Why I’ve Pivoted to Writing Christian Trauma Recovery Content

Years ago, when I was just getting my feet wet in the water of serious business writing, I had a client who kept sending a draft back. It wasn’t that the overall message or tone was bad. They liked the majority of what I’d put on the page. But they kept coming back to single sentence that wouldn’t let them sleep at night. The analogy I’d used wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t right, either.

Eventually, the client came up with an analogy of their own they loved. We ended the project on great terms.

But the line nagged me.

Why hadn’t I been able to come up with anything that fit?

Experience.

Or rather, a lack of it.

Green cactus in close up photography, Ann H from Pexels; calligraphy pen background, Mattjeacock; edited by Wanda Thibodeaux via Canva Pro

What trauma writing requires — and why most writers can’t offer it

Analogy — or more broadly, the way we describe something in any way — is built on our understanding of multiple things that are. The experiences we’ve had inform not only the word choice and connotation, but also the feelings the descriptions evoke. If we haven’t had specific experiences, we don’t have the foundation to reference anything that pulls the accurate emotion.

More recently, as I read more and more content about CPTSD, it dawned on me that many writers — including therapists and counselors who have studied trauma extensively — often can’t write about trauma recovery well for the same reason I couldn’t write the business sentence. They’re not bad wordsmiths. Their lack of personal experience just means they struggle to build the right foundation survivors can relate to and see themselves in. Instead of comparisons or imagery that cuts past all the survivor’s defenses with incredible sensitivity, they end up with copy that’s clean and professional — and which also feels generic or not quite right to the survivor.

The difficulty here is that if you have been through trauma, you have to be far enough along in your own recovery to write to heal, not to be healed. This is the space in which you can find and express the universal truths about what trauma is and the consequences it has, rather than simply sharing your own story in the implicit, subconscious quest to understand it.

The ghostwriters who are actually in this space — individuals who have the mind of a thoroughly trained clinician or pastor, coupled with matured personal experience that allows the limbic system to almost automatically red flag phrasings or assertions that might land wrong for survivors — are rare.

The ones who deliberately choose to make trauma writing their niche instead of something more popular are even rarer.

Ones who narrow their trauma writing underneath the deeply felt, hard-won experience of a Christian lens are rarer still.

I am one of them.

What one sees, one is obligated to use

I write well about trauma because I can intellectually keep pace with it. But I also write well about trauma because my bones feel the shape of the page and tell me how close the words are to the universal truths of pain and realities of God.

I’m not pivoting from general business ghostwriting into trauma recovery content for money — general corporate clients pay well and, in complete honesty, are a bigger pond to fish in. It’s not because I enjoy repeatedly sitting in the mire of trauma topics, either — there’s a cost that comes with sitting in the ashes again and again. Rather, I’m pivoting to trauma recovery content because I now understand this combination of intelligence and felt experience inside faith to be the needed skill it is. I can’t, in good conscience, through the refusal to use it, leave untouched the barriers that keep survivors from reclaiming the joy God wants them to have.