How Do We Heal Emotional Wounds?
Everyone copes with their childhood traumas differently. Some of us are so shattered we can’t function in society. Others go into hiding mentally and emotionally. We may look and sound normal, but anyone trying to get close will find entry is denied. Some keep others away using perfection, humor, anger or sex without intimacy. Many of us use all of these strategies to a degree at some time or other. Hopefully, we receive some support and ultimately heal and grow. In her classic work How to Help Children Cope with Separation and Loss, Claudia Jewett Jarrett noted that children can survive anything—if they have support. Even if we don’t have parental support, as our lives move forward finding and being support for ourselves it critical.
If I cut myself, all the wound needs to heal is support—I have to protect the wound and not reinjure myself and I will heal. We’re hard-wired to heal. I have found the same is true of emotional wounds. But it’s tricky to not reinjure the wound of sexual abuse when intensity feels like intimacy, right? For me, it’s taken a lot of wrong turns, but each course correction, no matter how small, has protected the wound so it can heal. It’s like I had a lot of broken emotional bones from abuse and from wrong turns that had all healed crooked, so when I “walked” I hobbled and bumped into things causing bruising and sometimes more injuries. I had to break the emotional bones to set them straight. Now they’ve healed stronger than if they’d never been broken.
On my journey, a strict religious upbringing did some harm but also did a lot of good by teaching me core values of unconditional love and honesty. I was able to sift out the good from the bad in this religious training, ironically thanks to my parents having taught me to think for myself. Over time I learned to let go of ideas of hell and a vengeful God, to use what’s rich and makes sense in the Bible and other traditions and leave the rest, and to take the high road and give people the benefit of the doubt. I also made a decision when I was nineteen to never become bitter. And both my parents had self-effacing humor, which taught me to have a sense of humor and not to take myself too seriously. All of these habits have served me in my healing from sexual abuse.
Readers say they enjoy the irony of finding humor in the Lion Tamer Memoir books, a story about sexual abuse. We all know the protective healing power of humor. I hope even though the way is painful, we all have healing and fun along the way.