What if the thing you locked away thirty-five years ago is still fully alive inside your brain. It’s waiting, unprocessed, and exactly as it happened?
I’m Anna Moore Bradfield. In this episode of God’s Power Stories, I sit down with Lisa Saruga, a licensed professional counselor, trauma therapist, speaker, and author of The Trauma Tree: Going Beyond Survival, Growing Toward Wholeness.
Lisa is also a survivor. At eighteen years old, in her college dorm room, she endured a violent assault where she was nearly suffocated, knifed, and raped by a masked intruder who told her he was going to kill her. She survived. And then she did what so many of us do with our deepest wounds. She minimized it, told almost no one, and packed it away on a shelf in her brain for thirty-five years.
Then came a phone call. Her cold case had been reopened, and the attacker had been identified. In an instant, everything she thought she had dealt with came flooding back with the full force of the original trauma, because, as Lisa explains, that’s exactly how the brain stores what it hasn’t processed. We talk about why she now prefers the term post-traumatic stress injury over disorder, how trauma physically changes the brain’s amygdala and hippocampus, and why healing is possible no matter how many decades have passed.
Lisa also shares a powerful story of how she stood in the very dorm room where she endured the assault, hours before the building was demolished. Her husband handed her a fistful of Sharpie markers. She tells us what she wrote on those walls, what she discovered when they finally broke through it with a sledgehammer, and what she found waiting on the other side. It will stay with you long after the episode ends.
We talk honestly about self-blame, about Job’s friends and the human instinct to find fault so tragedy feels avoidable, about the long and imperfect process of forgiveness, and about Psalm 27:13, “I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living,” a verse Lisa clung to and ultimately relearned the meaning of. We also talk about the moment healing turns a corner.
If you’ve ever locked something away and told yourself it was handled, this conversation is for you.
Key Takeaways:
- Unprocessed trauma is stored, not gone—the brain keeps it fully intact until it is faced
- Post-traumatic stress is an injury, not a disorder—your brain reacted exactly as it was designed to
- Forgiveness is not a single decision but a daily, ongoing process
- Self-blame after trauma is common and rooted in a need to feel safe from what happened to someone else
- Healing turns a corner when we begin comforting others with the comfort we ourselves received
Key Themes:
Trauma and healing · Forgiveness · Post-traumatic stress injury · EMDR therapy · Self-blame · God’s goodness in the land of the living · Comforting others · Survivor story
Who Will Benefit:
Anyone carrying an unprocessed wound from years or decades ago, survivors of assault or violent trauma, counselors and caregivers who want language for what their clients are experiencing, and anyone wondering whether God was present in their darkest moment.
If something in this conversation stirred up memories you thought were long settled, know that it is never too late to begin healing. God’s goodness is still here, in the land of the living.
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Listen to more episodes of God’s Power Stories.