Emotional and Spiritual Wellness: Learning to Heal

Wellness is not a new concept, though, to be honest, it is for me.  The dictionary defines it as the state of being in good health, especially as an actively pursued goal. I dislike that definition because it seems incomplete. The National Wellness Association (who knew there was such a thing!) defines wellness as an active process through which people become aware of, and make choices toward, a more successful existence. Find them here That is better, I suppose. I am not fond of the term successful existence because it is simply so subjective.

For me, wellness is about well-being. I think of that old hymn by Horatio Spafford, It Is Well, penned after a tragic loss. This, to me, is well-being, when he can sing:

          When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to know
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

 For years I thought that wellness and/or well-being was serendipitous. One was either happy or not. And if one wasn’t, then one needed to manufacture that happiness, whether through serious effort or simply drawing a curtain in one’s mind over the unhappy things. I remember one manual on becoming a good housekeeper suggested that throwing all the dirty dishes in the sink and covering them up with soapy water would give one a sense of cleanliness. Of course, given time, the bubbles dissipate and sticking one’s hand in cold, dirty dishwater is worse than starting with an empty sink.

Our minds and hearts are the same way. We can cover up the wounds for a time, but then the magic curtain falls to one side, revealing our internal chaos. I have learned how to heal, through my own research, help from wonderful therapists and mentors, and from faithfully seeking out the counsel of the Holy Spirit. And as I speak to more and more women as my blog grows, I find that many women are a lot like I was. They want to get better, experience well-being on a deep level. But also like me, knowing where to start is really difficult. This is my journey, but I haven’t found that the basics change much.

1: Know your wounds.

Every emergency room has a triage for a good reason. They need to separate patients according to their degree of injury. Knowing your injuries sounds easy, but it is actually the hardest part. Sure, we know the superficial wounds. But just like a body can hide cancer or infection, so our minds and hearts can hide grievous trauma. For decades even. And we, as humans, have a terrible habit of treating our deepest injuries as superficial wounds.  Like the rape victims I speak to who say It doesn’t affect me anymore but who self-medicate in a myriad of ways, we don’t always see our self-destructive behaviors as symptomatic of trauma.

So I am going to make a blanket statement which I rarely do and with which you may disagree. If one has experienced abuse for any length of time, significant loss, severe physical injury or illness, divorce, poverty, or warfare and has not received at least some therapy, then one most likely carries woundedness that is still affecting some area of one’s life. To make that sentence user-friendly, I said ‘one’, but really I mean you. And me. If we cannot remember whole swaths of our life or if we have memories and relationships we avoid even thinking about, we are not fully well.

2: Wounds need care.

Wellness does not happen naturally in the presence of trauma. My husband recently had several moles removed. Some were quite large. My first reaction was that they needed to be exposed. That used to be medical thought. Light and air healed wounds. Not so, said the doctor. He said wounds needed to be covered in an antibiotic salve and kept moist. That would inhibit pain, scarring, and infection. Our emotional wounds are like that too. Often, we expose them, especially to the wrong people, and they become even more painful. Wellness or healing those wounds isn’t a matter of toughing it out.

Wellness is a matter of treating oneself gently. I remember one dear friend said that if she had known I had PTSD from the old house in which I lived with my ex, she would have insisted on taking me there. Supposedly I would see it for what it was and ‘get over it’. Not so. Desensitizing oneself to people and places is not healing. It is re-traumatizing. Instead, I have carefully probed these memories and drained them of anger and hatred. I have covered them with the antibiotic of forgiveness and repeated as necessary. The nightmares have ceased and the anxiety has quietened, not through toughing it out, but through tenderness regularly applied.

3: Wellness requires a steady diet of both truth and love.

Truth is not a concept. Truth is a person. And it turns out that Love is a person too! The same person, in fact! Jesus is the healer and we all must come to terms with what a relationship with Him entails.  How one has a personal relationship is such a mystery, people are still writing books about it. But this is the wrong way to approach it. The question is how do I have a relationship with Him and how do I grow it? That looks a bit different for everyone. I think about Him a lot. I talk to Him. I imagine being in scenarios with Him. I pretend to hold His hand when I am sad. The Bible helps me measure my experiences against who He says He is. Bottom line: I involve Him in every aspect of my life from my physical health to the last fight I had with my hubby.

Learning how to heal, to find wellness, is synonymous with developing an abiding relationship with truth and love, in other words, Jesus. I don’t say this lightly. In the thousands of hours I have spent ministering to people in healing prayer, the ones who are wide open to Jesus heal faster and more deeply. Funnily enough, they don’t even have to have a relationship with Him prior to coming to me. But I guarantee that when they open themselves up, they leave with the beginnings of a real relationship with Him. He can’t wait to meet us in our pain. And sometimes it is the people who think they know Him, who have Him in a religious box, who can’t seem to find wellness.

Sometimes I encounter people who are frustrated with why their healing seems to come so slowly. Usually, upon questioning them, they have a very decided idea about their specific wounds. But as they open up to me,  all sorts of traumas surface. One thing I have learned is that trauma is not a series of unconnected infections, but a network of related diseases. You can’t treat just one trauma. You have to look at them all. The originating trauma informed how we would respond to the next one and so on.

4: Wellness is not one choice but a thousand small ones.

Wellness is choosing forgiveness… again. Wellness is saying no to toxic relationships…again. And wellness is submitting our dark thoughts to Jesus again and again and again. In fact, the way to wellness looks an awful lot like the Calvary road. Paul was singing praises in prison. Perhaps he understood that the chains on our bodies have nothing to do with the chains on our souls. I did not leave my abusive ex because it was the right thing to do. If I had been able to that, I would have left long before I did. I left because God had begun to set me free on the inside.  The wellness I experienced in His loving presence set my heart free before I could start setting my mind, body, and spirit free from the cycle of abuse. Jesus is the Way. And sometimes, He is the Way Out.

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