By Ashley E. Schumacher, MS, LAPC

I have long wondered whether one of trauma’s greatest deceptions is not only that it convinces us the world is unsafe, but that, even in the pursuit of recovery, it can convince us we are finally seeing the world without distortion.

There is a certain clarity that trauma seems to offer. It simplifies an impossibly complex world into manageable categories: safe or unsafe, friend or enemy, good or bad, us or them. Those distinctions are not signs of weakness. They are often the remarkable work of a nervous system doing exactly what it was created to do: survive. The difficulty is that survival and healing do not always share the same perceptual aims. The former keeps us alive, sometimes at relational cost to ourselves and others; The latter re-expands our capacity for seeing. Here it is important to distinguish perception as widened awareness—non-reactive seeing—and relationship as ethical participation, which includes accountability, boundaries, and the possibility of repair or non-repair. This expanded perception may allow us to see both ourselves and others more fully, including those who originally caused harm and wounding.

This becomes increasingly apparent when considering trauma that occurs not within a single relationship but across multiple systems. A child may grow up in a family where image is protected more fiercely than truth. Years later, that same person may encounter a church or ecclesial community where similar patterns and relational dynamics reappear in distorted form.

Later still, they may find themselves in a workplace or clinical setting where the preservation of institutional reputation or personal ego takes precedence over the acknowledgment of mimetic harm. None of these systems are identical. They differ in culture, language, mission, and people. And yet there can be an uncanny familiarity beneath the surface differences, as the nervous system responds not only to what is present, but to what has been repeated and remains in the process of repeating.

What feels familiar is not necessarily the people, but the atmosphere—and the autonomic nervous system’s trauma responses within it. There is the subtle expectation that belonging depends upon compliance; that complexity is inconvenient or dangerous; and that preserving the image of the system is more virtuous than confronting the reality within it.

I hesitate to describe these simply as narcissistic systems, because the term is often reduced to individual pathology while detached from systemic formation. More often, what I see is an overlap between narcissism as an expression of trauma and traumatized systems themselves.

Like traumatized individuals, systems can become organized around fear. They grow more invested in certainty, more suspicious of ambiguity, and more dependent upon rigid narratives that preserve stability. Over time, the system functions as though survival is the highest good, even at the cost of its most vulnerable members—or those who see most clearly what is happening.

Such systems do not only wound those they exclude. They also reshape the perception of those who inhabit them—those who enact harm, those who passively participate in it, those who suffer it, and those who are formed within the system’s survival logic in ways that may unintentionally sustain its patterns.

Traumatized systems generate distorted perception across the entire relational field. When survival becomes the organizing principle, truth itself begins to appear dangerous. Those who speak it are no longer encountered as persons but as threats to the coherence of the system. In this way, trauma narrows perception throughout the system, though not in the same way and not with the same moral responsibility or consequence.

Within this, it becomes difficult to remember that a well-formed conscience cannot exist apart from moral imagination. Moral imagination is the bridge between perception and relationship: between widened awareness and ethical participation. A formed conscience depends upon the capacity to perceive the poor and the vulnerable not as abstract categories, but as concretely present within our families, communities, and daily practices and interactions. When moral imagination is diminished, both perception and relationship are narrowed; what remains can resemble obedience and loyalty to the system rather than fidelity to truth. This is part of what makes moral injury so profoundly disorienting and soul-shattering.

Moral injury is not simply the experience of being hurt. It is what happens when what was meant to be good becomes the site of harm. It is one thing to expect betrayal from an enemy. It is another to encounter it in those entrusted with care, truth, or protection. Perception itself begins to shift—not only memory, but the way reality is seen and held.

After enough experiences of systemic betrayal, we do not simply remember differently. We begin seeing differently. We anticipate image management before honesty, control before collaboration, exclusion before belonging. Trauma teaches pattern-recognition because it once preserved survival. Eventually, those same capacities begin to limit what can be seen.

What can emerge resembles an autoimmune kind of logic. In traumatized systems, anything perceived as a threat to coherence—including truth-telling, vulnerability, or dissent—is expelled to preserve stability. In traumatized individuals, a parallel process can occur inwardly: parts of the self organized around trust, dependence, or openness are disowned in order to maintain psychic survival. Clinically, this resembles what happens after chronic attachment rupture. The nervous system reorganizes around safety rather than truth because safety has become the necessary condition for survival. 

Theologically, this can be understood as exile of desire from its source. What is expelled is not gone; it remains present as absence, experienced as disconnection, numbness, or mistrust of what once felt sacred. Even God can be encountered in this register—not as absent, but as perceptually severed. Like a phantom limb, there is an ache where communion once was.

The result is a paradox: survival can become a form of self-amputation from the very sources of meaning, attachment, and transcendence that once made survival livable. Trauma protects life, but can narrow the conditions under which life is experienced as worth inhabiting. The tragedy of complex trauma is not only that it teaches us what to fear. It diminishes what can be imagined beyond fear. The imagination becomes organized around survival.

This is where Elijah becomes a framework for recovery from moral injury within traumatized systems. His journey names something essential: healing is not immediate insight but gradual reclamation of perception at the level of mind, body, soul, and imagination.

It is tempting to read Elijah’s collapse beneath the broom tree (1 Kings 19:4–5) as the result of a single threat from Jezebel (1 Kings 19:2). But his life has already been shaped by prolonged exposure to a nation organized around violence, idolatry, and the preservation of power (1 Kings 18–19). Prophets have been hunted (1 Kings 18:4, 13). He has lived through drought (1 Kings 17:1; 18:1). He has carried prophetic isolation within sustained rejection (1 Kings 18:21).

Even Carmel (1 Kings 18:36–39) does not undo chronic vigilance. One message from Jezebel (1 Kings 19:2–3) is enough to collapse the horizon: “I alone am left” (1 Kings 19:10, 14). His words are not merely inaccurate. They reveal how trauma constricts perception. Elijah cannot yet imagine a world larger than the one his suffering has trained him to expect.

God does not begin by correcting him. There is no argument, no explanation, no immediate disclosure of the seven thousand. Instead, provision precedes interpretation: “Take and eat, because the journey is too much for you”, (activation of the parasympathetic nervous system) (1 Kings 19:5–7). God recognizes that Elijah’s perception cannot be restored through argument alone. Exhaustion, chronic fear, and moral injury reshape how reality is held. Before understanding comes, there must be stabilization in the nervous system. Only then does the horizon widen at Horeb (1 Kings 19:8–18).

The sequence matters: restoration of capacity before explanation, regulation before insight, presence before interpretation.

Those who have lived within multiple unhealthy systems carry more than memory. They carry patterned ways of perceiving shaped by survival. Safety becomes tied to rapid categorization, and imagination comes to expect repetition. Over time, perception narrows into binaries that once preserved coherence under overwhelm.

To ask such persons simply to “see differently” may be to ask for premature surrender of the very strategies that once preserved life. The clinical task is therefore not immediate correction but sustained tolerance of tension without collapsing into diagnosis, labeling, or premature resolution. Healing is not replacement of thought but gradual enlargement of perception itself.

Moral imagination is the restoration of that enlargement. It does not deny harm or collapse into naïveté. It names the capacity to perceive more than trauma initially allows. It holds together what trauma splits apart: that wounded people may perpetuate wounded systems without being reducible to them, that justice and mercy need not compete, and that accountability and compassion can coexist.

Trauma organizes the world into “us” and “them.” The Gospel interrupts this formation. Christ refuses the categories imposed upon him, encountering persons rather than ideological camps.

The Kingdom expands perception where trauma narrows it.

Healing is therefore slow not because memory fades slowly, but because perception itself must be re-formed. Survival-based ways of seeing cannot simply be discarded; they must be outgrown through new experience. The body must settle enough that threat is no longer the organizing center of awareness.

Like Elijah, there is nourishment, then rest, then a gradual widening or expanding of what can be seen and held, and at the nervous system level, the ‘window of tolerance.’

The angel’s invitation is more than physical care. It initiates the restoration of embodied and spiritual regulation through perception itself, allowing imagination to widen beyond survival.

Complexity can then be held without collapse into binaries and false dichotomies. Conviction need not become rigidity, and truth does not require the loss of compassion. Harm can be named without becoming the only lens through which future relationships are seen.

In the end, liberation is not only from institutions but from the constrained vision that trauma produces and systems reinforce.

Take and eat. Taste and see. (1 Kings 19:5–8; Psalm 34:8)

The journey is not brief. The restoration of how we see does not remain private or solely personal. It returns us to the world differently and opens space for healing and an enlarged life within relationship, in which moral imagination is restored as a lived capacity for perceiving beyond the limits of survival (John 10:10).

In this sense, moral imagination becomes the restored capacity by which we begin to taste, to perceive the goodness of God once again, a goodness that has been present all along, waiting not to be recreated but to be perceived anew.