When you were a kid, do you remember getting injured?

I can’t tell you how many times I scraped my knee, pulled a muscle, or got injured in some way as a kid. And, the part that I hated the most was that I had to stop playing. 

Ugh! I hated that I had to stop playing. I couldn’t sit still. I had to be with my friends playing games and having fun. That’s where I felt most alive.

But, my body had to heal. It took time. Maybe it was a few days, but for a kid it felt like an eternity. If the injury was more extensive, obviously, it took longer to heal. That’s the natural progression of life, though. Certain, activities must stop so that whatever was injured can heal properly. 

If that’s what has to happen to us physically, what about emotionally, psychologically, or relationally? Why haven’t we recognized that just as we need healing for physical injuries, we also need healing for relational, emotional, and psychological injuries? 

Did you know that there are many neurological studies that demonstrate we experience brain injuries and brain developmental issues when we experience relational ruptures, intense shame, and trauma? This impacts us for the rest of our lives until we get healing. We experience injuries when we’re rejected or abandoned by those we love. Like, literally, our brains disintegrate and fragment depending on how severe the trauma is. 

For me, I grew up in a home where there were constant ruptures within relationships, really messed up thinking correlations, and an inability to repair or reconcile. I learned to cope with it in unhealthy, damaging ways. Luckily, non of the ways were criminal or illegal. However, I wondered why I felt purposeless at 25 years old. I didn’t know why I got up in the morning to go to work; I hated my job. I didn’t know how to deal with people at work that made me angry. I was usually anxious about what someone at work would make fun of and mock me for. 

The sad part is that I wasn’t even aware how injured I was. Yet, I was searching for answers. I found A LOT of the wrong answers through marketing on positive thinking, strategies, and different influencers that propagated “hustle”, and “Follow my proven formula and you’ll accomplish your goals”. What a bunch of B.S. 

Maybe that works for the extreme people who don’t have a lot of trauma. However, if you’re reading this, the probability is that you’re living with extensive relational trauma. When we become injured internally like this, if there’s no healing, our brains and ability to achieve what we desire in life become mostly impossible.

But…there’s hope. The process is more difficult than most people want, but it’s the only way. It’s the way through the pain.

You can continue living your life the way it is now, repeating the same patterns, and getting the same results. Or, you can chart a new course into the unknown of your soul. It will be dark, painful, and full of suffering. But the reward on the other side is worth the journey. I don’t know how long it will take. There are no principles or formulas, only further into the pain.

The first major hurdle is learning to let your body experience the emotional hurt, rage, or trauma that you’ve stored in your body from past experiences. This is scary; we weren’t meant to live with and feel pain. Naturally we avoid it. Avoiding it is what keeps us stuck. 

Begin by giving yourself permission to enter pain with someone who can handle your pain. This might be a counselor, a pastor, or a psychologist. Whoever it is, they need to exhibit patients and kindness towards you without minimizing your pain, changing the subject, becoming awkward, or anxious. You need someone who is secure and can stay with you as you learn to feel and metabolize your past experiences. 

This is the first step of everyone who goes through healing and finds life on the other side with more joy, more thriving, and more purpose that ever before. There will also be pain on the other side. But on the other side, you’ll have Christ, others, and new skills to process and metabolize the negative experiences so that you’re not continuing to live with them in the present.

Here are some scriptures to encourage you to step towards this journey. 

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” – Psalm 23:4 ESV.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” – Hebrews 12:1-2