Why Unlocking the Past Can Hold the Key To Our Healing

We all have a past. No matter who we are, no matter where we were raised, we each have a story, a history that has been etched into the seams and shadows of our hearts.

We didn’t ask for the things we experienced as children. Whether it was a chaotic family life, our parents’ divorce, or financial struggles, whether it was the rejection and ridicule we experienced from our so-called friends at school, by the time we made it to adulthood, life had already begun to take its toll.

The problem is, the wounds we carry from our past into our adult lives don’t just fall by the wayside once we graduate from school. Our wounds affect and infect everything from our work, our relationships, our faith and our inner peace. We can’t outrun our wounds, we can’t ignore them, we can’t escape them.

We can heal them. We can find freedom from them. The abundant life God desires for you doesn’t include your wounds, or your burdens.

If you’ve ever felt hopeless that life could ever be different – it can! Here is an excerpt from my new book, Peace For a Lifetime, that shares why unlocking the past can hold the key to our healing.

Debra was forty-eight years old when she pursued therapy in order to deal with her addiction to alcohol. Our initial conversation revealed that Debra grew up in an alcoholic family. She was the oldest of four children.

Growing up, she watched daily as her father came home from work and began his evening ritual of pouring himself a few drinks before dinner. With each drink, his agitation increased. He would start with angry comments about the news. Then he would bicker with her mom, and yell at the kids to, “shut up so I can have some peace and quiet,” as Debra recalled. By suppertime, he was in a virtual rage. His bickering escalated into cursing and name-calling. Seemingly he was looking for something that would give him an excuse to explode.

Debra remembered a night when she was six years old that her dad stood up from the table and began to beat her mom violently. Debra immediately took the little ones to their room. When she came back to the dining room, she started pulling on her dad’s arm, desperately trying to get him off of her mom. He merely flung her off while he continued his vicious attack.

One night when Debra was fifteen years old, as another fight began, she stood in front of her mom with a knife and threatened to kill her dad if he ever touched her mom again. He never did.

To make matters worse, Debra was molested by a teacher when she was twelve years old. Though she told her parents, they didn’t believe her and refused to take any action that might embarrass the family.

Since then, Debra has always found herself in relationships where there is a lot of drama. Whether the drama is from her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, his boss, or a nosy neighbor, there is always a fight to be had, and she is ready for battle. The relationships usually end when there are no more battles to wage.

The losses have been tremendous for Debra. She began to rely on alcohol many years ago as a way to deal with the pain of the break-ups. She feels so alone, and the sadness is overwhelming. She just wants to feel loved, to feel safe. Her current boyfriend truly does love her but can’t take Debra’s drama anymore.

When I asked what role faith played in her life, she responded she had a general belief in God. She related having a lot of anger toward Him, not understanding how a loving God could have allowed her to experience everything she did as a child. She also felt God had abandoned her just like her parents did when she told them of her molestation. Certainly she could not feel safe with someone else who was going to leave.

Though Debra survived her childhood, she did not escape the emotional residue that contaminated everything in her life, including her relationship with God.

Thankfully, this is not the end of the story for Debra. God had another plan for Debra’s life. A plan for healing, a plan for life, a plan for peace.

God has another plan for your life, too! He has not abandoned you. He has not forgotten your wounds or your pain. He longs to heal all that is broken in you. He longs to give you a new life and a new future.

I share simple, practical life steps in my book, Peace For a Lifetime, that can help you understand the life God desires for you. This material can help you create and experience an indestructible peace – not just for today, not just for tomorrow, you can experience peace…for a lifetime!

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How God Can Use Our Wounds To Make Us Whole

Our wounds leave us feeling frail, broken, desperately unwhole. It seems like everyone around us must be living the abundant life, but with our wounds, that kind of life feels like an impossibility. We feel helpless. Hopeless.

I felt that way too, for most of my life. I never dreamed that God’s healing could be for me. I had prayed so many times. I had hoped —only to see my hopes dashed when the healing I longed for never materialized. Then I discovered how God could use my wounds to make me not only healed, but whole.

If you’ve ever felt hopeless, hurt, and wounded, too, God has so much more in store for you! God longs for you to experience peace. “Peace” in Hebrew refers to wholeness, completeness, safety, soundness, and fullness. God wants us to be whole —physically, spiritually, and emotionally. I Thessalonians 5:23-24 (NLT) states, Now may the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again.

Here is an excerpt from my new book, Peace For a Lifetime, that shares how God can use your wounds to make you whole so that you can embrace a life of hope, wholeness, and harmony.

God created us as physical, emotional, and spiritual beings. All three are necessary and important components to understand if we want to build peace into our lives and relationships. At the time we received Christ as our Lord and Savior; He healed us uniquely and completely. Yet, some of our wounds, burdens, and infirmities remain. How can that be? Because as humans living in a fallen world, though we are healed in the spiritual realm, we may not see the fullness or completion of that healing until we reach heaven.

While at the time of conversion, some individuals experience immediate freedom or healing in certain areas, all of us spend our Christian lives “work[ing] out [y]our salvation with fear and trembling.” (Philippians 2:12 NIV) [Additions mine] In other words, we take the salve of God’s healing and apply that salve to our physical, spiritual, and emotional wounds so we can find freedom and peace in areas of our lives we never thought possible. If we were all completely healed at the time of conversion, we would all be perfect then, wouldn’t we? I find great comfort in hearing Paul describe his affliction in 2 Corinthians 12:7–10 (NIV):

“...because of these surpassingly great revelations. Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

I wish for the church to be more gentle and compassionate with the weaker, more broken parts of the body so we can experience healing and wholeness too. Sometimes our wounds are the safest place we know. If the church can create a safe place for the broken to uncover and acknowledge their wounds, we, the body, can begin applying the salve of compassion and understanding. The broken can then start to heal.

You don’t have to spend the rest of your life limping along. You don’t have to carry the weight of your wounds one day longer. God desires to take your wounds and give you a life of healing and abundance.

I share simple, practical life steps in my book, Peace For a Lifetime, that can help you understand the life God desires for you. This material can help you create and experience an indestructible peace – not just for today, not just for tomorrow, you can experience peace…for a lifetime!

The Only Remedy for the Hole Inside Our Hearts

 God created each of us with a “God-shaped hole” inside of us. A hole designed to draw us to Him, and into an intimate relationship with the God of the Universe. Most of us feel the ache of the hole inside, we feel the emptiness and despair that echoes our inner pain.

We try to fill that hole with anything and everything under the sun, except the one thing that was perfectly and uniquely designed to fill that hole.

Here is an excerpt from my new book, Peace For a Lifetime, that explains the importance of understanding the hole that exists within each of us, and details the only remedy to fill this hole and give us a life of abundance and peace – the perfect person of Jesus Christ. He is the remedy, our remedy!

St. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in You.”19 Still, humanity searches to fill this hole with anything and everything except God! Sadly, too many people spend their lives looking for something other than God to fill their longing for meaning only to discover how empty and unfulfilled they remain.

King Solomon, who had all the wealth, power, and success in the world still declared all those things vanity, because everything he had accumulated and achieved had cost him so much in time and energy and satisfied so little. He summarized his experience by declaring, “Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13 NIV)

Famous mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, echoed this truth by stating, “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can only be filled with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, by God Himself.”20

I cannot pour enough alcohol into the depths of this God-shaped hole to numb the pain of the emptiness in which I am helplessly lost. I cannot run fast enough to get my adrenaline fix of sex, gambling, or thrill-seeking to escape the numbness of this stale existence called life. I can’t glue together the cracks in my soul through compulsive relationships, spending, or eating to provide at least a few moments where I can breathe. The glue will eventually begin to pull apart, and the cracks will become even deeper and wider than they were before. Nor can I simply intellectualize my way out of this closet, trying to pretend in my self-proclaimed sophistication this hole does not exist any more than the God I cannot look at nor believe in exists.

We spend half of our time numbing ourselves and running from the pain, and the other half of our time using every rationale to pretend the pain doesn’t exist. Ironically, we appear to fear the light that would save us far more than we fear the darkness of the abyss that threatens to consume us. As a result, we prevent ourselves from passionately committing to anyone or anything outside of this prison cell of our own making.

What have you used to fill the hole inside of you? How have you tried to numb the pain in your soul? I invite you to stop running, stop reaching for things that cannot fill you or provide the meaning and peace for which you long.

In my book, Peace For a Lifetime, I share simple, practical life steps that can help you understand the life God desires for you. This material can help you discover identity, clarity, and purpose. It will help you create and experience an indestructible peace – not just for today, not just for tomorrow, you can experience peace…for a lifetime!

You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in You.

_ St. Augustine

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19 St. Augustine, Confessions (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 43.

20 Blaise Pascal, Pensees (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1966), 75.

How Trauma Can Wreak Havoc in Our Lives and Relationships

 It takes two healthy individuals to create a healthy relationship, experts say. But what happens when our early childhood experiences seep into, contaminate, or even destroy our relationships?

As children, we absorb a world of big and small hurts (traumas) that we didn’t ask for, we couldn’t help. We didn’t have any adult tools to help us deal with those traumas, so we developed tools of our own, coping skills that would help us survive, help us deal, the best way we knew how.

But what worked to get us through our childhood years, doesn’t usually work for our adult lives or our relationships.

Here is an excerpt from my new book, Peace For a Lifetime, that shares how trauma from our childhood can wreak havoc in our adult lives and relationships.

Kevin was thirty-two years old when he and his wife, Stacy, twenty-eight, came to see me for their first counseling session. They had been married for six years, but they were on the verge of divorce because of Stacy’s control issues. Kevin alleged Stacy controlled everything in their marriage, including the finances, household chores, and parenting of their three- and five-year-old girls. Stacy decided what and when they ate, what movies they saw, their activities, and their friends. If everything went according to Stacy’s plan, the family could enjoy a pleasant afternoon. But if something didn’t fall in place perfectly, Stacy usually became agitated, critical, and often enraged at Kevin or the girls. Whenever Kevin wanted to offer his opinion or make a suggestion, he was ignored, belittled, or threatened. Those experiences left Kevin feeling resentful and bitter toward Stacy.

During their initial visit, I discovered that Stacy’s mother had been brutally murdered when she was twelve years old. After the loss, she was taken to a counselor once, but shortly after that, her father remarried and moved the family several states away. Since she wasn’t getting into trouble and appeared to be doing okay, her father didn’t see the need to continue her counseling sessions.

In therapy, Stacy revealed she began having terrible nightmares of something happening to her after her mother’s death, or, even worse, to her father. He was all she had left. If something happened to him, what would she do? Who would look after her?

She began pulling her hair out several months later, a habit she was continuing at the time of our sessions. Her anxiety was at an extremely high level and was accompanied by severe periods of depression.

Stacy is an example of how a Big-T trauma during childhood can dramatically impact how we function in relationships as adults. However, Big-T traumas are not always from exposure to a single traumatic event. Big-T traumas may also result from sustained exposure to significant physical or emotional neglect or abuse over a long period, or repeated incidents of sexual abuse or sexual molestation. Big-T traumas can occur if we are loaded with an overwhelming amount of emotional baggage in childhood. Should there be no one to help us unpack and detach from those situations, we are left to carry this baggage with us into our adult life, our jobs, our marriages, and our relationships with our children.

Kevin and Stacy are just one of several stories I chronicle in my book, Peace for a Lifetime, that shows us how we can not only heal from our childhood wounds, but we can build a life that is radically different from anything we may have experienced. We can build life differently. We can build a life of hope, wholeness and harmony that will bring us peace – not just for today, not just for tomorrow, we can experience peace…for a lifetime!

We are not chained to our past. Through Christ, we have been freed to build a

foundation of peace that will last a lifetime!

 To learn more about the book, click HERE!

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