Healing from Emotional Wounds

There are three giant links in this chain of emotional bondage that must be broken if we are to come to emotional freedom. 

The three links are:

1. Physical illnesses of thought control (chemical imbalances). This refers to the conditions doctors call mood and psychotic disorders. The most common disorders or chemical imbalances are depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. In these conditions, a person loses the ability to control their thoughts due to brain chemistry deficiencies. These conditions require medical treatment and divine healing.

2. The harassment of Satan (demonization). This refers to the specific harassment of an individual by demonic forces.

3. Personality injury from the wounds of our past experiences. This refers to every negative or damaging experience in a person’s life that has hurt him and left a scar on his personality that restricts his emotional freedom.

To achieve complete freedom, we need to be ministering to emotionally broken people in all three areas of bondage. 

We must recognise the usefulness of medications, deliverance and emotional healing as a combined treatment for all believers who struggle with their emotions.

Now let’s look at the third link in the chain, Woundedness.

Personality Injuries or the Emotional Wounds of Your Past

Since we are all members of a fallen race and we have been raised by wounded people, we have all been damaged emotionally by the actions of others through abuse or neglect.

Everyone who is wounded needs emotional healing. God has made healing available for everyone. Unhealed emotions disrupt every part of our lives. Relationships are damaged, our body suffers from stress related pain and even our Christian ministry is contaminated by our sinful attitudes. Our godly character is handicapped when we have unhealed wounds. The path to greater ministry effectiveness and anointing is through brokenness. As our emotional wounds are healed, we will emerge ready to carry a greater anointing and be far less vulnerable to Satan’s attacks.

God is our True Loving Father

God wants to have a “daddy” relationship with us rather than the distant authoritarian “association” that we impose on Him. We will be shocked to find that God wants to be closer and more available to us than our natural parents.

Zephaniah 3:17 says that “The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing” 

Isn’t it amazing to think that the almighty Creator is that interested and excited about us? We know all about God but do not know Him in a personal, intimate way. We have more of a business relationship than family intimacy.

The reason why so many of us have this impression of God is that we assumed that God is like a human father. Human fathers expect us to become increasingly self-reliant and independent based on previous family experiences. If we remain dependent on our fathers, it is a sign of immaturity. It is very difficult for intelligent, mature, independent (especially male) Christians to realize that God is totally different. As we mature in faith, He wants us to become increasingly childlike and dependent on Him. Many Christians reject this and continue to live in emotional poverty.

Our Love Deficit

Every human has been created with an enormous need for love. We can call it as our “love deficit.” It resembles a huge cistern that holds millions of gallons. No human is emotionally complete until this cistern is filled. As long as the deficit remains, we are unhappy, restlessly searching for the love that will bring us peace and contentment. Satan takes advantage of our quest for love and offers us counterfeits so that we search for love in all the wrong places and only receive a few drops that barely wet the cistern.

There is only one source of love that can fill the tank to overflowing, and that is the love of our Father God. The good news is that God has an unlimited supply and wants to generously give His love to us all so that we can become emotionally free.

God wants to be our daddy and our friend.

Unlike human parents, He loves to hear our thoughts, opinions and cries for help, twenty-four hours a day. Jesus knows how we hurt. He sees all our emotional scars, our emptiness and our need for love. He is the only one qualified to heal us and meet our emotional needs, and He desperately wants to. We don’t have to convince God to care about us or our needs. He is interested in us and pleased with us, and He wants to chat with us forever.

What Keeps us from an Intimate Relationship with God?

Our own personal emotional bondage prevents us from having the full, emotionally free relationship with God that He desires.

HOW DID WE GET WOUNDED?

It was God’s original plan that His complete, loving nature was to be communicated to children through the godly love that was transmitted by their parents. In this way, parents were to become mirrors that reflected God’s nature to children. Parents were to demonstrate and make visible God’s invisible characteristics to children so that they could easily understand and come to know God.

As a result of the Fall, sin entered the heart of mankind and the “mirror cracked.” Parents then taught children out of their own brokenness, so they, too, would become sinful and wounded, with dysfunctional relationships and difficulty relating to God. Through varying degrees of abuse or neglect, we have all been raised by imperfect parents to be emotionally handi-capped.

God wants to heal our emotions and bring us to freedom from our wounds and chains.

We must each be healed individually, just as we came into God’s kingdom individually. The hard reality is that emotional healing does not happen automatically at the time of salvation.

We must choose to become free of our chains after we enter the kingdom.

It is never too late to start down the path to freedom and meet your real

“daddy” for the first time. God is waiting for you now; He’s calling to you, inviting you to crawl up into His lap and begin a new relationship of emotional freedom with Him. 

Jesus was wounded on the cross for us. He was wounded to take our wounds from us. He paid the price so that we could walk free. We must continually give Him our wounds and corrupted thoughts so that He can take them from us and replace them with His thoughts of love and acceptance.

The first step is to forgive your parents and all those in authority who wounded you. You forgive to set yourself free, not to let them off the hook.

Then you must repent for hating them for what they did. You sinned in your response to their wounding. You must repent for believing the lies that were planted in you at the time of your wounding and ask Jesus to show you the truth so that you can trust and become vulnerable again.

Having done that, now ask Jesus to come and heal your wounds and fill you with truth that will push out the lies. Crawl up into the lap of an approachable, warm, loving and friendly God who is very interested in you.

THE HEAD-HEART SPLIT

Our spirits enter our bodies at the time of conception. From that point on, the infant spirit is susceptible to spiritual influences. In God’s original plan, every spirit was to be born healthy, vibrant and ready to relate to others.

We were then to be nurtured, trained, moulded and encouraged by emotionally healthy parents who modelled God’s love. The growing child would then have healthy relationships with both God and man.

Sin contaminated our spirits and wounded our souls so that we all became dysfunctional. The wounding can take place at any time after conception, usually through abuse or neglect, and it leaves us emotionally handicapped and not fully functional. 

After being hurt, we will always pull back from any risk of further injury. We then build protective walls around our hearts and emo-tions. This damages our ability to have healthy, intimate relationships with others, with God and with ourselves.

When we have been so wounded, our relationships become only superficial and intellectual, since our emotional walls block our ability to feel or relate to anyone emotionally.

Intimacy is difficult, because it requires vulnerability, which is impossible when we live behind high emotional walls. 

We will be too hardened to give or receive love. We believe all the right things but will not feel anything. We serve God with our mind, but our heart will not respond. We just keep busy doing religious things, hoping that we were pleasing God. We substitute activity for the lack of relationship. All our relationships will be distant and intellectual.

This problem of wounding, leading to emotional freeze up, leading to intellectual relationships and the splitting of the head from the heart is so common that it’s almost universal. It is particularly common in men.

Our emotional freeze up is a direct result of emotional bondage that began at our first wounds after conception. To become free of our wounding and the splitting of our heads from our hearts, we must be set free from emotional bondage.

God wants you to be free in all areas of your life. The overwhelming power and authority of the love of God can break your chains. 

There is one very powerful obstacle, however, that must first be overcome. You must want to be set free.

Recovery requires a deliberate act of taking action. You must choose to ask Jesus to begin the healing process, which will involve “open-pit mining.” You may need to go to a counsellor or physician. You must do it! Don’t let Satan convince you that nothing can ever change or that it’s not worth the bother. That’s a lie.

Growing Up to Emotional Maturity

Just as the human body grows, it must pass through certain developmental stages to reach maturity. Emotional maturity is much the same.

There are stages of emotional maturation that everyone must pass through in order to successfully reach maturity. The big difference is that if someone is not reaching their emotional milestones, it is much more difficult to detect than if they miss a physical milestone. It is possible for someone to be in emotional childhood yet look fully mature in an adult body. 

At puberty, everyone becomes self-conscious about their physical development and acceptability to others. We all ask ourselves, Do I fit in? Do I look and act right? If our emotional maturation process proceeds correctly, we will pass from a very inward-looking, self-conscious stage to an outward-looking, self-confident stage where we feel secure in our identities and self-worth. 

To successfully pass through emotional adolescence, we must come to the place of self-acceptance. To reach this milestone, we need to have godly parents who themselves have come to emotional maturity so that they can guide us through these stormy waters.

God designed us to pass quickly through this very awkward and uncomfortable yet important stage. If development stops at this point, a person will be continually driven by the emotional pain of insecurity, self-consciousness and inadequacy to search for an identity. This state is that of being in perpetual emotional adolescence, regardless of age.

The shocking reality is that very few of us ever complete this process of self-acceptance and release from emotional adolescence.

In preadolescent years, mothers have the primary nurturing role. In adolescence, fathers take on the predominant role to prepare the teenager for adulthood. If a father has never learned to accept himself and is struggling with insecurity, he will pass the same struggle on to the child at this critical time of personality development. This leaves the emerging young adult with large gaps in their emotional development, and they will struggle with self-acceptance for the rest of their lives until they get help.

God is very sensitive to this common situation. He cares very deeply for us and wants to heal us from this state.

When emotional adolescence remains unhealed, people hate themselves and become preoccupied with their own sense of emptiness, guilt, shame and inadequacy. Unfortunately, many of us are still struggling with this phase, and these unhealed, immature emotions keep breaking through our adult façades to shock and embarrass us.

This is like living on top of a volcano. The mountain is filled with our unhealed emotions from childhood and adolescence, even though we are now adults. 

The Way Out

As we are filled with His love, we begin to feel His approval of us, so we can accept ourselves as we see God accept us. As God’s love pours in, He fills the gaps left by our natural fathers, so the father wound is healed by the love of our Heavenly Father. 

As our cisterns fill, we will no longer be preoccupied with our wounds, since they will melt away. The recurring thoughts of self-condemnation and hatred will fade.

Jesus was wounded for us. He wants to take our wounds from us so that we can be free. Remember, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3).

Source: Emotionally Free by Grant Mullen