Darby Strickland’s When It’s Trauma is one of two 2025 book releases on trauma from a Christian counseling perspective that make tremendous contributions to biblical understanding and practice. (Steve Midgley’s complementary work, Understanding Trauma: A Biblical Introduction for Church Care, is reviewed earlier in this issue of Themelios).

Darby Strickland is a faculty member at the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation in Philadelphia and teaches counseling at Westminster Theological Seminary. She writes with many years of experience working in a Christian counseling center with trauma, domestic abuse, and relationships as her areas of specialization.

When It’s Trauma is written for anyone who wants to come alongside someone who has been traumatized, which she defines as being “severely impacted by a devastating event that was (1) sudden and unpredictable, (2) life-threatening, or (3) a profound violation of trust” (p. 16). This book will indeed be helpful for a pastor, elder, small-group leader, friend, family member, or professional counselor. It has the clear feel of someone who has had extensive experience of walking compassionately and skillfully with many suffering people over excruciatingly long periods.

Strickland provides this summary of her book (p. 11):

Part 1: Foundations of Care. We begin not with strategies but with presence. With listening. With seeing…. We explore how we can be wise companions to people who are walking through deep suffering—and how Jesus himself draws near to the broken-hearted.

Part 2: Wounds of Trauma. We delve into specific wounds caused by trauma. Each chapter … follows a similar structure by defining and describing one of those wounds, showing how Scripture portrays it, overviewing its impacts on a sufferer, and then explaining how a helper can provide support. Some suggestions will be most practical for formal counselling relationships, while others may be useful in any context. Each chapter also includes discovery questions you can ask a sufferer to learn more about their experience.

Part 3: Hope of Restoration. We end by exploring the slow, sacred journey of restoration after trauma, drawing from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah to cast a hopeful vision of how sufferers can rebuild amid the rubble. Healing from trauma is rarely linear—it weaves grief with worship and progress with resistance—and so it requires the steady presence of Christ and his people.

A helpful, annotated “further reading” list is provided after the appendices, and additional resources to help church leaders work through the book’s contents are available for download.

The book left me, an experienced counselor, satisfied and newly encouraged to push on more hopefully with my longer-term traumatized counselees. There is also much here for the inexperienced and those who want to be more effective in their helping. Its message is humble, clear, and hopeful: the Lord is our Deliverer and Counselor—not Strickland, not me, not you, and not the counseling relationship or counseling method, as important as these are, and as loving and skillful as Strickland is.

Furthermore, even recommended self-soothing techniques that might be seen as purely medical or physiological are rightly attributed to God’s grace, wisdom, and kindness, in a way that helps restore confidence in our loving and sovereign Lord. My own observation over decades is that hoping in the Lord and looking to him in all things is at the core of the most helpful approaches to trauma. Strickland models this in the fine details of extended counseling relationships, while exhibiting the interventions that the wider counseling world has also found to be beneficial. Nevertheless, her approach is deeply rooted in Scripture—it is the lens used to interpret everything, and her words sensitively and wisely express the word of Christ.

Strickland’s “ministry of presence” is a wise, biblical, and necessary corrective in a culture where pastoral care can be rushed and efficiency is highly valued. It is an appropriately paced ministry of the Word that starts by saying little. It should help many to slow down and really listen before speaking gently and slowly, while continuing to listen carefully and prayerfully.

A short appendix on “Empathy Versus Enmeshment” (pp. 291–96) will be helpful for those who may get too caught up in the lives and experiences of others—especially when caring in local church contexts that do not have the usual boundaries of a professional counseling center.

I have just two small criticisms of this truly excellent book. The first is that a Scripture index would help as readers dip back into the book again and again. The second is that there could be more on singing as a healing response to trauma, trouble, and distress, as we see in many of the Psalms, in other parts of Scripture, and in the world around us.

Having said that, singing out loud while alone was not a mainstream psychotherapeutic intervention when this book was being written. So, it is pleasing that Strickland not only mentions it (p. 16) but later notes that “many of my counselees have learned to call on the Lord by singing a song that encapsulates a comforting reality” (p. 222). She also has a wonderful section on Psalm 42 about how the Lord helps people find their voice despite the challenges of embodied distress (pp. 92–99).

However, I would want to give more emphasis here to the psalm itself (and songs like it) being for singing as well as speaking, noting that Psalm 42:8b is usually taken as referring to songs of the Lord that he gives his people to sing to him at night, with v. 8c (“a prayer to the God of my life”) clarifying just who is singing. (Further support for this reading can be found in Psalm 77 and Job 35:9–10, where God “gives us songs in the night,” and Psalm 137:4, where traumatized people struggle to “sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.”)

Taken this way, the ancient psalm-singer foreshadows Strickland’s contemporary observation that many of her counselees have learned to sing to the Lord in their trauma. And in the context of night-time distress, singing a God-given prayer-song at night would then become a significant, even exemplary, way to self-soothe both body and soul. For through singing/speaking to ourselves and the Lord and hearing him in return through the inspired words of the psalm, we simultaneously receive the physiological benefits of breathing exercise, the comfort of musical sound and vibration, a resetting of rumination, and much more besides.

To be clear, what Strickland helpfully recommends about actively imagining God singing over us in his redeeming love and compassion remains valid, as we should still pursue blessing through meditating upon the beautiful and comforting image in Zephaniah 3:17, where our God sings over us and “quiets (us) by his love” (p. 127).

As I expected, I find myself in close agreement with what Strickland says about counseling “when it’s trauma.” The unexpected thing is that I also find myself wanting to be like her in my own work—imitating her as she imitates Christ. And that may be the highest praise I can offer. It is delightful and inspiring to see the heart, character, and wisdom of the Lord in the ministry of another in such a challenging area.