Spiritual Wounding – and how to find healing - Part 2
Part 2 of a 4 part series – I recommend you read part 1 of this series before reading this article. You can find Part 1 here.
In the last article we looked at spiritually abusive wounding and the effects it can have on us – mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. In this article we’re going to start to look at how we can find healing and learn to feel safe again.
If you’ve been spiritually wounded, you might wonder how you can recover from it and move forward to be able to trust other Christians, or even God, again. That’s a normal part of this, but God can bring you through to a place of hope and trust again; in fact, He’s the best one to do that.
There are healthy ways to deal with being wounded and there are unhealthy ways. Many of us have resorted to using unhealthy ways to deal with hurt, partly because we felt that they were the easier, or even only, option – squashing our hurt down, running away from it, pretending it never happened, blaming everything on others, blaming and shaming ourselves, becoming a victim in our mind and in our behaviour, etc. I used many of these ways to try and deal with both the family abuse I suffered as a child, as well as the spiritual wounding I received from Christians over the years. I won’t go into details here, but believe me when I say that there have been multiple times that I’ve been on the receiving end of spiritually abusive wounding in my life and have had to work through it to a place of trusting and believing in myself, the church, and even in God, again.
Here’s some things I’ve learnt over the years that have helped me, and hopefully they’ll help you see healing happen in your life, so that you can learn to feel safe and trust again.
God cares about the injustice you’ve suffered
God has seen, and cares about, the injustice you’ve suffered. He definitely does not in any way endorse the behaviour of those who hurt you, and they will be held accountable by Him for their actions.
God has not abandoned you in your suffering. He has never left you or forsaken you, even though it may have felt like that (Deut 3:16), and He will not leave you to try and handle your pain alone. He wants to walk with you through it all and bring you into a place of healing, restoring you and strengthening you to move forward with renewed purpose and hope. He has promised to be your healer, your friend, your wise counsellor, your keeper, and your teacher. His goal is to establish you in a place of being able to trust and love freely again.
Be honest
If you are going to experience the healing of your wounds you must start with honesty about what happened, and how it’s hurt and impacted you.
You can’t heal what you won’t face! Be honest with yourself, and with others, about what’s happened. Face it, so you can find healing. Being honest about what happened is not always gossip; sometimes it’s just facing facts! Don’t sweep it under the carpet or deny that it happened. Don’t try to justify the actions of those who wounded you, or justify your reactions. Don’t try to minimize the nastiness or severity of what happened, or the effects it has had on you.
Don’t judge yourself and your feelings, don’t go down the self-recrimination rabbit trail of thoughts like, “I should have seen it for what it was.” You didn’t and that’s because you trusted the person who hurt you; you thought they had your best interests at heart. That trail leads only to self-shame and self-blame. Just recognise your feelings, and process them through with God, tell Him about them, and ask Him to bring understanding and healing to them.
You can be real with God. He’s not going to get offended by your anger, or even your language. Let Him know that you’re angry at how a person’s misrepresentation of Him, or the Bible, has been used against you. Talk to God about your feelings and ask Him to show you any previous hurts that they’re echoing off, so they can be healed along with this new hurt.
You may find, as part of this wounding, that the enemy tries to establish within you a feeling that God isn’t trustworthy, or that He has let you down. If so, acknowledge those feelings, and talk to God about them. He will appreciate and respect your honesty. Don’t let those feelings build up a cynicism, or bitterness, within you towards God.
When you and God work together to process your hurt it can be an incredibly precious time where you and He develop a deeper relationship and you get a fresh revelation of His love and trustworthiness. You and God will together co-create a new place of safety, strength, resilience, and wholeness in your life. And on top of that, when you let Him heal one hurt He doesn’t usually stop at that one, but He often reaches back in time to heal previous hurts that this one reminded you of. Bonus! What an awesome God, and caring, loving Father He is to us!
Recognise that you’ve suffered trauma
Recognise that you have been through a terrible experience; you’ve been hurt, wounded, and have suffered a potentially life-altering trauma.
Trauma is our emotional response to terrible events happening to us, or around us, and can cause feelings of shock, feeling unsafe, possible feelings of helplessness, shame, denial, unpredictable emotions, ongoing feelings of stress, strained relationships, mental health issues and physical things like nausea, headaches, depressive episodes, and more. Trauma can be the result of a single event or it can be ongoing, as in long-term abuse, bullying, discrimination, or humiliation. Religious wounding, and the trauma it produces, is not often recognised, let alone discussed, but it’s incredibly important to name and understand.
The reality is, if you’ve suffered ‘spiritual wounding’ trauma you will have a swirl of confusing feelings happening, and probably feel them very strongly – confusion, and anger (at the person, at church and maybe even at God), shame, self-recrimination. These are all very real and common feelings in these situations. Give yourself time to work through, and process, all these feelings; don’t expect yourself to ‘be better’ in a couple of days or weeks. Processing trauma takes as long as it takes, but it is often faster with professional help and ministry.
These feelings, as well as the enemy of your soul, will all be trying to tell you things about yourself and how you could have handled things, and not all of those things will be true. Part of dealing with spiritual wounding trauma is identifying what are truths that we need to realise about the situation, and what are lies that we need to discard.
Trauma is not just a modern buzzword; it is very real, and thankfully we are gaining more and more understanding of the effects that it can have on a person’s life, and how to help them through that.
Recognise and understand your feelings
If you’ve suffered spiritually abusive wounding your feelings will be all over the place. You’ve been attacked, and the wounding may affect you on all levels – spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically – and it will have social and relational repercussions as well. Your feelings may range from intense and strong to feeling numb and dead inside. They may fluctuate wildly from day to day for a while, from anger to shame, to disappointment with people and church systems, to depressed, or worse. These are all normal responses to deep hurt and they show that you have been traumatised by what has happened to you. Learn to recognise, and seek to understand, your feelings. Notice what is happening in your body and soul. Many of us don’t pay enough attention to what our feelings (emotional and physical) are trying to tell us. So often instead of listening to them, we go into our mind and start to rationalise our feelings away, or we berate ourselves for feeling them.
You will probably go through what is recognised as the 5 stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Let’s look at them a bit closer.
Denial – Denial doesn’t just present itself as refusing to accept what has happened. It can also feel overwhelming and like the world has become meaningless. Feelings of shock and numbness occur as our bodies and mind only let in as much emotion as we can handle. As this shock fades away, feelings that have been suppressed will begin to surface.
It can cause us to question ourself, and can present in thoughts like, “Did this really just happen?” “Maybe I imagined that”, or “Maybe I’m reading that wrong.” Or “They didn’t really mean it like that, they’re just trying to be helpful”, “I’m just oversensitive, they didn’t mean to hurt me.”
Anger – As we begin to feel emotions again after a spiritual wounding, anger may rise above the rest of those emotions. That anger may be directed at others, at ourself, at church leadership, or just at the church in general. It may spill over and present in our family, with friends, or at our workplace.
Bargaining – The bargaining stage of grief is your mind’s way of pushing off reality and regaining a sense of control as you grieve. If you allow your loss to sink in, you have to admit that it’s real and final, but your mind can be stubborn, so it scrambles and fights off the truth instead.
In this stage you’ll find yourself thinking or saying, “What if,” or, “If only”... As you bargain with yourself, or with God, you may try to explain away what happened or resolve your emotional pain in several ways.
·You may find yourself offering to be a better person, to volunteer your time somewhere, or even donate money if your emotional pain is taken away.
You may beat yourself up with guilt, saying that if only you had done this or that, this thing wouldn’t have happened.
You may seek to bargain with God in order to regain what you lost, promising that if He heals you then you will… in order to receive healing or a miracle restoration.
Depression – It is important to acknowledge that experiencing a deep hurt can be a depressing situation, and feeling down is a normal and appropriate response. In this stage of grieving you may feel foggy, heavy, and confused, empty, sad, and you may withdraw from many of your usual activities, or find it difficult to be your normal self. Sadness can come in waves that strike anytime, anywhere and sometimes life can feel like it no longer holds any meaning, which can be very scary. If you are finding this time particularly difficult, please seek help from your support group (family, close friends, trustworthy minister, doctor, or professional counsellor).
Acceptance – This stage is about accepting the reality of what has happened, the pain it’s caused, and the effects that it’s had on your life. Finding a place of acceptance about the situation looks different for everyone and can be a process of adjustment and readjustment. This stage is where we can begin to move forward. We may begin to learn how to feel safe again, change, grow, reconnect with church, re-invest in our life and our spiritual growth, and begin to live again.
Your feelings are trying to help you
It’s important to remember that your feelings are trying to help you make sense of all that’s happened, and that they are not your enemy. During this time your feelings may go up and down, and you may cycle back through stages of grief several times as you come to grips with what has happened and find your way through it.
Your feelings may alert you to healing or adjustment that needs to happen – in your sense of self-value and worth, your beliefs about yourself, your relationship (with God or others), your confidence, or even your sense of calling. Maybe cynicism or bitterness need to be dealt with, and imprisoning walls of isolation may need to be breached and broken down, letting others back in.
Having doubts and questions about all sorts of things are normal when you’ve been hurt. You may have questions about where God was in all this, how you can ever trust again, how you can believe what people say, and more. You may wonder whether going to church is worth the risk and whether you’d be better off if it was ‘just you and Jesus’. Hurt causes us to feel destabilised and unsure about things that we may have previously felt sure about. These feelings and questions are normal, and they don’t mean that you’re a bad Christian; they just say that you’ve been hurt. They are evidence of a spiritual wound.
We’ll finish here for today, but in the next article, we’ll continue to look at how you can find a place of acceptance concerning what has happened, how you can find healing and learn to move forward again in life with a renewed, and growing, sense of inner safety.
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