Healing from your past is essential for your overall well-being and for living a fulfilling life. Our past experiences color our perceptions and influence our decisions.
Healing from your past, especially trauma, is crucial for your mental health, emotional health, and physical health, as well as your relationships, personal growth, and life satisfaction. All these aspects of your life can be affected by past wounds and unresolved trauma.
Research shows that unresolved trauma is strongly linked to conditions like anxiety disorders, depression, PTSD, chronic stress, and personality disorders. Also, physical symptoms such as headaches, digestive issues, a weakened immune system, heart disease, and high blood pressure.
Healing, on the other hand, brings about transformation. Healing promotes physical well-being and helps you to understand and manage your emotions. Healing also helps regain a sense of control and allows you to access more of your self-esteem.
It’s important to remember that we live in a fallen world, surrounded by imperfect people, flawed, just like you and me. Every person you encounter carries their own story, shaped by unique experiences, beliefs, and values. Many of them, like us, have known pain. They’ve suffered loss, endured trauma, and carry wounds—some visible, others buried deep.
And the truth is, people who are hurting are more likely to hurt others. That’s not to excuse anyone’s harmful behavior, but to offer a lens of understanding. When we recognize the pain behind the actions, we’re better equipped to respond with compassion instead of confusion or bitterness.
If you’re anything like I used to be, you might believe you can change someone. But here’s the hard truth: you can’t. You can encourage, support, and influence someone’s growth, but real change? That has to come from within them. The only person you can truly change is the one staring back at you in the mirror.
That’s where the real work begins. With her. We can evaluate her. We can make a plan for her. We can control her actions. And most importantly, we can give her permission to heal.
Awareness is huge. Your healing journey begins with awareness. Let’s explore arrested development for a brief moment here. The process is quite simple. Here it is:
We’re born à Something bad happens à We develop layers to protect ourselves
Those layers often manifest as new beliefs and, in some cases, even new identities. For example, you were dating a man, fell in love, and discovered that he was cheating on you. You may have made his cheating mean that you were not enough as you were. Not pretty enough, not skinny enough, not adventurous enough, not giving enough.
But from that moment on, you showed up differently because of that new belief that you are not enough, and that new belief arrested your development. When you attach negative labels to yourself or make it mean that you are a lesser person when something bad happens to you, the result is layers and layers of protectionshielding the real you. What you’re actually doing is moving farther and farther away from your authentic self. You’re masking who you really are because you keep responding to life’s challenges through a distorted lens. You can’t see clearly because your mirror is smeared with hurt, pain, guilt, shame, rejection, trauma, and not enoughness. The wounded you have hijacked your life and is masquerading around as you, but she’s an impostor.
When you don’t heal from past wounds, you’re holding on to them with negative energy that affects how you show up in the world and limits your present and future potential. And remember, those open wounds have far-reaching consequences across the mental, emotional, physical, and relational aspects of your life.
The more you rehearse a painful past, the more you’ll want to be vindicated. Holding yourself in this perpetual cycle keeps you with a victim mentality. Feeling like you’re damaged, powerless, and undeserving of a fulfilling life.
I’ve heard some people say that they can only begin to heal when they get closure. You need to know that you will not always get closure from someone who has wronged you. There will be times when you’ll need to get closure on your own meaning between you and God. You can’t afford to let the lack of closure rob you of your freedom in Jesus. Remember, you can’t control what someone else does.
Your response is your responsibility.
Healing from your past requires you to take responsibility for your life. That means doing the necessary inner work to clear your mirror. We each have to examine ourselves, so the clearing process is different for everyone, but what is true for everyone is that there is nothing too hard for God. You cannot change your past, you can only reframe it. Healing from your past is not about forgetting what happened but about processing it in a way that minimizes its negative impact on your life, both present and future.
I want to challenge you to have faith in God. God can hold your heavy. He knows everything about you, and He wants you to trust Him to care for you. God is committed to your care. He created you for His glory and for His pleasure. He created you to be a light, an ambassador for Christ. He can use your life and your testimony to advance his Kingdom. You were created for a purpose. You’re not going to stumble upon a better life. You’ve got to be intentional about changing your life. So, I’m challenging you to show up. Show up as the woman God created you to be.
This healing journey is a transformational one that requires courage, commitment, patience, self-compassion, trust, surrender, and forgiveness, but it’s worth the journey.
The Devil wants to short-circuit you. He wants you to keep your wounds open so he can keep playing on your hurt and your brokenness and keep you from healing. His strategy is to keep reminding you of what happened to you. What someone said, did, or how they made you feel.
He doesn’t want you healed or delivered because you’re then armed with a testimony and can be a witness to others about what God can do.
When you declare God’s Word over your life, you put angels on assignment and create an environment of faith in which God can work on your behalf.
A healed and a healing Christian is a threat to the devil’s kingdom. Why? Because as you shed those layers and false identities that you took on throughout your life and better understand who you are in Christ, you will walk in your God-given identity and enforce the victory that Jesus has already won for you.
You are not helpless or hopeless. There are opportunities for you to take responsibility for your life when it comes to your judgments, your thoughts, your emotions, and your actions. Listen to my podcast episode “Rewiring Your Brain for Breakthrough” for a deeper dive on this.
God’s Word holds the power to heal you and to break any cycle you may be in. There is no reason for you to live in fear and torment.
You are more than a conqueror;
You are a child of the Most High God;
You are fearfully and wonderfully made;
You can do all things through Christ, and
You are loved by God.
Trust God to hold your heavy. He cares about you!
Don’t settle for less than God’s best for your life.
As you do the inner work to heal from your past, you’ll begin to feel so much lighter as the layers that you’ve attached to yourself throughout the years begin to fall off, and you start to walk in peace.
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