest and the most impressionable. And now I’ve gotten better at things and my dad did as well. And I wonder if there’s like, is there any way around this or is this just how the chips fall? And ⁓ what do we do with this?
Michelle Keener, PhD (33:09)
I mean, there’s a lot in there, right? ⁓ And that’s okay, we love that. And I can relate to it. Some, my husband is a retired Marine, three combat deployments, and we had two young children when he was deploying. They’re grown now. ⁓ But it is, there’s a couple of different things, right? The person who is experiencing the PTSD or the trauma response, whatever we choose to call that, because there are kind of gradations of it.
Dru Johnson (33:11)
I’ve always got a lot in there. Not unloading.
Right, right.
Michelle Keener, PhD (33:40)
There are ripple effects and it ripples in our own life. ⁓ When I have clients who come in who present with really unhealthy behavioral ⁓ strategies, so it could be addiction, it could be ⁓ any form of addiction really, or any kind of self harm, my trauma detector is already up.
Dru Johnson (34:03)
Right, right.
Michelle Keener, PhD (34:03)
Right?
And so there’s this ripple of, no, I’m here because I am, I’m drinking too much. I’m cheating on my wife. I’m, you know, looking at porn, whatever you’re doing this, but the root of it is here. It’s years ago. Right? And so there is that ripple in the individual life, but then there are also the ripples of what happens to those who are around us and those, especially those who love us because they will tend to bear the brunt of our processing and our healing.
And for children, what we tend to see is how is it impacting their development? How is it impacting their attachment style? Because those are the two primary things we’ll carry into adulthood. The way that we relate to other people, ⁓ the way that we perceive our place in a relationship. And a lot of that can be influenced by the healing work our parents were doing or weren’t doing when we were little itty bitties.
Dru Johnson (34:41)
yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Michelle Keener, PhD (35:03)
Is it fair? Of course not. We live in a broken world. There is very little that is fair in this world. But it’s not hopeless, right? There is always a path forward and there is always a way to start healing these deep wounds, even if it’s decades later.
Dru Johnson (35:22)
Yeah, I also think, and this is just the naive version of me, but when you look at the ripple effects, living, okay, I’m gonna be very careful how I say this, living a good Christian life, and I mean that in a very biblical sense, a faithful Christian life in a faithful Christian community, even though that’s gonna be ugly and broken and all kinds of things.
Seems to me to have a lot more power than, I mean, not that that solves anything, but it actually ameliorates a lot of the ripple that comes with trauma as well. But Job’s friends always teach us not necessarily, right? coming back to Job then, I wonder, before I leave you, liturgically speaking, Job is a big book.
You know, one of the reasons that I assume a lot of people avoid Job is it’s difficult to dip in and, you know, to read a few passages for your daily devotional and get something meaty out of it. How do you suggest that we imbibe in Job?
Michelle Keener, PhD (36:28)
⁓ I mean, I honestly suggest and this is this is like the worst possible suggestion, but start at Job one and go through because each each chapter is important. And honestly, this is this is what I have told people. And again, really unpopular opinion. Here’s what I say. Start at Job one. You read through the whole book, then reread the epilogue and then go back and then read the rest of it.
Dru Johnson (36:36)
Amen sister.
nice.
Michelle Keener, PhD (36:58)
Because
one of the things I’ve noticed in interpretation of Job is how you read the ending will impact how you read the beginning. And it colors what you think is happening for the rest of the book. ⁓ And so we get to some of those really difficult interpretive questions around ⁓ Job’s, I don’t know, put my scare quotes, repentance, because I don’t think that’s what happens.
Dru Johnson (37:10)
⁓
Michelle Keener, PhD (37:28)
⁓ and what God says in the divine speeches. How you read those definitely impacts how you read the rest of the book. So I say read it through all the way. Just, you know, give yourself a week, two weeks to do it because it’s heavy and then reread the ending and then go back and read it a second time and then see what’s coming up for you.
Dru Johnson (37:48)
Yeah, really is… Well, I don’t want to get in trouble here, but it’s like one of Paul’s letters. How can you just read a chapter? You got to read the whole sermon, right? You can’t just dissect the sermon. But it is a big ask. ⁓ And of course, for us, we constantly are telling people they ought to be reading entire biblical books, maybe even multiple times in a weekend to see the pattern. But it is difficult with Job to see some of these patterns emerging. And I mean, if the goal is to kind of…
let your body go through a process with this literature, you gotta do the process. can’t, you I sound like an AA meeting at this point, but you gotta work the process, right, for it to work for you. ⁓ Besides that, any ⁓ final commentations about how we should be thinking? I mean, I’m very interested in, you think he doesn’t repent, okay, so what do you think is going on there? I might be with you on this one, so.
Michelle Keener, PhD (38:33)
and it brings up that interesting…
⁓
I would go with it’s not, you know, the troublesome verse, right? ⁓ What is it normally translated as? Therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. I hate that translation and I don’t think it fits. I don’t think it works. But that’s just me. Lots of people disagree with me and I’m OK with that. What I think that.
Dru Johnson (39:10)
Is it shoov in that
sentence? Is it?
Michelle Keener, PhD (39:13)
I don’t have it in front of me. ⁓ what I think we see happening is a resolution of trauma. And because again, we have to again context, right? You can’t just read that one verse and think we know what it means. What has what has happened before that? And then let’s look and see how God responds to Job in the prose epilogue.
Dru Johnson (39:15)
Okay, no, it’s fine, it’s fine.
Michelle Keener, PhD (39:40)
where he is commended, where he is restored to this priestly role, where he receives double recompense from God, where he is reintegrated into his community. And so from a trauma theory hermeneutic, what I suggest we see is a resolution to a trauma response, where in that Job is now, he has experienced something that the text does not make clear to us.
but he has experienced something in the presence of God that has allowed him to reach a place of resolution, of healing, and of integration of the trauma where he can now rejoin his community. I would frame it that way.
Dru Johnson (40:20)
And then the, not to put words in your mouth, but the way that might impede us from getting there is if we’re going to Job saying, ⁓ how do we make God good and not, you know, this isn’t, God is not doing evil. God’s not a trickster. We’re basically trying to defend God rather than listen. And the book of Job is going like, no, that’s not what I’m talking about. Like, of course God is good, but like we can work all that out. ⁓
I am very excited for you to watch the Tree of Life now because my interpretation is I think that’s exactly the direction they took Job is that this was about healing and not about like God’s character is not impugned. It’s really about people healing. So you can tell me what you think whenever you do get around to watching it, but you do have to carve out two and a half hours.
Michelle Keener, PhD (41:13)
I will, I have no problem doing that. I have no problem. I’ll send you an email and be like, okay, I watched it. Yup.
Dru Johnson (41:16)
Yeah.
Alright,
let’s go. Alright, well, Michelle Keener, thank you for your wisdom.
Michelle Keener, PhD (41:24)
I appreciate you having me Dru, thank you.
