Each of us carry the wounds that we have experienced in life. The hurts, the disappointments, the rejections. The pain is real and you have every right to feel hurt and to hold onto your pain, but it won’t do you any good to hold on to your woundedness.
We all carry wounds, but how we choose to respond to them makes a huge difference in levels of freedom, joy, and healing we are able to experience. Our lives do not have to be defined by our woundedness.
The question is not if we will get wounded, but what we will do with those wounds. The choice to pursue healing is not enough though.
In our attempts to heal our woundedness we can actually fall into the trap of going after our healing in a way that brings more of the same wounding.
When we live out of reaction to our negative experience we either tend to create the same situation again or such an extreme opposite that it’s bad in a different way.” -Blake Healy
As Blake shares in this sermon, (seriously so good, go listen to it now) there are four common ways we try to heal, or at least protect our wounds, that actually bring more hurt.
False Sources of Healing Woundedness
Cynicism
There’s always a reason that things aren’t good and won’t be good. Why people can’t be trusted. Even when things seem to be going well there’s a reason it won’t last. You find a reason to be disappointed before anything or anyone disappoints you.
But in this attempt to avoid disappointment and rejection you end up experiencing more of the same. As Blake says, “You’ve become so accustom to believing the lies the enemy says about you that you find it easy to believe the lies he has to say about others”
Justice
Enneagram 8’s know this false source of healing better than most. While justice is a good and righteous thing, in our quest to make sure no one else experiences the wounds we have, we make anyone who does that bad thing out to be a villain and box them into being stuck in that place of being the bad guy.
When we see justice through the love of God then we can bring transformation to both the victim and the victimizer, and that’s what true heavenly justice looks like.” -Blake Healy
Identity
When you take your woundedness as an identity it very quickly can turn into entitlement. And when you are entitled you stop seeking healing.
When everyone owes you something because of this wounded identity, you are never able to enter into relationships of equals where real healing can happen.
Identity has to be built on the love of God for true healing to ever take place.
The Goodness of God
Not something you would expect to be a false source of healing, but when we slap a “God is good” bandaid on real hurt healing doesn’t actually take place, and the goodness of God is not actually present.
As Blake puts it, “Experiencing the goodness of God without first having a revelation of God’s love reduces God’s goodness to a fake smile.”
True Source of Healing Woundedness
God’s Love
A real encounter with God’s love, hearing what He actually has to say about our pain, is the most powerful source of healing.
This is a source of healing you can access totally on your own, but if you are feeling stuck with hearing God’s voice this is also a source where inner healing can help provide breakthrough.
Often we need to heal misconceptions we have about God before we are really able to hear Him clearly.
If you are feeling stuck in healing from your woundedness, inner healing and counseling services can help, but only when you first encounter the true love of God.
You can hear the truth about your hurts from other people. They can affirm how wrong what happened to you was. But nothing sinks as deep into healing those wounds as hearing from God for yourself how He feels about what happened.
Blakes new book, Profound Good, takes you on a journey of seeing God through the lens of his love and learning that his goodness is actually even better than you may think.