Most everyone will encounter some major, traumatic event in their life. The death of a loved one or of a relationship. Betrayal by someone you trust. A catastrophic event that you couldn’t prevent. Physical, sexual, or emotional abuse.
To survive the trauma, we develop coping mechanisms. Dictionary.com defines a coping mechanism as: “an adaptation to environmental stress that is based on conscious or unconscious choice and that enhances control over behavior or gives psychological comfort”.(1)
My go to survival technique was repression, suppression, and disassociation. I began building a wall in my heart which separated the part of my heart (and mind) where I lived from the part that contained the traumatic memories and deep pain. The first brick was put in place when my father died when I was young. My dad knew he was going to die before he did, and he made me promise I wouldn’t cry and that I would be strong for my mom. My five-year-old mind’s way of keeping that promise and dealing with the pain was to block out everything that happened before the day he died. The good, the bad, all of it. I have no memories before the night my father died when the first brick was built in the wall in my heart and my mind.
I experienced many more traumatic events in life over the years and with each one, another brick was added to the wall. Sometimes a whole section of wall was put in place. Each disappointment. Each betrayal. Each abuse. Each painful episode. Brick by brick by brick the wall grew higher and more impenetrable. I did what we all did in my family, I suppressed it all and went on with life as if nothing happened, as if nothing had changed. But it did. It did happen and everything changed.
The more I suppressed the issues, the higher and thicker the wall became to keep the thoughts and feelings at bay. It helped me survive the un-survivable, but it also caused me to not feel things that I was supposed to feel. I disconnected not only to the bad feelings but also to the good ones and I disconnected from others in my life. My husband was also very disconnected due to his own traumatic life events. The more I couldn’t reach him and the more broken our marriage became, the more I withdrew in self-preservation. Until in the end, neither of us could reach the other and our lives completely crumbled around us.
But no matter how high or how thick you build the wall, the toxic feelings seep through. Think of it like this: you have a basement in your house that you know has issues. It floods often. There is black mold growing and the walls are rotting from the inside out. Quite a few creepy crawly things have made themselves right at home there. Whenever you think about that area of your house, it makes you shudder. No way are you going to open that door and face what is growing there! However, the issues never stay in the basement. It begins seeping into other areas of your life. Your whole house (or heart in this case) is poisoned by what you will not deal with.
For me, the wall collapsed when my marriage did and the pain that had been suppressed and held at bay came crashing down over me. It was the most immense pain I have ever felt in my life. The pain was crushing in its intensity and beyond anything I could stand on my own. It has only been by surrendering it all to God, leaning into Him, and drawing from His limitless strength that I have been able to survive it.
The pain is sometimes still overwhelming and more than I can bear, but God has met me right in the midst of the pain and He has helped me to begin to heal. It is a process and it takes time. There are many layers of pain to heal. He deals with it one layer at a time and I know one day I will be fully healed and restored. Until then, I continue to cry out to God and surrender all of the brokenness to Him. He daily brings beauty from the brokenness in my life. We can never give God our whole heart, when we have un-surrendered places hidden there, things we are unwilling to turn over to Him.
Are there broken areas of your life that you have buried or built a barrier around to shield you from the pain? Are there things that you still haven’t fully surrendered to God?
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