1. You might have sensed that there is something terribly gone wrong in a person’s life in the past. Start with finding out what went well in their life. Use the principles of Helping through Blessing out of my book “From Shame to Peace”. Encourage wisely, not overdoing it, but share truthful statements. Avoid any criticisms! You need to pray for this person and ask the Lord to prepare the ground, that they would want to open up.

2. Start talking about yourlife. Tell him or her how you handled a tough situation that gave you nightmares. Try to include that you discovered that God doesn´t want you to carry what you can´t handle (1 Cor.10:13). How you turned your mind away from those ugly feelings, how you pushed them aside. You didn´t deny them, but you decided to use “divine indifference to them”. That you started to meditate and focus on the Gift of Peace. Try to explain Philip.4:6-9 by how you tried to “obey the Lord in sharing your need and concerns WITH thanksgiving to the Lord and how the Lord created a “wall of Peace around you”. Share how you know that Jesus is in your heart and that “where Jesus is, thereis peace even if you don´t feel peaceful”. Talk about your struggles with guilt feelings over past actions, even when you had confessed this to the Lord and you know that it is forgiven, yet it keeps bothering you. How the Lord reminded you to deal with real guilt feelings as soon as possible. You might even include how the Lord helped you to take ´a very long vacation of vague guilt feelings´. Accepting that they are there, but ignoring them. 

Only when one can say these things do I encourage people to take a careful step into the ugly story of the person one is concerned about. There might be still other things you could encourage them and be a friend who listens well. Some people have taken months of me “just being there for them” before I could be of any more trauma help. I just listened, I tried to honestly answer direct questions, without probing deeper. To trust someone so much that they could share some of their deepest feelings, really takes time.

3. I would hope that they open up to you and that they want to talk about what has happened. Be very alert at their body language. I would use the rule of “you can share what you want, for 5 to 8 minutes” then encourage them to take a break. If they show tiredness, be alert, to share deeply emotional stuff can be very tiresome. You can always say: “I want to work this through with the Lord and get wisdom from Him. This is really for you a rather hurtful story. I am so glad that you can share this with me”. Especially as you find out that you are the first person they share this with, you need to be very careful that you don´t listen too long. Even moreis this carefulness important for you, if you don´t know them very well. You can say “I would love to hear more about this, but we hardly know each other”.  I learned that lesson early after my return to the Netherlands. 

After my brief but intensive time in Open Doors (see chapter 6) I started to work in “In de Ruimte” Bible school and Youth Center. The director had met in a psychiatric hospital a young girl in her early twenties. He felt that she wasn´t schizophrenic as the director had told him, that there was somewhere a healthy girl inside that wouldn´t come out. He shared his feelings with the director who said with a smile: “well, if you want to try to help her, go ahead, when you are tired of trying, you let her come back here. We have diagnosed her as a classical schizophrenic and she will be here for the rest of her life.

Ellis(1) was one of the first charges I had to take on. She talked very direct to me about her situation and said: “I know that I am supposed to talk, but if I do, there are microphones in the wall, people will hear what I tell and talk about it at the breakfast table”. I thought hard for an answer. Then I said with a smile “well, couldn´t we just walk in the woods that are closeby to the house? I don´t think they have microphones in the trees. If they do, we walk too fast for them to pick anything up”. She smiled and said, “YES we could do that”. I then talked the whole way and shared about my war trauma´s, how I had lost all sense of color and how one day I saw the beautiful green trees, as I biked with my mom. She had listened well, I could notice that.  She even asked me questions. I was struck by her eyes that showed understanding. Two days later she storms into my office and blurted out “Téo, I have seen how beautiful the trees are”. Then Ellis started to talk about her life, how she was deeply hurt in the farm of her parents. How her only escape was to start acting crazy. How she was taken into the hospital and there she felt safe. The crazy people with whom she had to live had affected her mind, she knew that! How she did believe that there were microphones in the wall. How she now knew as well that this was not true. I was so happy. Wow, this was a miracle! The girl was healed! After talking 45 minutes, she slumped back in her chair, her face white. She stood up without any further word and went away. I heard later that evening that she had chosen the isolation apartment, she could lock the door from the inside and stay there for two full weeks. Food would be placed before her door, she would pick that up later. 

After two weeks she came back again, I had in the meantime understood that she was so ashamed of her behavior and what I would think about her. She fell back into her suspicious attitude. I had met though, “that healthy girl” and kept working with her for about 9 months. Then she was ready to go to a half-way house. This story is still so deeply carved in my mind, it helps me to check: “Am I not going too fast”? If I have had any tendency to make mistakes it has been exactly in this area. I need to remind myself time and again: Growth takes time.

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1. Not her real name