What Is Spiritual First Aid and How It Integrates Psychology and Theology

Disaster preparedness is sort of an oxymoron. Disaster is the kind of indiscriminate calamity that only ever finds us ill-equipped to manage. And if you are truly prepared, you’ve probably averted disaster.

There’s a big difference between the impact of disaster on physical, material life—and its outsized impact on mental, emotional, and spiritual life.

Personal disasters like a terminal illness, natural disasters like the recent fires that razed southern Californian communities, the impact of endless, senseless wars … these all cause a pain and physical damage that can be mitigated or rebuilt. But the worst of these cases threaten to destroy the very meaning of our lives.

No wonder disaster takes such a psychological and spiritual toll. There’s an urgent need to find or even make meaning from it. To somehow explain it, justify why God would allow it, and tell a grand story that makes sense from the senseless.

These are difficult questions, and my guests today both have personal experience with disaster. Dr. Pam King is the Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology, and the Executive Director the Thrive Center. She’s an ordained Presbyterian minister, and she hosts a podcast on psychology and spirituality called With & For. Dr. Jamie Aten is a disaster psychologist and disaster ministry expert, helping others navigate mass, humanitarian, and personal disasters with scientific and spiritual insights. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute Wheaton College, where he holds the Blanchard Chair of Humanitarian & Disaster Leadership. He is author of *A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me about Faith and Resilience.*

In this conversation, Pam King and Jamie Aten join Evan Rosa to discuss:

• Each of their personal encounters with disasters—both fire and cancer
• The psychological study of disaster
• The personal impact of disaster on mental, emotional, and spiritual health
• The difference between resilience and fortitude
• And the theological and practical considerations for how to live through disastrous events.

About Pam King

Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. She hosts the With & For podcast, and you can follow her @drpamking.

About Jamie Aten

Jamie D. Aten is a disaster psychologist and disaster ministry expert. He helps others navigate mass, humanitarian, and personal disasters with scientific and spiritual insights. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute and Disaster Ministry Conference and holds the Blanchard Chair of Humanitarian & Disaster Leadership at Wheaton College. And he’s the author of *A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me about Faith and Resilience.*

Show Notes

• Humanitarian Disaster Institute
• Spiritual First Aid
• Jamie Aten’s A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me about Faith and Resilience
• The Thrive Center at Fuller Seminary
• Pam King’s personal experience fighting fires in the Eaton Fire in January 2025
• 5,000 homes destroyed
• 55 schools and houses of worship are gone
• “Neighborhoods are annihilated …”
• Jamie Aten offers an overview of the impact of disasters on humanity, and the human response
• 1985: 400% increase in natural disasters globally
• Japan 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami
• Haiti 2010 earthquake
• Physical, emotional, spiritual
• Infrastructural impacts that set up disasters
• USAID support
• Jamie Aten’s experience during Hurricane Katrina
• Personal disasters
• Jamie Aten’s experience with colon cancer
• “Evacuation Impossible”
• Impact of disaster on personal sense of thriving
• Thriving vs surviving
• Understanding trauma
• Collective traumatic events
• The historically Black multigenerational community in Altadena
• What constitutes thriving?
• Thriving as adaptive growth: with and for others
• Self-care is not just me-care, but we-care.
• Trauma brain and the cognitive impacts of disaster
• The psychological study of disaster: grapefruit vs beachball
• Humanitarian Disaster Institute
• Spiritual First Aid
• A rupture of meaning making
• Place and spirituality and the impact of disaster on sense of place
• Bethlehem pastor Munther Isaac’s “Christ in the Rubble”
• Finding meaning in both the restructuring or rebuilding, but also in the rubble itself
• Hope embodied in service
• Everything is a cognitive load
• Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz’s The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything
• Psychological and trauma-informed care
• ”One of the things that we found was that when people received positive spiritual support, that they reported lower levels of trauma, lower levels of depression and lower levels of anxiety.”
• Bless CPR
• BLESS: Biological, Livelihood, Emotional, Social, Spiritual
• “What’s the most pressing need?”
• Spiritual health
• Spirituality and our ultimate sources of meaning
• Transcendence
• Lament as a practice for dealing with disaster
• Prayer or sacred readings
• Meaning making and suffering:  Elizabeth Hall (Biola University) and Crystal Park (University of Connecticut)
• Baton Rouge Flood 2016
• Navigating suffering
• Religion in disaster mental health
• Faith as a predictor for resilience
• Meaning making outside of religion
• Mr. Rogers: “Look for the helpers”
• Best disaster preparedness: “Get to know your neighbor.”
• “Proximity alone is not what it takes to become a neighbor.”
• Neighbors helping neighbors
• Managing burnout in helpers
• “Spiritual self-aid” instead of “self-care”
• Self-care is like surfing
• “God holding the fragmented pieces of me”
• “God’s love is with me.”
• Spiritual fortitude in personal and natural disasters

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Jamie Aten and Pam King
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, Kacie Barrett & Emily Brookfield
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give