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I want to speak honestly, but not noisily, about emotional and psychological harm.

Not to rehearse details.

Not to settle scores.

But to name something real.

I keep returning to Walter Brueggemann’s language of orientation and disorientation. There are seasons of life where things more or less make sense. Where the ground holds. Where the world feels coherent enough to live in without constantly questioning it.

And then something happens that pulls the ground away.

Disorientation arrives.

The familiar scaffolding collapses.

Meaning fractures.

Security drains out of the picture.

The Psalms know this territory well.

“All your waves and breakers have swept over me.”

“My tears have been my food day and night.”

“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever?”

I have ministered through things that most people would reasonably expect to be undoing. I have walked alongside too many people who have died far too young. I have been spat at. I have been assaulted three times — one of those assaults led to a conviction. I have witnessed suicide at close quarters. I have had hammers waved at me. I have been robbed.

These experiences were shocking and upsetting. They brought anger, grief, and questions that still surface from time to time. But they did not push me into disorientation.

Two things did.

The first was slowly coming to grasp the scale and seriousness of the climate and ecological emergency — not as an abstract issue, but as something that unsettled my sense of the future itself.

The second.

That was different.

Not physics, not global.

I don’t want to give it a name.

But it resulted in emotional harm.

It is this I want to speak about.

Not the details.

Not the people.

But the impact.

Only later did trauma studies give me language for what was happening. Trauma is not simply about what occurs, but about what overwhelms our capacity to make sense. It breaks the internal frameworks — the stories and assumptions — through which we understand ourselves, others, and the world.

That breaking did not stay in my head. It lodged in the body. Sleepless nights. Waves of nausea. A constant tightness in the chest. Ordinary conversations suddenly carrying threat. Words — casually spoken — taking on the power to undo me.

The Psalms again feel close at hand.

“My heart is struck down like grass and has withered.”

“I am poured out like water.”

“Darkness is my closest friend.”

It felt as though the stained-glass window of my inner life had been smashed. The light was still there, but it no longer fell in patterns I recognised. Just fragments. Sharp-edged. Disorienting. Impossible to put back together as they had been.

I found myself going back, again and again, to the conversations where harm had occurred. Replaying them. Re-entering them. Trying to work out what had been said, what I had said, what I should have said. This looping was not weakness. It was the mind’s attempt to restore coherence after rupture.

“Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?”

At times that search turned inward. I began to wonder whether I had somehow deserved it. Whether I had misread things. Whether the harm was, in some way, my fault. Trauma has a way of bending responsibility back onto the self, because self-blame can feel safer than facing the reality that harm was done — and that those with power were unwilling to name it or intervene.

Another layer of this, which I am still learning how to name, concerns attention and intensity.

I have never had a diagnosis, but I am fairly sure I am ADHD. In much of my work, this has functioned almost like a spidy skill. I adapt quickly. I plunge into creative tasks. I make connections fast. I can hold complexity, improvise, respond, imagine. In the work I do, that way of being has often been life-giving.

But what I experienced seemed to draw something different out of it.

The speed increased. Thoughts replayed faster and faster. A strong, insistent sense of justice made silence feel almost impossible. Conversations looped relentlessly. The same moments replayed again and again, with no obvious way to bring them to rest.

At the same time, something narrowed.

The creativity that usually opens outward began to collapse inward. Instead of generating new possibilities, my attention became fixated. Focus hardened into rumination. Energy that once moved freely became trapped, circling the same questions, the same scenes, the same unresolved tensions.

What is often a strength became, in this context, exhausting.

I name this not to pathologise myself, but to be honest about how differently the same traits can function depending on whether one is safe or under threat. What helps us flourish can, under sustained stress or injustice, become part of how the wound keeps itself alive.

Time has gone by.

I am okay.

The wounds are no longer raw. They do not dominate my days in the way they once did. But they have left their mark. They have changed the shape of things. What remains is not pain in the same register, but awareness — a quieter attentiveness to limits, to language, to the conditions under which people can flourish or fracture.

This disorientation reshaped how I saw both present and future. Confidence I had long lived with thinned. Trust became tentative. Assumptions I had relied upon no longer felt able to carry my weight. What I felt was grief. Not dramatic, but steady. The grief of something once inhabited that could no longer be lived in in the same way.

There was something humbling about this season.

For years I have walked alongside people who have lived with abuse in its many forms. I have listened. Supported. Stood with them. And then I found myself realising — not as an idea, but in my body — how exposed and fragile I am too. How words can wound. How power, when misused, can lodge itself in the nervous system and refuse to loosen its grip.

I did not walk this alone.

My wife journeyed with me through this season — steady, honest, present — even while carrying wounds of her own. There were times when we were both tired, both hurting, both unsure how to take the next step. Her faithfulness was not heroic in the dramatic sense, but it was real. And it mattered more than I can easily say.

Healing, such as it is, has been slow and unremarkable.

It has come through being in places that feel safe.

Through the patient listening of a small number of trusted friends.

Through time.

Through daily prayer — sometimes fluent, sometimes wordless.

“The Lord is near to the broken-hearted.”

“You have kept count of my restless nights; put my tears in your bottle.”

It has come through learning, again, how to be gentle with myself.

Trauma does not simply disappear. But it can be held differently. The stained glass is not restored to what it was. Instead, new patterns begin to form — not by effort or force, but through patience, safety, and care.

I am not “over it”.

But I am at peace with where I am.

More aware of my limits.

More careful with my heart.

More attentive to the weight words can carry.

I write this not to invite sympathy, but to offer something truthful.

My poems, and the public story of Lighthouse, can sometimes give the impression of a strong, resilient, charismatic leader. I name that here as a corrective. I am fragile. We all are. Real strength is not the absence of fragility, but the courage to live honestly within it.

I also write this because one of the enduring marks of abuse is concealment. Even for those who tend towards openness, who prefer to live as open books, there is a quiet pull to keep certain chapters hidden. Abuse breeds shame. It cultivates silence, secrecy, and the sense that some stories are safer left untold.

I do not want that.

I have been deliberately vague, not out of evasion, but out of care. Some of you reading this may recognise yourselves here. You may be in the thick of it. You may be replaying conversations, questioning your own reactions, wondering whether you are overreacting, wondering whether it is somehow your fault.

If that is you, I want to say this gently and clearly: harm does not have to be dramatic to be real. Wounding does not need visible scars to be profound. And healing — slow, uneven, often quieter than we would like — is possible.

Disorientation is not the end of the story.

The Psalms insist on this, even when they refuse easy answers.

“Weeping may linger for the night,

but joy comes in the morning.”

Not a return to what was,

but the slow emergence of something truer,

more grounded,

more compassionate.

The stained glass is changed.

But light still finds its way through.

-Rev’d Jon Swales