Healing From Inner Wounds

Meditation on Hidden Wounds

Emotional Injuries Hide In Our Unconscious
Throughout our lifetime, most of us have in some significant way been wounded. The physical wounds we can see. Their solutions, if available to us, are fairly straightforward. Even these we many of us tend to ignore. We hate to go to doctors. Others of us dwell in the fear of being wounded physically.
But other wounds take place in our souls and spirits. These wounds take place in our minds and in our hearts. They are not so easy to see and are often stored out of touch, deep within our unconscious. When they do surface we force them back down.
We find ways to escape them. We work so much that we don’t have time to reflect on them, or for others drink whenever they begin to disturb us, or seek some other diversion, many times harmful in order to keep from facing these painful and frightening inner wounds. Above all we deny they exist.

We all want an "abundant life" (John 10:10). We want to learn, laugh, leave a legacy, and love and be loved. Even though we would like to learn, to grow and to reach our full potential, most often we end up feeling powerless and unable to break the patterns which repeatedly lead us to dissatisfaction and pain. The more we try to run away from our pain, the faster our pain seems to catch up to us. The abundant life seems to slip through our fingers like golden sand.
Healing, in reality, asks us to address our pain rather than avoid it. Pain is a warning signal. As we give our pain our attention, exploring what we can learn from our situation, our interactions, our thoughts and our feelings, we can begin to see the pain as a part of a dysfunctional pattern that has been repeating itself over and over in our lives.


What We Lack
Most of us do not lack the desire to change these painful, dysfunctional patterns. We had hoped that being "born again" and becoming a Christian would end the pain and the dysfunction in our lives. But, for the most part we can see that did not happen by simply having faith in Jesus as our Savior. Rather, we are trapped in the pain and patterns for another reason. We are lacking the ability to understand the history and purpose of our wounds as well as the tools and the sensitivities of how to bring positive changes about and find healing from the past.
The Source Of The Problem
The dysfunctional patterns of our present life is most often a consequence of some way that we, as children, learned to fit into, cope with, understand or survive vulnerable situations from our family interactions. Things we learned to expect, ways we learned to feel about ourselves, other people, and our environment, which we misunderstood, were false, or which are now outmoded. We grow up believing these falsehoods or generalizing what once seemed true in our families to our experiences outside of our families where they don't really belong. Many times our family of origin were not healthy. They were simply places where wounded people were now wounding their children.

Our Inner Heart Survival Glasses Misrepresent How We See And Cause Us To Recreate The Past
It's as if when we were very young, we got a prescription for a pair of inner heart glasses that fit the way we were seen by our family and the way we, at the time, saw ourselves and the tiny world we lived in. We grew up and went out into world of new possibilities, experiences and relationships as we became independent adults. But we kept the same old glasses. These glasses force us to look at our present experience through the eyes of what happened to us in the past.
These glasses have caused us to wrongly see reality. Everything is distorted, out of focus, and colored. These glasses work together with the ways our thoughts and emotions are stored and upheld in our bodies (through cellular memory in the brain), and lead us to keep recreating our past, unconsciously interfering with our sincere yet fruitless efforts to change and grow into the image of Jesus Christ..


How to Change of our Inner Heart Glasses
How do we change this perception of the world? How can we change the prescription on our inner heart glasses so we can see the real world as it really is instead as how we saw it as children?
We need to ask the Lord to help us to get a new set of eyes. We need to seek through meditation on the scripture to reprogram our inner selves. Through positive self talk and careful examination of our life history we can prayerfully begin to see where wrong ideas and beliefs were born.
We need a way in the present to work with our misunderstandings from the past. So we recreate the "scene of the crime", where we re-experience the same kinds of feelings we originally felt, even though the names and faces and even the look of the situation may now be different. We look for our "triggers" which set us off and lead us unchecked into hurtful patterns. By identifying these triggers this allows the present to serve as a pathway to the past and help us see the original injury. We can then locate the old belief structures and transform them with a present-time consciousness that now has resources far beyond those we had access to when we were children. We can act as wise and good parents to ourselves and allow ourselves to act as mature adults rather than as hurt children.
Addressing the Mind, Heart, Body & Spirit
We are mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual beings, and our healing needs reflect these different aspects of ourselves. This means that instead of looking at emotions as "bad" we begin to accept them and not fear them. We will not give them control of our actions when they lack wisdom but we will not lock them away. We can sit with them like frightened children providing comfort and guidance to them. We must learn to be patient with ourselves even as God has been patient with us in Jesus Christ. We must also recognize we are physical beings. This means we need to provide care and support to our physical self. This can mean exercise, proper nutrition, and relaxation exercises. It can also mean seeking medical attention when we need and even seeking the help of a psychiatrist when there seems to be a biological basis to our inner turmoil. We also need to develop a spiritual process that includes the private practice of spiritual disciplines, the interaction of a small group, and the guidance of a wise spiritual mentor. As we dedicate ourselves and invest into this process of healing we will see wonderful results. Our past does not have to dictate our future. We can choose a different path.