Open Wounds

Recently we have had a friend undergo surgery that ended with several 're-entries' and due to this, it became very difficult to find flexible, healthy skin to close the wound to heal.  This is a terrible ordeal ~ just when you think the worse is over ~ to find out more is yet to come. This made me think of our emotional wounds.

At one point, the wound had to be left open to clean out the infection.  How vulnerable .... I thought.

When we are injured emotionally as a child, this wound we carry with us the rest of our lives.  

Arrested development is where you are frozen in your emotional development at the age where you encountered trauma.

So here is how it works (from Broken Children, Grown-up Pain by Paul Hegstrom).  'The information received by our senses comes into the part of the brain called the thalamus.  The thalamus is like a train-switching station that decides if the input it receives is traumatic or not--based on the past information stored in the brain.  If one has been wounded in childhood then he or she is actually making life decisions based on the wounds of childhood."

There is quite a difference in people who have been wounded as they age; those who age with 'the God' perspective and a wound that has been healed and those who age with 'a worldly' perspective and are fearful and live with an unhealed, open wound.  

Paul Hegstrom suggests that  "the purpose of healing and maturity is to override what wounded children's brains drive them to think, feel, and do by using the frontal cortex of their brains to make decisions and taking captive the imaginations and bring down the strongholds.  This is maturity.

Maturity is the ability to see reality instead of perception. 

Children and wounded adults think their perception is the only one to be believed and that all other perceptions are wrong.  If I have been abused through rejection, incest, sexual molestation, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, or physical abuse, every incident and bit of raw data coming into my brain computer has to go through a clogged filter of my perceptions based upon my previous wounds and  will become my reality for a lifetime."

Without the renewing of the mind (Romans 12:2) or sancification we walk through life incomplete and stuck.

I have been keenly aware of couples who are retired and in the last half of their lives.  Everywhere I go, I notice them.  I think 'so that's retirement'?  I wonder if they have an 'open wound', seeking something to help heal them.  How many of us are wondering around making life decisions based on childhood hurt?  

Seeking  true healing .... A covering to protect the most precious thing ....

There is only one true healer, one way to be healed and that is through Christ.