This interview appears in Issue 24 of The Mockingbird, now available to order in our store.
Okay, I need to say this.” So begins a TikTok posted by licensed trauma therapist Kobe Campbell in May 2022. Sounding impassioned, if exasperated, she continues, “So many of us have turned healing into becoming this super perfect version of ourselves. That is bondage, right? That is anxiety waiting to happen.” Healing, she explains, is not aspiration — it is the inverse: “Healing is letting the worst version of yourself be loved.”
The brief video went viral, allowing Campbell to regularly speak her deeply personal and faith-filled message of trauma recovery to many thousands of followers. This exposure made way for her 2023 book Why Am I Like This?, a blend of science, faith, and psychotherapy, in which Kobe shares from a place of personal vulnerability about how God meets us in our shame with grace, tenderness, and love. Her book combines all the elements of solid therapeutic practice with Biblical insight into where God shows up in our stories of trauma. Campbell’s work is a game changer for anyone who feels like they have to choose between their faith and getting therapy.
So often in religious circles we are told that “God helps those who help themselves.” But is that what Jesus died for? Is that consistent with the doctrine of God’s grace? Kobe’s findings match my own experience as a practicing therapist (and human) when she writes, “We live with the armor of performance in order to protect ourselves from being seen as the terrified people that we are.”
— Marilu Thomas, interviewer
Mockingbird: In the introduction to your book, you share your personal story about how you were called to be a trauma therapist. I would love for you to share a bit of that with us.
Kobe Campbell: I never love to spoil the beginning of the book, but I will say this: I had a really miraculous, personal, tangible moment with God, at one of my lowest, lowest moments. The experience confirmed for me that God is real. And not just, like, in a big, he’s floating around in the sky way, but, like, he sees me in this dark room alone, hurting, broken. God cares, and he’s not mad at me for hurting. That experience revolutionized my life.
I came into this field not hoping to be an expert, but hoping to be a presence, the way God was a physical presence to me. I wanted to be with other people and let them know that pain doesn’t disqualify anyone from God’s love. Your pain doesn’t make you shameful. Your pain does not mean you’re not a true believer. God has created provision in his presence for your pain.
M: That’s so powerful — and you don’t always hear that message in church. Sometimes the church is a place of shame.
KC: Oh, for sure. I experienced that a lot.
And to be honest, I felt a lot of redemption, because a lot of the spaces where I often felt that shame are now spaces that have, in many ways, repented and recognized what they got wrong. So that’s been a beautiful reality.
But what I think the church can sometimes miss is that, in the year of our Lord 2024, God is not done revealing himself. We can get too comfortable. We feel like we’ve mastered knowledge of God. And so my journey and my work is always about remaining curious — God’s not done revealing himself.
M: That’s beautiful. Because we can easily be overcome by the news headlines, or by what’s happening in our personal lives. But God’s not done with us yet. I find it so interesting that when I’ve watched your other interviews, like on Good Morning America — you’re talking about God in those places. And people seem very hungry for that. Have you found that to be true?
KC: Absolutely. Faith is an elephant in the room in many professional conversations. Statistically, more people than not have a faith perspective, whether it’s Christian or not — and in this country, it’s predominantly Christian. So when we exclude faith from the conversation, we’re literally siphoning off a part of someone’s healing journey. We’re creating this silo, as if to say every part of you can be healed except for your view of God, except for your relationship with God, except for the spiritual abuse you’ve endured. And I think that can make people feel really hopeless. And so when I am able to share myself, my heart, my story, and God’s story in my life, even people who don’t have a faith perspective start getting curious.
M: It seems like you’re not trying to evangelize anyone or get them to believe, you’re just saying, “This is a reality in my life, and this is what has healed me,” and people are very attracted to that.
KC: My husband has this saying, and I love it so much. He says, “Be a witness, not a gossip.” A gossip tells what they’ve heard. A witness tells about what they’ve seen themselves.
M: In your book, I noticed you used the word “tenderness” a lot. That really struck me because, even in all my theological training, I’d never heard anyone connect trauma[1] and the tenderness of God. How have you seen that show up in trauma recovery for yourself and your clients?
KC: Well, in the world you respond on the same level as the stimuli is presented, right? If someone presents an intense stimuli, then you give an intense response. But in the therapy room I was having this overwhelming, intense experience — and God responded with gentleness. That was like absolutely confusing to me, and it shook me. I was like, oh, what is happening? God actually wants to be near to me. He is not waiting to punish me. He is not angry at me for hurting, but he is angry at the things that have hurt me.
“Tenderness” is a word that a lot of us don’t have a reference for. But I want to continue to integrate that into our lives and our relationships with God — that God’s strength is in his restraint. God could punish us, but he doesn’t. He could hold everything against us, but he doesn’t. And he demonstrates a beautiful power in his ability to remain gentle in the most tumultuous of times. And I’ve seen that in my life. So the invitation in my therapy, in my speaking, in my retreats, is to help people not just hear about it, but to experience it for themselves.
And that’s why I love experiential work. I can’t tell you that you didn’t feel the Holy Spirit in your body. I can’t tell you that, because nothing can refute that.
M: Right. We can’t really argue with what we feel.
KC: Yes.
M: You know, I have clients who, when you’re tender with them — they cry. They’re like, “It’s hard for me to hear that.”
Why is it so hard for us to accept God’s tenderness?
KC: I’ll say this: The world is just truly a cruel place. That’s one.
But two, I think for Christians — and I may step on toes here — but I think we love to motivate people with fear. Because fear motivates quickly, but love motivates sustainably. When you motivate with love, it might take a longer time for that person to catch on to the principle you’re trying to communicate, but when they catch on to it, they’re gonna live it and embody it. But when you motivate somebody with fear, you get them to elicit the appropriate response, a.k.a., the response you desire quickly. Why? Because they’re avoiding punishment; they’re avoiding pain.
I think that for many of us it’s hard for us to experience tenderness because it’s hard to let go of fear. It’s hard to let go of constant challenges. We have been taught that we should allow fear to motivate us. We have become preoccupied with a constant spiritual ascension, a constant spiritual obstacle course that we have to scale and jump and swing across. And to say I can just dwell in love — and that is enough — that’s something that is so antithetical to the ways of the world.
M: Yes, and we almost prefer the latter. We almost prefer to have a prescription so we can follow it, so we can try to have success in the world. And yet, Christ’s way is to meet you at the lowest point in your life, with this tenderness — accepting that you are where you are.
I was thinking back to that TikTok that went viral, about “healing is not becoming the best version of yourself but letting the worst version of yourself be loved” — that is a message we don’t hear enough, wouldn’t you say? Especially in the Christian church?
KC: Yeah, I think we have lost the value of the crucifixion of Christ. We say it’s Christ crucified that gives me grace, but then we act like it’s our own work.
We’re called to be transformed, yeah. We’re called to certain standards, absolutely. But are you engaging in those standards as an external rehearsal for what other people expect of you? Or are these actions a true reflection of a heart transformation that has come from dwelling with and being in the presence of God?
Accepting that I’m not perfect is not permission to fall short in where I think God’s called me to, but it gives me permission to receive the reality that God is not waiting for me to be perfect to love me. He loves me now. In this moment. And that’s what makes me want to get up and do something good.
M: Yeah, and there’s nothing I can do to make him love me less, or love me more.
KC: Oh my goodness, yeah.
M: One thing I often hear in the therapy room with trauma cases is, “Well, I’m not starving. My wounds feel small. My past feels small.”
KC: I think that many of us dismiss just how many places in our lives God wants to touch. We validate what’s worth weeping over based on what other people think about it. When we have a personal relationship with God, you never know what God’s gonna bring up.
There’s a desire to dismiss our wounds, and there’s a desire to deny the reality that we are human beings; we are embodied spirits, which means your heart and your spirit may align with something, but that does not mean your body is yet aligned. And that’s why experiential work is so important. Right? Because God created the body. Our body is wired, our brain is wired through repetition. Which means that when we shift, we need repetition that is aligned with the shift. And repetition presupposes that you’re not gonna get it right the first time.
M: Right. It’s a long process. Even seeing the patterns — you may see them — but you can’t know the depth of what’s ingrained until Christ has worked with you on that.
Somehow that makes me think about the story about your brother-in-law and the monster under the bed. Can you tell that story?
KC: My brother-in-law tells this parable. He says, what do you say to a kid if they say there’s a monster under my bed? I and many others often say, well, you tell the kid you can sleep with mommy and daddy. But he says, no, you tell the kid to go into the room and teach the child to tell the monster to go away. Because if the monster can run you out of one room, it can run you out of any room.
I actually reread that excerpt yesterday, and I thought about how graceful God is. I wish I would have added this in the book: that God has given me the time to come sleep in his bed, and he has also gotten me up and said, “Now let’s go tell the monster to leave.”
M: I love that you just put together resting with God and facing our trauma. I’m reminded of the broom tree, where God gives Elijah rest. In the book, you include so many beautiful little Bible studies like that. Of all of them, what’s the one that is top of mind right now?
KC: I really relate with the Bible stories of Elijah and Moses. Just them openly, rawly, expressing where they are emotionally with God, and his response was never to shame them. That hit me like a ton of bricks and, many days, it still hits me like a ton of bricks. He could have said, “What little faith you have!” But there is a tenderness that God demonstrates when it comes to our mental and emotional pain — he does not judge them for having need, he just meets it.
How many of us spend so much time circling our needs and, like, theologically assessing whether our needs are worthy of being needs in the first place? And in that time, God is just waiting to meet the need — to satisfy it.
M: You’re so right. God could have said, “After all I’ve done for you!” And yet the heart of God meets them in this beautiful way.
One thing my clients don’t often know is that you actually can heal from trauma. They think of this as a life sentence, of just repeating the patterns and having the same reaction when something happens.
KC: First, I will just reiterate what you said. You can heal from trauma.
What is healing from trauma? Healing from trauma is not forgetting what happened to you. It’s about no longer having your life and your daily experience controlled by the effects of what happened to you. The same way that you developed responses because of a moment is the same way you can develop new responses because of a new moment. Right?
You can unlearn the trauma responses and learn new responses that align with your God-breathed authentic self. Trauma healing is holistic. We heal the perspectives of the spirit and the mind. We heal the patterns of the mind, and we heal the manifestations. Sometimes that can happen over time, and sometimes it just takes a moment. Maybe your heart is going to shift before your patterns do.
The brain is beautiful, but it loves to keep us safe. And what’s safe to the brain oftentimes is predictability. Change is difficult. It’s uncomfortable, but that discomfort is a sign that you’re changing and not a sign that it’s impossible or that you’re doing it wrong.
M: Which reminds me of the story of the woman at the well, the Samaritan woman — the way you talk about her being neurobiologically systematized to that isolation (John 4:1–42). Can you talk more about how Christ met her in that?
KC: The woman at the well has what we call a corrective emotional experience. A corrective emotional experience is really like a grand reversal of an experience that you’ve initially had. So imagine you have a birthday party and nobody shows up. A corrective emotional experience would be your having a birthday party to which all of your friends came. Right? It rights the wrong in the specific way that the wrong happened.
The woman at the well is a woman alone, isolated from the community, judged and hurt by the men in the community. And yet the redemption of her life — the healing of her life, and the opportunity to reconnect with the community that she was ostracized from — comes from this connection with the man Jesus.
And in every case I think you can have a healthy, beautiful season of pulling back. I don’t think that the first thing you should do in your healing is run right back in the situations that wounded you — but we will need a time where we have to reengage in the areas where we were wounded, not staying with the same people and not staying in the same context, but if you’ve been hurt in deep friendship there’s a time in which you’re going to need to step back into deep friendship, because you were designed for it. And so with the woman at the well, she gets this moment that reverses and directly refutes her core wound.
But now she has to learn how to live with people again. Now she has to learn how to develop relationships. Now she has to learn how to live her life on a daily basis and a completely different trajectory than what she’s used to.
M: And whether we have identified trauma in our backgrounds or not, we all have a relational wound of some sort.
The theme of this issue of the magazine is mystery. And your book reminds me of the reality that we’re a mystery to ourselves. How does the mystery of God show up in the therapy room?
KC: I love that idea, that we are a mystery unto ourselves, especially when we’ve experienced trauma. And God is a mystery and will always be a mystery to us. And I think sometimes we can see the word “mystery” as a negative, scary word — I’ll never know this; I’ll never attain this. But I think about the beauty of mystery, the beauty of an infinite goodness, an infinite tenderness, an infinite presence, an infinite glory, an infinite joy, an infinite comfort that will always be a mystery. I will never reach the end of God’s grace. I’ll never reach the end of God’s comfort.
And also I don’t know how God’s going to show up in my life. You know, I mentioned in the book having a session with my therapist and recalling my childhood trauma. She says close your eyes, and I just want you to imagine that Jesus is in the room. And I did it, but I didn’t do it with the real expectation that I would see, feel, or sense anything, right? But I was open — open enough to let God show up if he wanted to, even though I didn’t think he would.
And I closed my eyes and I literally could see Jesus in the corner. I’m immediately crying, completely broken down, and here’s the thing I love to make sure I communicate: My therapist was not a Christian. A good therapist honors your beliefs.
She asked me questions about Jesus that really made me reevaluate what I thought about God: If your God is kind and full of grace, why would he be mad at a little girl who’s been abused? That doesn’t sound kind and full of grace. And I’m like, oh, you’re right!
M: Gosh, that’s so powerful how your therapist really leaned into your need and your belief.
KC: And what was interesting was, she felt it too. She was like, I think I felt the thing in my body when that happened. And, you know, I never could have written down that God would do that. I didn’t learn it in seminary. I didn’t learn it in Bible study. I didn’t learn it in a sermon, but I was open to the mystery of God. And God showed up — as mysterious things do — unexpectedly.
M: Jesus just loves to do that, doesn’t he? Show up in the place we never expect him to be.
KC: Yep. A thousand percent.
Love this article…walking this kind of road…