Keys of Posttraumatic Coping (Paperback) | Released: 30 Jun 2020

"Religions are traditions of wisdom, reflecting on fundamental human experiences and offering sage advice on how to cope with life's vicissitudes and how to find a connection to the sacred. It should be no surprise then that the Bible -one of the repertoires of such wisdom- is full of stories of trauma and healing. In this book, Luis Cruz-Villalobos engages with such Biblical stories, notably on the apostle Paul, and reads them with a psychological lens. The reader will glean new insights about the bible and old wisdom about trauma. A fascinating transdisciplinary endeavor!" Dr. Ruard Ganzevoort
Summary: The present research is a study on posttraumatic coping in some paragraphs of the second letter to the Corinthians of the Apostle Paul. As a thesis, in methodological terms, follows the steps of the hermeneutical arc proposed by Paul Ricoeur (1976, 2002, 2016) from the perspective of the Psychological Biblical Criticism (Rollins 1983, Kille, 2001, 2004; Ellens, 2012). As a first approach, the Pauline writings were evaluated as a very good alternative to explore the issue of adversity coping, especially 2 Corinthians as the letter with the highest number of explicit descriptions by Paul of traumatic events, in addition to be considered one of the undisputed Pauline writings of greater autobiographical character. In the first part of this study a detailed review of current research on posttraumatic coping in the field of psychology is made. Then they examine exegetically four selected texts from 2 Corinthians that describe the ways in which Paul faced various traumatic events in his life. Each paragraph is analyzed looking for the texts to show their world and their own sense, to then identify the hermeneutical keys of coping that are observed in them. Among the main conclusions reached in this investigation, we can highlight that Paul offered, in the analyzed texts of 2 Corinthians, coping modalities that showed a permanent search for "sense of coherence" (Antonovsky, 1979, 1984, 1987, 1993), which involves the comprehensibility, manageability and significance of adverse events, but in his case, from a fundamentally theological framework ("sense of theological coherence"). In addition, it was found, when looking for common factors in the coping keys observed in the Pauline texts, that these can be synthesized in the so-called "theological virtues" faith, hope and love, which function as dispositions that allow the religious / spiritual articulation of traumatic events, both on a personal and community level. We believe that this study has achieved a significant understanding of hardiness, resilience, posttraumatic growth and positive religious coping modalities, from a theological perspective, which can contribute to the development of new practices of pastoral and psychological care, especially in contexts of adversity.Author: LUIS CRUZ-VILLALOBOS (Santiago de Chile, 1976). Chilean poet. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). Clinical psychologist and professor. He is a specialist in the interdisciplinary study of posttraumatic coping. He has developed academic works that connect hermeneutics, phenomenology and Psychological Biblical Criticism with resilience and posttraumatic growth.