Healing hurts

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Healing hurts

21 January 2007 See also Healing blog

Mention healing to a group of Christians and different feelings and opinions are sure to be expressed. Some have had bad experiences. Others just don’t believe the hype, some really wish that they or their friend would be healed, and some have been healed.

Lots of people want healing in their inner life. All of us have experienced psychological hurts. Physical trauma has an effect on our feelings and sometimes on our inner self. Verbal abuse, and the traumas associated with loss, disappointment and rejection all have an impact on our inner person. Some of us have suffered major ridicule, or opposition, or injustice. Others have been physically or mentally attacked or abused. Others have been witnesses to horrific events.

These experiences can make a major impact on the way we think about ourselves and how we behave. But getting free from them, or finding healing is not easy. In many ways this kind of hurt is helped by psychological healing. But Christians have a great deal to contribute to the healing of our inner hurts and injuries. Many are very susceptible to healing prayer. My experience is that a profitable partnership is possible between the psychologist and the pastor in these matters.

Many feelings, attitudes, habit patterns, inhibitions and reactive ways of coping which we have now were caused or began at an earlier stage of our life. Some may have happened as recently as last week, and others as long ago as the week we were born. Christian healing has to deal realistically with the impact of those traumas, hurts and our feeling and decision reactions.

Christian healing does not try to go back to the past to undo something or to imagine a different outcome. Rather it has to deal with the actual person as they are in the present.

Part of the prayer is that the hurts that have been done to us will be healed. But the person may also need to acknowledge their feeling reactions (anger, resentment, disappointment, grief etc) and seek forgiveness for those which were wrong, admit the rightness of those which were right, and seek forgiveness for allowing any of the right reactions to linger and fester. They may need to ask God for healing both for the initial injuries and for the effect of their feeling reactions. They may need to forgive others, and even stop blaming God.

There may also be decisions the person has made as a result of what happened to them which have affected their life from then on. These decisions may have been conscious and willful or they may have been unconscious. They may have been the best they could do at the time. Either way they are real decisions with effects in the real world. Some of these decisions may need to be changed and a new way of operating adopted with God's help.

To describe the process simply we could say that an injury done to us results in

· hurt

· reactions by us.

We could have at least four kinds of reactions.

1. One is to hold blame against the person who hurt us. To act as their accuser. Forgiveness involves giving up being their accuser. It means deciding not to hold it against them any more.

2. A second reaction is to desire to punish the other person. This is different to the first. Punishment is what anger is about. This desire to retaliate, expressed in our feeling reactions, needs to be given up and healed. Even though the initial anger may have been justified, the continuing of the anger is wrong and harmful.

3. Associated with this may be a cluster of other feeling reactions to the hurt. Feeling reactions are normal. But if they continue and have a bad affect on the person's life there may be a need for relief. What people do with their feeling reactions is their choice, so they may need to choose not to be full of self-pity any more. They may also need to pray that God will lift the feeling of discouragement or whatever feeling is still there.

4. A fourth reaction may be to make decisions (consciously or unconsciously) which alter the way we act or think. These may be decisions to protect ourselves, to retreat, or they may be decisions to get our own back. There are many kinds of decisions we could make - some good, some bad. Some decisions may have been the best we could do at the time. Some of these decisions may still be operating in our life, even though they were made a long time ago. Wrong decisions need to be changed in favour of new godly ways of living. Decisions that were the best we could do at the time could be changed for decisions that reflect how we want to live now.

Enough for now. More about this another time.

Dale

Comments

Perhaps the most important part of healing, whether physical, mental, emotional or spiritual is the communication with God about the need for healing; then accepting the situation whatever it is, knowing that God is in the midst of the situation, He has a plan and that healing in some way is taking place. This may not be healing as we envisage or in the time we want. Healing usually takes time and so 'waiting on God and trusting is important'.

Posted by Deborah Hennessy on Sunday, January 21, 2007 at 09:02:52

I really appreciated this -clear teaching on this is so needed as Christians are getting in to and pushing a kind of inner healing that says until the "feeling" is gone I have to keep digging and go to the past and know where it came from etc. It seems to me that imagination and accusation and hurt in families/relationships results instead of the hurt one accepting where he himself/she herself is at now and dealing with her own reactions now. thank you for helping us think more clearly about our own reactions and choices.

Posted by Janet on Thursday, January 18, 2007 at 11:27:37