Bracing for the Storm: The Imperative of Psycho-Trauma Training in Nigerian Seminaries

Seminary formation programmes in Nigeria do not include trauma training, consequently leaving seminarians completely unprepared to provide trauma care and counselling when they become priests. The present study is an attempt to build support for incorporating trauma training into seminary classrooms. The aim was to show that preparing seminarians for the emotional reactions they may experience while providing trauma care is a necessity, given the increasing prevalence of stress and trauma in Nigeria. A purposive convenience sampling technique was used to recruit senior seminarians from two Catholic major seminaries in Nigeria. Responding to a Likert-type survey created for this study, 83 seminarians provided usable data regarding the following variables: Trauma awareness levels; Perceived readiness to provide trauma care; and levels of experience garnered from annual (6-weeks) apostolic internship. The statistical package for social science research (SPSS) version 25 aided the analysis of data, including the measurement and correlation test of the variables. The results indicated that most of the seminarians (n = 61, 73.4% of the sample) were hardly aware of the potentially traumatizing aspects of pastoral work. Although they had slightly higher scores for their perceived readiness to provide trauma care than they had for trauma awareness, the results showed that these two variables had a statistically non-significant relationship. There was also no significant relationship between their experience from annual pastoral internships and their abysmally low trauma awareness scores. These results suggest the importance of targeted training in basic trauma awareness for seminarians in Nigeria. Implications for seminaries and future studies are discussed.