Six years ago, my friend asked me to co-facilitate a robot group for children who needed help with their social-emotional development. We had a great time building relationships and helping kids and their families, and it opened up a window of learning for all of us. Many of the behavioral disturbances we see in children are because they are triggered from the trauma they’ve survived. As trauma-surviving children grow up in our homes, neighborhoods, and schools and become teenagers and adults, it’s hard to understand why they have such strong reactions to certain people and situations. Perhaps it’s even more difficult for us to understand how and why we get triggered.
Last weekend I went down to my wood shop and built a robot. I’m calling my robot TILT. Like many of the people feel that I help, each of the pieces I used to build TILT had been discarded by others and were just sitting around my shop hoping to be noticed, valued, and used to make a difference in our world. Like most of the outside-the-box visions I have, I had to fight off all the negative, self-defeating, critical messages that surfaced as I was creating TILT.
Much to my surprise, I not only loved making something out of nothing, I found myself being mysteriously drawn to this little blockhead. The longer I gazed into this small creature, I started to identify with it. And then I began to recall story after story about how I became trauma informed. I felt the Holy Spirit nudging me to use TILT to tell my story, to help people understand trauma, and to engage in conversations about God’s healing.
You see, TILT is a little off. Like the bumper games we used to play at the arcade or bowling alley, if you got too rough with it, the game would shut down and a huge “TILT” sign would appear on the screen, and it wouldn’t work anymore. We sometimes got the same messages at the amusement park when a ride was broken and would be closed.
My first TILT was a brutal blow to the face when I was only a two-year-old. Being an adventurous boy, I was running with a baton behind my head, and I tripped and faceplanted on the concrete floor. I lost my front four teeth, and they didn’t come back in until I was eight years old.
The trauma to my head wasn’t the biggest blow. What hurt more than the initial pain was how people looked at me. I felt like a freak. People laughed at me. They called me names, and every time I came back there for family gatherings, people retold the story of how I knocked my teeth out. They would laugh and laugh at me. All I felt was shame and rejection for being the way I was, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
Where is God when bad things happen? I found God through the tender care of my mother. Imagine having no front teeth and trying to eat corn on the cob each summer. I’d try to use my back teeth, and it didn’t work too well. My mother would take a knife and cut all the corn off the cob so I could enjoy eating it like everyone else. She was Jesus to me during my toothless years doing the little things that allowed me to function when I felt bad about myself. She didn’t look at me any differently just because I did something stupid and knocked my teeth out.
It was the shaming laughter of those who were supposed to love me that contributed to me beginning to turn inward, against myself, and against people.
When do you struggle with feelings of shame, rejection, or think you’re stupid? What do you do?
