Trauma-Informed Ignatian Pedagogy
'Care for the Whole Person' must include our wounds and brokenness
For the last few weeks, I have been writing some reflections on what it means (in theory and in practice) to work to create trauma-informed classrooms. This is Part 6. You can find the introductory post in the series here, in case you want to go back and read from the beginning.
I teach at a Jesuit university. This word, “Jesuit,” means a lot of different things to different people.
I was speaking to a priest the other day, a member of the Society of Jesus, a Jesuit himself, and he told me that—for him—he sees in the Jesuit tradition a balance between order and flexibility. Throughout their history, Jesuits have found ways to adapt, and to speak with the cultures in which they have found themselves.
This adaptability began with the founder of the society himself, Inigo (later Ignatius) of Loyola. Born in 1491 in Azpeitia in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa in northern Spain, he was the youngest child of a large family. At sixteen he was sent to be a courtier to a wealthy nobleman, where he developed worldly tastes and vices.
Over time, he became a soldier, and an officer, and found himself in May of 1521 defending the fortress of the town of Pamplona against the French. The Spaniards were outnumbered and the commander of the Spanish forces wanted to surrender, but Ignatius convinced him to fight on for the honor, if not for victory.
During the battle, a cannonball struck Ignatius, wounding one leg and breaking the other.
His leg was set, but it didn’t heal, so it was necessary to break it again and reset it. Although he was told to prepare for death, on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul (June 29) he took an unexpected turn for the better. The leg healed, but he was left with one leg shorter than the other. For the rest of his life, he walked with a limp.
The biographies of Ignatius Loyola will often move from this story of his injuries, to describe his convalescence, but mostly as a context to talk about his conversion.
However, there have recently been writers who have returned to this period in the life of Loyola to explore the injury and recovery in terms of it being a traumatic event.
Following from that, we can further explore how the ordered and flexible aspects of Ignatian pedagogy might benefit from being understood as a trauma-informed pedagogy.
Ignatius as Trauma Survivor
In 2012, Dawn Eden wrote a book entitled My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints. As the title suggests, the book explores the healing journey that Eden takes by meditating on various holy presences in the Church, with a focus on the role that trauma played in their lives and their faith.
In the first chapter of the book, “The Love We Forget,” Eden looks at a central prayer of Loyola, the Suspice, which begins with the words, Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my whole will.
Eden writes that she can understand Loyola offering his liberty, and understanding, and will—but how curious that he also includes the entirety of his memories among his offerings. In fact, it is the first thing that Loyola offers to God, after offering liberty itself.
Eden continues her analysis, saying,
In Ignatius’s understanding of the human mind, the concept of memory refers to more than just particular memories. Memory includes everything that had entered into his consciousness to make him who he was—whether or not he could actually remember it. It forms the foundation of his present identity, including his hopes for his future. This is an ancient way of understanding memory, dating back at least to St. Augustine, and it makes particular sense for one who has survived trauma. ... Often in trauma survivors (and this holds regardless of whether the trauma was the result of sexual abuse or military combat) the brain attempts to protect itself by consigning painful swaths of the past to areas where memory’s tendrils cannot reach them. Yet the memories of traumatic events, whether present to us or not, remain part of us.
That is why there is something very beautiful about St. Ignatius offering his memory to God. The saint acknowledges there are things he cannot change—the events of his past—and at the same time displays the bold hope that his Maker will accept him as he is now, with everything he did and everything that was done to him. Such is true abandonment to divine providence—joyfully accepting in your own life the truth encapsulated in the old proverb, "God writes straight with crooked lines." [1, my emphasis]
This is a powerful, and too-often overlooked aspect of Ignatius Loyola. The descriptions of his injuries are so gruesome as to border on the horrific, and they were worsened still by the repeated (and in many ways botched) attempts to heal him, whether physically or cosmetically.
It is difficult to imagine someone surviving such an experience without suffering significant trauma, yet this is often the very way we are taught to think of such injuries. That is, we are led to think of them as atomized, isolated events, which occurred somewhere “in the past,” with no effects on our present condition.
Loyola wished to have the whole of himself—including his memories—become an offering to God. So what would it look like to look at the spirituality of Ignatius, and the pedagogy that has been built from it, in light of his identity as a trauma survivor?
Ignatian Pedagogy
The Jesuit tradition is a spiritual tradition, but this spirituality has long been associated with a particular approach to education. In particular, we can characterize Ignatian pedagogy as one that
aims at assisting learners to undergo a series of internal transformations in how they go about understanding themselves vis-à-vis their own inclinations, passions, biases, and spontaneous reactions. Hence, the need arises to learn how to make one’s own internal operations more discerning. [2]
As you can see, the Ignatian approach to education is explicit in its goal to transcend a solely intellectual transformation. Instead, it is a pedagogy that seeks to reshape even the spontaneous reactions of the students.
In the human brain, the higher executive functions are handled by the prefrontal cortex. This is the so-called “seat of reason,” and it provides deliberative and dispassionate decisions in many situations.
Trauma, however, and similarly reaction-formations such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are characterized as non-cortical events. This is to say, the effects of PTSD on the nervous system are concentrated in a different portion of the brain than the cortex. Rather, PTSD is a creature of the limbic system—in particular, the amygdala and the hippocampus.
These are the portions of our nervous system that we might term the “rat brain” or the “lizard brain.” That is to say, they are occupied with a much more primitive set of functions and decisions than the cortex. The limbic system is the “fight or flight” portion of our brains, and it handles trauma in a way that affects our decision-making without itself being subject to our decisions.
In other words, the limbic system is the portion of our nervous systems that governs our “spontaneous reactions,” as opposed to our considered and rational decisions. Moreover, in the wake of traumatic experiences, these spontaneous reactions can become pathologized into a set of reaction formations like PTSD.
So if we are to accept the claim of Ignatian educators that they are seeking to transform even the spontaneous reactions of their students, then we must be open to considering what it might look like to have a trauma-informed Ignatian pedagogy.
Toward a Trauma-Informed Ignatian Pedagogy
In short, an Ignatian pedagogy is one in which the student is challenged to appropriate his or her own process of knowing. The first step in any process of knowing is experience, and the advice of Ignatius would be to become attentive to what one is experiencing, either the experience going on in oneself or in the reality around one. The second step in this process of knowing involves reflecting back on one’s experience and on what has been triggered by way of questions that emerged from such experience. [3, my emphasis]
This goal, “to become attentive to what one is experiencing,” is understood in Jesuit educational settings to intentionally transcend the intellectual realm. It is intentionally inclusive of affective aspects of the student’s experience. More even than this, it includes the imaginative and aspirational aspects of the student, as well. This is to say, the student’s desire for improvement of relationship with God and with the neighbor is an explicit aspect of the educational moment within Jesuit contexts.
When Ignatian pedagogy appeals in this way to the extra-intellectual aspects of the educational moment, it is an invitation to practice cura personalis, a Jesuit commitment to caring for the whole person.
This offers us a chance to return to a portion of the long quotation from Eden above:
That is why there is something very beautiful about St. Ignatius offering his memory to God. The saint acknowledges there are things he cannot change—the events of his past—and at the same time displays the bold hope that his Maker will accept him as he is now, with everything he did and everything that was done to him. [4, my emphasis]
The whole person must be understood to include the aspects that are often overlooked in educational contexts. The whole person includes—explicitly—traumatic experiences and the experience of moral injury. Moreover, these traumatic experiences are forming the spontaneous reactions of our students, such that they are reflexively responding to stimuli in our classrooms before the executive functions of the cortex are even aware.
As-such, these commitments within the Ignatian tradition allow a possibility for Jesuit pedagogies to be more responsive than some other pedagogies to students who enter our classrooms with trauma, traumatic reaction-formations, and post-traumatic stress.
But for this promise of Ignatian pedagogy to be realized to the benefit of our students (a significant portion of which are presenting in our classrooms with a traumatic experience —up to half our students, if statistics are correct) then we must become more explicit about the mechanisms of formation of spontaneous reactions, and the role that trauma and post-traumatic stress play in those mechanisms.
Students are showing up to my courses with significant trauma. This is a fact. The question to be answered is how can we adapt the pedagogical traditions of our Jesuit institution to allow these students to assess their trauma in healing ways, such that they become appropriated into the student’s overall process of knowing.
This remains the vital task. AMDG.
Dawn Eden, My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints (Ave Maria, 2012)
Daniel Hartnett, SJ, Transformative Education in the Jesuit Tradition (Loyola University Chicago, 2015), p. 8.
Hartnett, p. 8.
Hartnett, p. 8.
As I mentioned, this is part 6 of a series on “creating a trauma-informed classroom.” You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, and part 5 here. I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment, and if you want to ensure you get access to the whole series, please consider subscribing. Also, if you think others would benefit from reading these ideas, it would be wonderful if you would share them. Those links are below. Thank you.