Trauma-informed faith with Conscious Coore
Trauma-informed faith is not a buzzword; it’s a lifeline. And for too many people, the church has never offered it. What happens when the church can’t hold your pain? When the language offered is “everything happens for a reason,” and the practice is rushing straight to forgiveness without ever pausing for repair? This week on Jesus, Justice + Mercy, we open the Everyday Prophets series with a woman who has built her life’s work around the intersection of trauma-informed faith and spiritual care.
Conscious Coore is the founder of Flamingo Trauma Recovery and an educator training therapists, clinicians, coaches, and faith leaders in trauma-informed approaches to spiritual care. She is one of the sharpest thinkers I have encountered at this intersection, and this conversation will challenge you, equip you, and probably name some things you didn’t have words for before.
What Is Trauma-Informed Faith?
Trauma-informed faith is not therapy with a Jesus lens. It’s something more structural, an adjustment in how we offer care, what language we use, and how we build our procedures and practices to account for the reality that the people sitting in our pews have lived real lives. Conscious breaks down what trauma-informed actually means, and why most faith spaces are operating without it, often causing harm without realizing it.
The Question the Church Fears: Why?
One of the most formative threads in this conversation is what Conscious calls “the logic of the belief system”, the idea that faith formation isn’t just about what doctrine we receive, but how it lands in us, given what we’ve already lived through. She invites us to ask: has the knowledge of God shaped your beliefs, or are your beliefs a filter through which you see God? That is not a small question. Sit with it.
Repair Before Reconciliation
If you’ve been listening this season, you know repair before reconciliation is a recurring theme. Conscious brings a framework that deepens it. She makes a distinction that stopped me mid-conversation: reconciliation and reconnection are not the same thing. Reconciliation, making peace, putting things in their right place, does not require returning to a relationship as it was, especially if that relationship was built on harm. The church has been collapsing these two things for a long time. This conversation begins to pull them apart.
Dissecting Doctrine
Conscious introduces a three-part lens for examining doctrine: authority, theory, and culture. When we take doctrine at face value without asking who it served, what context it came from, and how it landed differently across communities, we risk using it as a tool of harm, even when it was originally intended as a tool of formation. This is not deconstruction for its own sake. This is faithfulness that takes the gospel seriously enough to ask hard questions.
You Are a Person of Influence
Conscious closes the conversation with a call that I don’t want you to scroll past. She believes this work, trauma-informed spiritual care, the language of repair, the courage to dissect doctrine, was never meant to live only in the hands of a few trained experts. It belongs in the hands of ordinary people of faith who are willing to become fluent in a new language and use it in the spaces where they already have influence. That is an Everyday Prophet. That might be you.
About Conscious Coore
Conscious Coore is the founder of Flamingo Trauma Recovery, where she provides trauma-informed spiritual care, spiritual counseling, and training for faith leaders, therapists, coaches, and counselors, integrating faith in their work. She is based in New York and is active on Instagram and Threads at @consciouscoore.
Connect with Conscious
• Website: Conscious Coore or Flamingo Recovery
• Instagram: @consciouscoore
• Threads: @consciouscoore
Resources Mentioned
• Flamingo Trauma Recovery | trauma-informed spiritual care training and counseling
• Beyond Faith as Usual Resource List
RESOURCES:
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There is a version of faith that taught us silence = holy. That speaking up would cost us relationships, standing, or spiritual reputation. That the godly woman is the quiet one, who stays small & calls it faithfulness. What if we weren’t formed into faith but into silence? If that question lives in you & you’re not sure where to start, here’s something for you. Beyond Faith as Usual: a theological reading list for the curious & courageous.
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