Ever wonder why you feel so much better after any sort of therapy session? This could be with a licensed professional or your best friend over coffee. When trauma is trapped inside your memory, it's dying to be let out. That may seem terrifying to think of, revealing our shame to another living soul, but it's not doing us any good keeping it trapped inside us, rotting, festering & spreading like a cancer.
I know this isn't easy to do by any means, but it is so necessary for our healing and our growth. We need to find a trusted friend, life coach, mentor, counselor, therapist, group therapy or pastor to share our experience with. I keep coming across this same message and I'm at the point where I'm witnessing the truth in it. Pastor Jerry Flowers, one of my most favorite keep it real, in yo face kinda preachers just released a sermon title called, "I can't heal it, If you hide it" and you can watch it here. Just like the title implies, what stays hidden can never get the air it needs, to come to the surface and more importantly, come UP & OUT of you. This can be with habitual hidden sin in our lives that we can't shake or a painful suppressed memory that caused us major damage or just the opposite, it may keep replaying in our minds. We're so embarrassed and ashamed by it most of the time, that we'd dare not tell a soul. See, the enemy does his BEST work in secret and isolation. Not only does he not want to be exposed, but the same goes for the evil plans he's set out as attacks for our lives. He's literally up in these streets, trying to steal, kill & destroy. By blocking blessings, blocking progress, and definitely blocking your healing which is keeping you from walking fully in who God designed you to be. On top of the trauma or painful memory, he doesn't stop there, to make us feel even worse and really kick us while we're down, he throws false guilt into the mix, and levels of shame that keep us scared and silenced into submission. But I'm here to tell you NO MORE! Lets put an end to this. The Word says in James 5:16 "Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective." This doesn't only apply to sin in our lives but areas where we struggle, because if we're honest, the pain leads us to sin a lot of times by being our coping for that pain.
Here's a personal story/testimony I'll share with you one that I kept "hidden" for years. This hiding wasn't on purpose either, this actually fell into suppressed memory category. So thank God for revealing it recently so I could begin to walk in true freedom. A very long time ago, my parents were going through their divorce, I was about 11 or 12 years old. I was scared and confused and I knew something really bad was happening in our family but being the youngest, nobody felt the need to explain to me what was happening. Having the inquisitive mind that I've always had, I had questions and needed answers! So I did the best thing I knew how to do, write! I wrote my Dad a letter. A very long, multi page letter. Just asking him a ton of questions about what was happening with our family, wondering what changes were coming, wondering if he still loved me, wondering who his side chick was. I mean a ton of questions that he just wasn't prepared to answer. I think I even put it in an envelope and I left it on his pillow. I can even picture in my mind where I left it.
Wanna know what happened next? Well, if you know my father personally, you'd know that he isn't exactly the emotional available type, so nothing happened, nothing. He never answered my letter. He never acknowledged my letter. It didn't bother me at the time because I was so young. I didn't understand the level of rejection that was being set or the seed that was being planted that would affect me for the remainder of my adult life. In my mind he was still my hero and the greatest ever so how could I be mad at him? But as I got older and looked back on what happened, I started to get angry. How messed up could someone be to not acknowledge their little girls concerns? For years, I was hung up on this fact. Honestly, we can thank that moment for really sparking my writing, because ever since then I've been writing any and everyone who'd read my writing. It got weird when I'd send books of text messages to my ex boyfriends who never cared anything for me or the outpourings of my heart. But there was an unanswered letter void that I carried for years. It wasn't until recently, where I found myself in my church group therapy retelling this story. Here's where and how it changed.
“We keep replaying that event over and over again in our mind, when in actuality, it only happened once! So we are reliving that pain and hurting ourselves over and over again, until WE DECIDE TO STOP IT. ”
I decided to be done
As I was sharing the story with my group, there was a quiet, gentle and non condemning voice in my head that I heard very clearly. In the absolute kindest & compassionate way possible, I heard "Ok Kimberly, are we done harping on this? Are we ready to let this bad memory go? It's taking up space in that beautiful mind of yours and I'd really like to replace it with a pleasant memory. Can we be done with this now?" Just like that. After telling that story to way more people than I'd normally ever be comfortable with, I decided YES! Yes, I am done harping on this!
I KNOW how my Dad is. So let's stop pretending I don't. I have to stop expecting him to be different, same goes for whoever hurt you and I don't mean to come across as taking your experience lightly. But some people are just straight up evil. No matter how much good we want to search for in them, unfortunately, it's not always there. But we keep expecting them to behave well, or speak well, or love well, and its just NOT gonna happen. Looking at him through a realistic adult lens, there was no way on earth that he was or would've been able to answer my letter. It was way too emotionally deep for him, even coming from an 11yr old so what does that say? A lot. But I can't keep holding him to something that he didn't have the capacity to handle. What was that doing to me all these years? Keeping me madder at him than I needed to be, ruining my relationship with Him, with God, with the exes, (even though they needed to be exes anyway) but it wasn't helping me to release all of this pain.
A member of this awesome church therapy freedom group said, "the offense only happened once (in some cases), and the odds are you're not still in that place of being victimized. Which means you're free! but we keep replaying that event over and over again in our mind, when in actuality, it only happened once! So we are reliving that pain and hurting ourselves over and over again, until WE DECIDE TO STOP IT".
This is where we make the choice to forgive and let it go. Or initially, stop harping on it. I tell you all Honey's these things to say, I retold my sad story two more times. Ya know, just as a feelings tester, and to my surprise, it didn't hurt anymore. Something happened, in between the sharing or revealing of it with the group of strangers and deciding to be done. That one memory, got healed! Hallelujah! and it happens just like that. One bad memory at a time. The digging up, the recovering, one trauma at a time, one tragedy at a time. Not all at once in my case, (that would probably be really messy), but a slightly lighter mental and emotional load. Another layer of callousness removed, so our tender heart can work the way it should.
If you'd like prayer for any area of healing that you're struggling with, please don't bare it alone. Reach out via Instagram, @HealedHoney or email the prayer team at HealedHoney@gmail.com or through our contact page here. Praying for you all, until next time,
Happy Healing!
Love,
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