Ginger Harrington

Trauma counselor Jennifer Hand shares how to find hope and Christian healing after trauma with practical faith-rooted tools for survival mode, caregivers, and the weary.

Delightfully joyful, Jennifer Hand loves coffee, play, and all things fun. She is the last person you might expect to find weeping in an earthquake zone. And yet.

She was on her knees in a village that no longer looked like a village.

Jenn had lived there before — had walked the streets in Nepal. She knew these people. Now there was only rubble where homes had stood. 

A crowd of hurting people gathered, desperate for hope. Undone by what she saw, she knelt in the wreckage of what had been a church, weeping: Lord, where is the hope here?

And then she saw it. 

Bent. Broken. Half-buried. 

A cross from the top of that church, lying among the debris.

The Lord’s answer came quietly but with clarity that gave strength: There is always hope beneath any rubble — and that hope is the cross.

That moment in Nepal didn’t just shape a book title that Jenn would later write. It birthed a mission, a message, and a way of walking with people in their worst moments. God has sent Jennifer Hand to 58 countries and disaster zones around the world. 

Jenn opened and closed our conversation with Psalm 139: I am fearfully and wonderfully made. It’s the scripture she returns to again and again, the reminder that God has numbered our days, knows us entirely, and has not been surprised by a single thing we have walked through.

The hope in this truth keeps her grounded.

When You Need Christian Healing After Trauma
Most of us will never stand in the literal rubble of an earthquake. But many of us have stood in something that changes our world — a diagnosis, a betrayal, a sudden loss, a season that rearranged everything we thought was solid. 
Jennifer has spent years walking into holy grounds of suffering, as she calls them. She went to Nepal as a missionary, felt God calling her unexpectedly into a master’s degree in counseling, and then watched as a massive earthquake struck the country she loved. She spoke Nepalese. She went to help. 

“When you’re in trauma,” she told us, “you feel alone. You feel isolated. You feel like you’re asking, will I ever be normal again?”

That question — will I ever be normal again? — is the one she hears most consistently, whether she’s sitting with a survivor in a third-world disaster zone or talking with a woman in a comfortable American church who has never told anyone how stuck she actually feels. 

The geography and the situation may change, but the question doesn’t.
Why Can’t I Just Move On? Hope After Trauma
If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t simply release trauma and get back to normal, you will be encouraged by this conversation. 

When your body still braces, still reacts, still carries what your mind has tried to let go, it’s important to  understand that your body isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what God designed it to do.

Jennifer explains that trauma doesn’t just affect your thoughts. It takes up residence in your body. When we sense danger of any kind — physical, emotional, or relational — our nervous system shifts from what she calls the thinking brain into pure survival mode. 

The body does what it needs to do to survive. And it does that through one of four automatic responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

Here’s the plain-language version:

fight means you move toward the threat aggressively
flight means you run from it
freeze means you go completely still, unable to move
fawn means you appease, people-please, or accommodate whoever feels threatening in order to stay safe

Four very different responses, all wired into us for survival. What we don’t always realize is how physiologically real these responses are. They can quietly run our lives long after the original threat has passed.

Jennifer describes it this way: imagine the pickup line at an elementary school. It is chaotic with every car for itself. A traffic cop stands in the middle trying to direct the flow. When trauma hits, your brain’s internal traffic cop goes into override. Your thinking brain steps back and the survival brain floods your body with one signal: survive, survive, survive. Your heart races if you’re a fighter. You go completely still if you’re a freezer. You feel, as Jenn puts it, like your legs are blocks of cement.
“Those are supposed to be our survival moments,” she said, “but not our thrive-in-life-all-the-time moments.”
Jenn reminded us that the number one thing a person needs reestablished after trauma is a sense of safety. Whether it’s physical safety, emotional safety, or relational safety, the ground beneath you has shifted, and nothing feels steady.

Scripture speaks directly into this need. Psalm 121 — from where does my help come? — and Psalm 91 — under the shadow of His wings, I can rest — are passages she returns to again and again.
“The reminder that we can rest under the shadow of the Almighty wings, His power, His protection,” she said, “I often have to go back to that again and again.”
The problem comes when the response gets stuck. When you’re still living in fight mode years after the original danger has passed. When a small thing triggers a large reaction and you don’t know why. When you’ve told yourself that’s just how I am for so long that you’ve stopped asking whether it has to be.

Jennifer encourages people to start noticing when a small thing creates a big response. “Pay attention to that,” she said. “It usually means you’ve been triggered, and you’ve gone into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.” She knows this pattern intimately. She’s a freezer herself — calm and capable in a crisis, and only later, once things settle, does she feel the weight of what she just walked through.

I recognized this in my own story. Many of us have learned to ignore our triggers and keep marching forward. We often believe “that’s just how I am” and keep going. It gets us through life. But it doesn’t make us healthy emotionally, spiritually, or relationally.
Why trauma gets stuck — and what to do about it: Trauma triggers automatic survival responses in the nervous system — fight, flight, freeze, or fawn — that are meant to protect us in dangerous moments, not define us permanently. When those responses get stuck, the body keeps living in survival mode long after the original threat has passed. Recognizing this pattern, without shame, is where healing begins.

Hope Is a Process, Not a Destination
Here is where Jennifer Hand gently disrupts the way most of us think about hope.

We want hope to be a switch we can flip and have it stay on. We want the stages of grief  and healing  to be linear. We prefer to check the boxes, to be done. 

Wouldn’t that be something, Jennifer said, laughing quietly. “Linear. That’s hard to even say.”

“Hope is a process,” she told Larissa. “Just like grief.”

Sometimes the hope you have for today is something basic and small like taking the next breath. Even when that is the bit of  hope available in this moment, it counts.

This matters enormously if you have gone through a season of trauma and felt the absence of hope like a physical weight. 

Just because hope feels gone doesn’t mean it is gone. 

It means it’s buried. Uncovering even the tiniest fragment — is where healing begins.

Larissa knew this firsthand. She has spent time in therapy  following her husband’s death. Grief opened layers of trauma she hadn’t known were there. “It’s been painful,” she said quietly, “but also so healing.” This isn’t theoretical for anyone in the room.

https://youtu.be/lDd2-Xj2tZc

 
When You’re Triggered: Practical Tools That Actually Help
Most of us don’t need more information about trauma. What we need is something we can actually do in the middle of a hard moment to heal and restore faith after trauma. We need something accessible, something free, something that works even when we have nothing left. 

This is why Jennifer Hand wrote Hope Beneath the Rubble.

She has sat with people who have no access to therapy, no money for resources, no time for complicated routines. Here are some of what she shared with our listeners — things you can use today, right now, wherever you are:

1. Ground yourself in the present. When a trauma response is triggered, your brain gets pulled out of the present moment. One of the most effective ways to bring it back is through your senses. Jennifer walks through what she calls the 5-4-3-2-1 technique: five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste. The practice is simpler than it sounds — you pause, look around, and notice and name each one. The act of naming pulls your brain back to the present moment and begins to lower the flood of stress hormones.

2. Breathe. It is free and you can do it anywhere. Square breathing signals to your nervous system that you are safe. Simply inhale for a count of four, hold for four, exhale for four.  “It gets you out of fight-flight mode,” Jennifer said, “where you’re really not using your thinking brain.”

3. Move your body. Walking, specifically, does something powerful for a traumatized nervous system because of what Jennifer calls bilateral movement. The movement of left-right, left-right helps trauma stop getting stuck in the body. She explained, “Trauma often gets stuck in your body, and movement is one of the ways out.”

4. Taste something strong.  Jennifer mentioned eating sour candy as a grounding technique, and Larissa claimed it immediately as her personal favorite. The strong sensation pulls you into the present moment when a flashback or triggered response has pulled you out of it. The physical sensation interrupts the loop.

5. Ask yourself what makes you come alive. This one Jennifer said isn’t even in the book.  She offered it as a gift to our listeners specifically. In her counseling practice, before she ever asks a client about their trauma, she starts with this question. When someone is so exhausted that even breathing feels like too big a step, what they need isn’t a task. They need a spark.

“Life is here,” she said simply. “And that spark — whatever it is, even buying a new coffee mug — will begin to give you that.”

Can Scripture Hurt as Well as Heal?
Before we leave the practical tools, there’s something Jenn said that I don’t want to rush past. She is careful about how scripture is used with people in acute suffering. She said something I think many of us in the church need to hear.

She told a story about being in Nepal, riding on the back of a motorcycle. When a wreck left her with a gaping wound on her knee, her instinct  was to put a bandaid on it. She didn’t want to bear the pain of cleaning the wound.

The wound, in her telling, is the unprocessed pain of grief, fear, anger, and confusion that trauma brings. The bandaid is the scripture quoted too quickly, before the person has been given space to acknowledge what they’re actually carrying. “And sometimes we can do that with scripture,” she said. “We don’t want to acknowledge and wrestle with the depths of what’s underneath — so we just quote Romans 8:28 and move on.”

Romans 8:28 — He will work all things together for good — is truth. She was clear about that. But it can also feel like “a weapon” for someone who doesn’t feel that yet. Someone in the middle of the wreckage doesn’t always need the promise of future good. 

They need to know they’re not alone right now.

Instead, Jennifer shares another part of Romans 8: Nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Not life, not death, not the present, not things to come. Nothing. “That is a key reminder,” she said, “that nothing will separate you from His love. Not your trauma. Not your survival mode. Not the feelings you’re afraid to name.”

She continued the illustration, “The streets of Nepal are dirty. If I hadn’t cleaned that wound out, infection would have come — and eventually it would have shown itself.”

Unprocessed trauma works the same way. The goal is never to avoid the hard thing. The goal is to clean the wound well enough that healing can actually happen.
How to use scripture with someone in trauma: Not every scripture fits every moment. Rushing to Romans 8:28 — He will work all things together for good — before someone has had space to grieve can feel dismissive rather than comforting. Jennifer Hand suggests reaching first for the scriptures that offer presence rather than resolution: Nothing can separate you from the love of God. 

Does Caregiving Count as Trauma?
If you are caring for someone right now — or if you have, and you’re still carrying the weight of it — this is the section I most want you to read. Not because caregiving is the same as surviving an earthquake. But because Jennifer Hand says it can be just as traumatic. 

I know this firsthand. I cared for my sister through her battle with ALS. I have dear friends in caretaking situations right now — including the particularly hard ones. Sometimes the person being cared for is not easy, not appreciative, not kind. That layer of hard deserves its own conversation.

Jennifer answered from the inside that experience. She walked through a caregiving season recently that was, in her words, horrific. She carries it. She also carries the faces of everyone she’s ever served in that role, and she wanted to speak directly to them.

She talked about Hagar (Genesis 16 and 21). The story of how God responded to a woman cast into the wilderness, alone, trying to care for a child with no idea what to do next. “God shows up as the God who sees,” Jenn said.

That’s the first thing you need to know if you’re a caregiver. You are not invisible. The behind-the-scenes work, the invisible labor, the exhaustion nobody thinks to ask about — God sees it. You are not forgotten.

“Shame is too heavy of a weight to carry while carrying someone else.”

The feelings that come with caregiving can range from heartbreak, anger, resentment, guilt, and overwhelm. Feelings are not evidence that something is wrong with you. They show that you are human and you are carrying something heavy. 

“Take your feelings  to God first”, Jennifer urged. “Then find one safe person and say, without asking for answers or platitudes or fix-it solutions: ‘I need someone to hold this with me.’ Sometimes what you really need,” she said, “is someone to just hold your suffering with you.”

How to Hold Someone’s Suffering Without Carrying It Yourself
If you love someone who is hurting — a friend, a family member, someone in your ministry or small group — you know this feeling. You sit with their pain, you listen, you pray. And then you carry it home with you. It settles into your chest and stays there.

You are not meant to carry what you receive. You are meant to be a conduit.

Jenn is intentional about this in her own life. When she returns from disaster zones where she has seen the worst of human suffering, she has a plan, a personal list of what brings her back to herself. 

These are simple things that help her release and reset. Top of her list is journaling. She calls this praying with a pen in her hand. She also makes time for items on her own “coming alive” list. These are the things that remind her life is here, in this moment, in her specific body.

“Have a plan,” she said. “Very specifically, when you know you’re in the middle of walking with a friend through a tough time, know what you’re going to do to release.”

She also offered something unexpected at the close of the conversation, speaking to the listeners who are more visual, more creative, more alive when they have something to make with their hands. Coloring. Vision boards. Painting a scene that feels safe. Building a grounding box filled with things that calm you. “God can heal parts of your brain as you color and meditate and pray,” she said. The body and the spirit are not separate projects.

The Cross in the Rubble
We began here, and we have to end here, because everything Jennifer Hand teaches flows from that moment on her knees in Nepal.

The hope she is pointing toward is not a feeling to be manufactured or a process to complete or a destination to arrive at. It is something that was placed beneath the rubble long before we started digging. It is a cross. It is a God who sees, who knows, who loves, who has not forgotten. It is Emmanuel — with us — which is the name of God Jennifer returns to again and again when she walks into suffering, because it is the truest thing she knows to say.
“There is a God in heaven who sees you,” she said quietly, in the voice she uses when she’s standing on holy ground. “Who knows you. Who loves you. And has not forgotten you.”
Just because you don’t feel hope doesn’t mean you are hopeless. It means hope is buried. And one gentle step at a time, it can be uncovered again.

If this conversation has spoken to you, I hope you’ll listen to the full episode — and consider sharing it with someone who might need these words today. 
Your Habit of Hope This Week
Choose one small thing this week — just one — that makes you come alive. It can be as simple as a cup of good coffee, a walk outside, or cutting pictures out of a magazine. Let that one thing be enough. Life is here.

Connect with Jennifer Hand: Find her book, Hope Beneath the Rubble: Healing After Trauma, linked in the show notes. Don’t miss the QR code inside the back cover — it unlocks free video teachings and companion resources developed to walk alongside the book’s practical tools.

Questions Our Listeners Are Asking
What is trauma, and how do I know if I’ve experienced it? One way to think about it: trauma is any experience in which you felt unsafe — physically, emotionally, or relationally. Jennifer Hand explains that trauma isn’t defined by the size of the event, but by the impact it had on your nervous system. She encourages people to start by noticing: do small things create big reactions in you? That noticing, without shame, is a place to begin.

What are fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses? These are your body’s automatic survival responses to danger or perceived threat. Fight means you move toward the threat aggressively. Flight means you move away from it. Freeze means you become immobilized — like cement blocks around your feet. Fawn means you try to appease or people-please to avoid conflict. Jennifer Hand explains how the nervous system can get stuck in one of these modes long after the original danger has passed — and how to recognize when that’s happening in you.

What are some practical grounding tools for trauma and anxiety? Jennifer shares several in this episode: the 5-4-3-2-1 sensory grounding technique (pause and name five things you see, four you can touch, three you hear, two you smell, one you taste), square breathing (inhale, hold, and exhale for equal counts), walking for bilateral movement, and even sour candy or holding something warm to bring yourself back to the present moment. Most of these are free and can be done without anyone around you knowing.

Can faith and trauma healing work together? Yes — and this conversation explores exactly how. Jennifer integrates trauma-informed counseling with deep Christian faith, but she’s careful to distinguish between scripture that steadies people and platitudes that can actually hurt. Her framework: God is big enough for all your emotions, including the ones that feel dangerous to name. Healing sometimes requires wrestling with God, not just quoting Him.

What does it mean that hope is a process? Jennifer Hand is clear that hope is not a switch you flip on and leave on. Like grief, it’s nonlinear — it moves forward and backward, and some days the only hope available is a single steady breath. Just because you don’t feel hope doesn’t mean you are hopeless. It means hope is buried. And uncovering it, one small step at a time, is what healing actually looks like.

Does caregiving cause trauma? Yes. Vicarious trauma — the impact of walking alongside someone else’s suffering — is real and can be just as profound as direct trauma. Jennifer Hand specifically addresses caregivers, noting that the shame and invisible nature of their burden makes it even harder to process. Her word to caregivers: you are seen, you are not forgotten, and shame is too heavy a weight to carry while carrying someone else.

What is Jennifer Hand’s book about? Hope Beneath the Rubble: Healing After Trauma is a practical, faith-rooted guide for anyone who has experienced trauma, grief, or overwhelming loss. It includes journaling prompts in every chapter and a QR code that unlocks free companion video resources. Jennifer wrote it because she kept seeing the same faces — from earthquake survivors in Nepal to Sunday school classes in Tennessee — asking the same question: will I ever feel normal again?

Meet Our Guest
Jennifer Hand is the founder Coming Alive Ministries and loves the honor of traveling nationally and internationally, providing the invitation to come alive in Christ through conferences, retreats, written resources and counseling.

Jenn has had the joy of serving in over 54 countries and speaking at around 40 events a year. With her Master’s degree in trauma counseling, God has opened a unique door for Jenn to respond after natural disasters around the world, providing trauma counseling and the hope of Christ on the holy ground of suffering.

Jenn is the author of 5 books, including My Yes is on the Table, published by Moody Publishers. Her most recent book is Hope Beneath the Rubble: Healing After Trauma.

This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode
Hope Beneath the Rubble: Healing After Trauma by Jennifer Hand

Holy in the Moment: Simple Ways to Love God by Ginger Harrington

Related Content
Each link features the article, podcast, and video of the content.

How to Scripture Journal (Episode 69)
How Gratitude Can Anchor Your Heart in Grief and Trauma. Interview with Christian counselor, Heather Shealy-Mawhirter, LPC (Episode 61)
How Rest and Solitude Restore Your Soul After Grief and Loss
How to Find God’s Peace that Guards Your Heart | A Study of Philippians 4:7 (Episode 56)
Finding Peace with Becky Keife | A Verse a Day for the Anxious Soul (Episode 58)