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Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series: Where Dharma Meets Trauma: A Chaplain’s Guide to Working with Suffering

Vanessa Able: Hello everybody. Hi. How nice to see you all. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I am so delighted to see so many faces here to join us for this installment of the Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series. Lovely to see you all. Today, a big warm welcome to Reverend Sumi Loundon Kim joining us from the East Coast. Sumi is the Buddhist chaplain at Yale University, where you've been working, I think, since 2018.

Sumi Loundon Kim: Mhm, that's right.

Vanessa Able: And before that, you were the Buddhist chaplain at Duke University for eight years. So, a lot of time spent in educational chaplaincy there. I'm just looking through your bio here on our website; you are also the founder of the Mindful Families of Durham and the primary teacher for that organization for eight years. Having a bachelor in fine arts in Buddhist studies and Sanskrit from Harvard Divinity School, you are the associate director for the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Massachusetts as well. On top of all of this, you've been a member of the Gen X Buddhist Teachers Sangha^[1] and you've been the board president there for many years. And if all of that isn't enough, and raising your children and everything else that you've done in your spare time, you found some time to pen a few books as well: Blue Jean Buddha, The Buddha's Apprentice, Sitting Together: A Family-Centered Curriculum on Mindfulness, Meditation, and Buddhism, and Goodnight Love: A Bedtime Meditation Story. Sumi, welcome. So delighted to have you here, and I'll pass over to you.

Sumi Loundon Kim: Thank you so much. Wow. I really appreciate being invited to connect with the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies, and I'm also impressed that there are 43 people online because that's about 33 more than we expected! [Laughter] So I guess this topic is hopefully going to be helpful. We have an hour together. I'm going to teach for about 45 minutes and leave about 15 minutes for discussion, and those of you who are in the chaplaincy program, at the top of the hour we'll have additional time where we can talk professional to professional.

I want to locate myself first in terms of the people I serve, and I'll do that with a few visuals. I do many things as a university Buddhist chaplain, and as one part of that, I'm also doing one-on-one pastoral counseling. Students will come with a tremendous range of issues that they want to talk about. Most of it is personal, but sometimes they're thinking about their career or their major. Occasionally, I get something that just delights me, like, "There's a ghost in my room. What do I do about the ghost?" But most of the counseling sessions tend to deal with personal and interpersonal matters.

There is also a great deal of trauma, whether that's identified or not identified just yet. Over the last 20 years, I've become a little more educated about how to work with trauma. Really, in the last eight years, I would say I've learned a great deal more. I do want to acknowledge that it is a continual process of learning and doing personal work, so it's a work in progress. But I feel confident enough now to share some of what I understand about meeting with people with trauma and how best we can support them.

In university chaplaincy, I'm generally meeting with someone in that one-on-one capacity maybe a few times during their student years at Yale. Sometimes it's just once, maybe with some email follow-up. Those of you doing other chaplaincies are going to have different exposures and durations with who you're meeting and how intense that is, whether you're in a hospital or on a Navy carrier. You're going to be accompanying people in different ways, but I'm hopeful that different aspects of what I talk about will still apply to your specific circumstances. I will be speaking out of my own experience as a university chaplain.

We're going to tackle this in three parts:

1. I'm going to talk a bit about that initial meeting that I have with the student (or client, or the person walking into your office).
2. I'll talk a little bit about the role and function of a chaplain when it comes to accompanying someone with trauma.
3. In the last part, which will be the briefest, I'll go over some trauma healing pathways to give you an overview of what you can suggest to people you're working with.

The Spectrum of Awareness of Suffering

When I have that first meeting—and sometimes, again, it's the only meeting with a student—I'm listening for two things as they share what brought them to me. First, I'm listening to get a sense of what they understand about their situation or their suffering. Then, I'm listening to understand what they already know about the resources and options before them to work with that suffering or trauma. Over the years, I've gotten a sense that people fall somewhere along a spectrum of awareness of their suffering.

What I see are people coming in mostly falling into the middle of this spectrum. They're either vaguely aware that something is not going well for them, or, more often, they really know what's going wrong in their lives but have no idea how to begin resolving it. That usually leads to feelings of overwhelm and despair, and those are the students I tend to be most concerned about. There are quite a few people who have correctly identified what they're suffering with, or what their trauma is, but they've come up with the wrong solution, or maybe one that isn't quite going to resolve things in the way they hope. From time to time, I meet students (usually grad students) who have very much understood what their trauma is and have done a lot of healing, but they feel like there's something missing—they're not quite there yet.

On either extreme end of the spectrum, I see very few students. There are those who are suffering but are completely oblivious to it. Then there are people who haven't really encountered major suffering, or who have resolved quite a bit and are in a really good place. They might be turning to Buddhism to look more at the flourishing side rather than the healing side. But again, I get very few of those coming to me because they're just not in a place to need that one-on-one support.

Let me share a few cases so you can get a sense of this:

• Lewis: He came to meditation regularly for a couple of years. It wasn't until a few years had gone by that he finally sought me out. He said he had been trying to use meditation to help lift his depression. I told him that might be difficult and asked what he thought about trying medication. He was resistant at first because friends had told him it had adverse effects and didn't work. I explained that isn't true for everyone; sometimes our brains need support, and once we get that support, we can try working with Buddhism and meditation. He started a low dose of an antidepressant and came back a few months later saying his only regret was that he didn't start the medication sooner. He felt much better, and because his brain had been recalibrated, he was actually able to meditate much better. Lewis correctly identified his suffering but was looking to the wrong solution.
• Gwen: She burst into tears almost from the moment we sat down. She shared that she had been struggling with bulimia. She had made good progress using her own willpower to not purge for about two weeks, but then had a major setback. She was so frustrated and had no idea what to do. Gwen was acutely aware of her suffering but didn't know the next steps to take.
• Kelly: A graduate student whose father was an alcoholic throughout her childhood and whose mother was very passive. Kelly had done extensive therapy, yoga, and had gone to adult children of alcoholic parents support groups. She had done a lot of healing, but noticed she still felt insecure, had low self-worth, and experienced rocky relationships. She kept being highly critical of herself when she "failed" to meditate or do yoga for the day. I recommended she pursue self-compassion practices and do a retreat, and she has really turned a huge corner.
• Jared: A freshman who wanted to do an interview with me for a podcast assignment. While he was setting up, I poked around to see if there was some unconscious reason he sought out a Buddhist chaplain. It turned out his parents had just separated, and his therapist suspected his mother had borderline personality disorder. Jared is an example of someone vaguely aware that something is difficult and reaching out implicitly.

As the person is describing what's going on, I'm getting an intuitive sense of where they are at. I often take time to name and validate what it is they already know for themselves. One thing we know about trauma is that it's a breach of trust, and it can lead to the person not trusting themselves. It can be very helpful for someone on the outside—especially someone they respect—to say, "You have articulated what's going on for you so clearly. You have such a clear grasp of what is happening internally and externally. Thank you for sharing that." Or to name, "You really have a good instinct about what is going to be helpful for you." Frankly, the fact that they're even seeking out a chaplain is a huge win, so just naming that helps. Helping the person come in touch with their healthy instincts and good intuition can do some of that repair work around broken trust.

When we speak to someone about their traumatic experiences in clear, compassionate, and appreciative ways, we're actually providing them with language for how they can start talking to themselves. Often, people with trauma or adverse circumstances have very tough inner critics. They have parts of themselves that can be quite harsh and severe, so providing that modeling is crucial.

Common Oversights in Identifying Suffering

Even as I'm helping to name what they're identifying, I'm also listening for things they might be missing. Many people either underrate or overrate various factors, including trauma, when trying to understand their problem.

In the big picture—especially for young people, though I suspect it applies across the board—when someone knows they're suffering, they tend to blame themselves. They think they're doing something wrong, or that there's something fundamentally wrong with them that is causing their suffering. This leads to a specific piece of logic: "If I'm the problem, then I need to change. I've heard Buddhism and meditation are great, so I'll try that to change myself." While Buddhism and meditation certainly can help them, there are often other fundamental things we need to look at first.

Here are the factors that people tend to miss frequently enough that I almost always ask about them:

• Medical Issues: A student came back from working with refugees in Greece and was experiencing brain fog, insomnia, and digestive issues. She assumed she had trauma from the intense summer internship. I asked if she had any other medical things going on, and she insisted she was a healthy person. I had her go through her body from head to toe, and she eventually mentioned she had been losing her hair. I told her that before we go into the psychological or spiritual world, I wanted her to get a full physical to rule out anything medical. It turned out she likely had an autoimmune issue. Both things can be true—she may have carried traumatic burdens from the summer—but we had to address the medical reality first.
• Circumstantial Realities: A student named James complained of low energy and brain fog, suspecting he had trauma. After listening, I learned his stepmother wasn't paying his tuition, so he was working multiple jobs and only eating one meal a day. I sent him to the dean, explaining that fatigue and brain fog can simply be the result of a severe calorie deficit. It's amazing what people overlook.
• Other People's Mental Health: Recently, a student blamed herself entirely for the dynamic following a breakup, feeling she was too emotionally volatile. The more she talked, the more I got the sense that it was actually her ex who had very serious mental health issues. Providing some education around personality disorders and the way trauma plays into these dynamics visibly allowed her to relax. She still had work to do on why she was drawn to that person, but the immediate self-blame was lifted.
• Family of Origin: A young woman named Tina was going in circles complaining about her boss, whom I knew to be a solid person. I asked about her past, and she shared that her mom was an alcoholic. Tina often had to take care of her passed-out mother, the finances, and her little sister. I explained that this background likely had a lot to do with how she was relating to her boss. She looked at me with hopeful eyes and asked, "So how long will it take for me to heal? Six weeks?" I gently explained it would take much longer, but she is doing well now.
• Unidentified Trauma: It's amazing how many people aren't able to identify trauma, even with the word being everywhere online. I met with a student casually for years who had an eating disorder and tumultuous relationships. Eventually, she casually mentioned she was sexually assaulted when she was 16. I said, "That is trauma," and that put us at a whole different starting point. On the flip side, sometimes people claim they have trauma for experiences that are big and painful but wouldn't necessarily be classified clinically as trauma.

The Role and Function of a Chaplain

As chaplains, we are there to listen and get a sense of what's going on to receive them. If someone has had a very recent traumatic event (in the last day or week), we can be there to help stabilize them. Our grounded presence, our compassion, and our equanimity can be very helpful in shifting that person into a more stable place.

I want to share a concept called the "window of consolidation," which I learned from Ralph De La Rosa's work^[2]. On the heels of a traumatic event, there's a window of a day to a week where the brain is still trying to make sense of what happened and encode a story around it. If, shortly after the event, the person is able to meet with compassionate, caring individuals who can help them interpret the event in safe ways, the event will be consolidated in a much less traumatic way. Conversely, if they are discounted, silenced, or blamed (e.g., a family member saying, "You brought it on yourself"), the trauma will encode in a much more painful way. If you're meeting with somebody right after something has happened, you can take steps to help that trauma consolidate in a less terrible way so they have less work to do over time. You want to make sure you stay well-regulated, work very gently, and establish safety without making them go into retraumatizing detail about the event.

For the longer term, we can help identify what healing pathways are available and appropriate. I think this is really where the overlap with a therapist ends. Therapists are going to have ongoing conversations with the person over time. As chaplains serving institutions where people are mostly passing through, we generally aren't providing ongoing therapy. Therapy might not even be the immediate next step. We might recommend a physical, community service, finding a group to belong to, or exploring somatic therapies like EMDR or Somatic Experiencing (SE). I might not be able to perform EMDR myself, but I can strongly recommend it to help process and encode trauma differently.

Where a Buddhist chaplain can also be exceptionally helpful is in destigmatizing and normalizing suffering. One of the fabulous things about Buddhism is that its core concern is grappling with and metabolizing suffering. Many people going through something difficult think everyone else is doing fine and assume there must be something fundamentally wrong with them. As a chaplain, you can say, "Actually, to be human is to experience suffering. What you're going through is normal." It is a huge relief just to hear that. I can also assure them that I know many other people who have experienced the same thing, and they have not only survived but gone on to thrive. That provides hope.

Sometimes we also need to adjust magical thinking around Buddhist concepts like emptiness^[3], non-self (anattā)^[4], and non-attachment. These can get wildly misinterpreted. People will say, "No self, no problem," or they hear "attachment is the cause of suffering" and decide they just need to detach from everyone they love and become a hermit. That is the worst thing for someone with trauma, who actually desperately needs human contact. We have to correct that.

People also tend to fixate on mindfulness meditation as a philosophy. While mindfulness is a powerful ally, I always have to elevate self-compassion and spiritual friendship (community). If you are going to pursue healing through Buddhism, you must work on self-compassion and you must find community. We can't do it alone.

Depending on how long we're in relationship with the person, it's also possible to provide the opportunity for some secure attachment or attachment repair, utilizing John Bowlby's^[5] attachment psychology framework (secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized). Providing a positive, stable presence—showing up to appointments on time, being a safe, comforting, and compassionate person—can be very helpful for a person who doesn't have secure attachments in their life. The way we relate to them provides modeling for how they can relate to parts of themselves in more secure, kind ways.

The Nervous System and Healing Pathways

I highly recommend learning about the "Window of Tolerance" framework developed by Dan Siegel^[6], as well as Polyvagal Theory developed by Stephen Porges^[7] and Deb Dana^[8].

When you are well-regulated, you are within your window of tolerance—you feel calm, safe, and stable. If there's a threat or stressor, your nervous system goes into fight or flight (sympathetic arousal). If the threat persists and you can't fight or flee, the nervous system drops into an interim state called freeze, and eventually into shutdown and collapse (immobilization).

It is deeply important to learn how your own nervous system works, and especially how to observe it in someone coming to meet with you. Taking time to observe is key: Is this person relaxed? Are they making eye contact? Do they have good prosody^[9] in their voice? Or do they seem agitated and hyper-aroused? Do they seem really shut down, with collapsed shoulders and a very small voice?

Knowing where they are with their nervous system allows you to use your own. If you are in your window of tolerance, you can actually co-regulate your nervous system with theirs to help bring them back into their own window. This unspoken, nonverbal presence is a huge part of chaplaincy. The more grounded and calm you are, the more their wobbly nervous system is going to align with it, and they're going to feel better.

This might come at a little bit of a cost to you. After the meeting, it's good to take time to reset your nervous system because we can absorb some of their dysregulation. Meditation is not always the right thing to do to reset. Sometimes slow walking meditation, grounding yourself in your senses, or pranayama^[10] are especially effective for re-regulating yourself very quickly.

When looking at trauma healing pathways, there are many resources and practices, such as self-compassion, Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, nervous system resets, breath regulation, trauma-sensitive meditation, and trauma-sensitive yoga^[11]. If someone with trauma really wants to keep doing meditation, we need to talk about how to adjust their practice so they aren't re-triggering themselves, experiencing dissociation (and thinking it's meditation), or being hyper-vigilant (and thinking it's mindfulness).

Learning about the nervous system's reaction to trauma substantially destigmatizes trauma for many people. You do not need to be fully healed in order to do chaplaincy work. You just need to be on your own path of healing while you do the work, staying aware of where you get triggered.

Q&A

Isho: Hello. Thank you so much for this gift. I am a person on the autism spectrum who is a chaplain. It's very interesting because one of the things I've come to observe is that CPE^[12] programs are rife with ableism and harmful, exclusive behavior patterns. They have created institutions of oppression where we are taught to be chaplains, and yet we are not chaplain-ing to each other. I've developed modalities and written about being a chaplain with autism, noting how pattern observation in a patient's room is a skill that would be beneficial to support all chaplains in developing, much like learning how to play the violin. The more we observe and practice, the more open the aperture becomes.

Sumi Loundon Kim: Thank you, Isho. You might want to reach out to Mark Miller, the Buddhist chaplain at USC, who is also on the spectrum. We have a lot of neurodivergent students at Yale, and serving as a chaplain with ASD, as well as serving others who are neurodivergent, is a very important aspect of the work.

Max: Thanks so much for your talk. I'm a hospital chaplain, so I've gone through CPE, and even now I'm studying to be a CPE educator. I'm sorry Isho that you feel that way; I think there are some of us in that training program who are trying to change the system. It was really helpful for me to hear your methods in working with trauma. They are totally different from the assessment models we're taught. I'm assuming you didn't go through the CPE method?

Sumi Loundon Kim: I did not. I took an ethnographic approach based on my own experience, but it overlaps pretty well!

Valerie: I just wanted to thank you. I am a psychologist and I am very touched and appreciative of all the resources you just handed out and the level of your speech. I found this wonderful.

Sumi Loundon Kim: Thank you. Much appreciated.

Vanessa Able: Sumi, thank you so much. I'm reading through the chat as well and really feeling the appreciation and gratitude for what you've brought to the session. There's so much to take away, and in the things that you've presented I've had so many aha moments. Thank you very, very much.