helping your family through post-traumatic stress on this edition of Truth in Love.

I'm Dale Johnson and you're listening to Truth in Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified

Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the

problems that people face. Joining us today on the podcast is Dr. Greg Gifford. Greg is a professor

of biblical counseling at the Master's University. He has recently finished his PhD studies at Southwestern

Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

I had the privilege of working with Greg on his dissertation topic.

It's a fascinating topic.

I can't wait to hear more about that in the future.

But that's not our subject today.

Dr. Gifford, we want to welcome you the podcast and then talk today about post-traumatic stress. This is a popular

topic in the culture in which we live. We as the church need to have a robust response and

answer how to care for folks who deal with post-traumatic stress. First thing that I think we have to do in order to set up

our discussion is defining trauma. There are all kinds of ways in which people categorize

trauma, the issues that they're struggling with, using that word trauma. Let's see if we can define trauma.

What constitutes post-traumatic stress? That's a good question because sometimes trauma is a

bit elusive. And what I mean by that is a traumatic moment in one person's life can be the actual exposure to

physical violence, threats of violence, abuse, whatever nature that looks like. But trauma in another

person's life may be that they've heard of this or they've been threatened by this or that

those events have occurred in the life of a family member,

someone close to them, that both of those, according to the APA, would be a trauma. And so now when

we think post trauma, we start to wrestle with, well, what is traumatic? And some of that comes down to

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