From the book of Captivating - written by John & Stasi EldredgeThe wounds that we received as young girls did not come alone. They brought messages with them, messages that struck at the core of our hearts, right in the place of our Question. Our wounds strike at the core of our feminity. The damage done to our feminine hearts through the wounds we received is made much worse by the horrible things we believe about ourselves as a result. As children, we didn’t have the faculties to process and sort through what was happening to us. Our parents were godlike. We believed them to be right. If we were overwhelmed or belittled or hurt or abused, we believed that somehow it was because of us – the problem was with us.
Lori’s father didn’t come to her recital. He went out of his way not to come. That was the wound. The message was that she wasn’t worth his time. She wasn’t worth loving. She felt that there must be something terribly wrong with her. Tracey’s father broke his foot. She invited him into her heart’s desire, and the result was disaster. The message? “ Your desire for relationship causes pain. You are just too much.” And she has spent the last twenty years trying not to be too much, trying to minimize her desires, trying to find some way to be loved without being too much. She has lopped off huge parts of her wonderful personality as a result.
Debbie’s father has an affair. What made it confusing was that in many ways, he was a good man. The message that settled in her heart as a teenage girl was, You’d better do more than she did or you won’t keep your man. After this came a young man who pursued Debbie, and then left for no apparent reason. We’ve known this beautiful young woman for several years now, and one thing has puzzled us – why is she always working on her life? Debbie is always looking for something to work on. Prayer, exercise, financial responsibility, a new hair color, more discipline. Why is she trying so hard? Doesn’t she know how amazing she is? What makes her search so frustrating is that she doesn’t know what is wrong with her. She simply fears that somehow she is not enough.
Many women feel that, by the way. We can’t put words to it, but down deep we fear there is something terribly wrong with us. If we were the princess, then our prince would have come. If we were the daughter of a king, he would have fought for us. We can’t help but believe that if we were different, if we were better, then we would have been loved as we longed to be. It must be us.
Sandy’s father abused her, and her mother turned away. It wrought great evil upon her soul. In all that she learned, Sandy came away with two basic things about femininity: To be a woman is to be powerless; there’s nothing good about vulnerability; it’s just “weakness.” And to be feminine is to draw unwanted intimacy to yourself. Does it surprise you that she doesn’t want feminine? Like so many sexually abused women, Sandy finds herself in the awful bind of longing for intimacy (she was created for that) but fearing to look the least bit alluring to a man. She settled for the persona of the “competent and efficient professional woman,” kind but guarded, never too attractive and never, ever, in need and never “weak.”
Some women who were sexually abused choose another path. Or, perhaps more honestly, they find themselves compulsively heading in another direction. They never received love, but they did experience some sort of intimacy through the sexual abuse, and now they give themselves over to one man after another, hoping to somehow heal the wrongful sexual encounters with sex that has love to it.
Melissa’s mother was wicked woman who beat her children with a wooden rod. “I was absolutely terrified of my mother,” she confessed. “She seemed psychotic and would play evil mind games. Most of the time we never really knew why we were getting beat. My father did nothing. One thing I did know was that with every blow my hatred for her deepened. She turned my sister into a fragile mush of person, and I vowed she would never do that to me. I vowed that i would be though, hard, like a rock.” This she became, well into her adult life.
The vows we make as children are very understandable – and very, very damaging. They shut our hearts down. They are essentially a deep-seated agreement with the messages of our wounds. They act as an agreement with the verdict on us.
WOUNDED FEMININITY
As a result of the wounds we receive growing up, we come to believe that some part of us, maybe every part of us, is marred. Shame enters in and makes its crippling home deep within our hearts. Shame is what makes us look away, so we avoid eye contact with strangers and friends. Shame is feeling that haunts us, the sense that if someone really knew us, they would shake their heads in disgust and run away. Shame makes us feel, no, believe, that we do not measure up – not to the world’s standards, the church’s standards, or our own.
Others seem to master their lives, but shame grips our hearts and pins them down, every ready to points our failures and judge our worth. We are lacking. We know we are not all that we long to be, God longs for us to be, but instead of coming up for grace-filled air and asking God what he thinks of us, shame keeps us pinned down and gasping, believing that we deserve to suffocate. If we were not deemed worthy of love as children, it is incredibly difficult to believe we are worth loving as adults. Shame says we are unworthy, broken, and beyond repair.
Shame causes us to hide. We are afraid of being truly seen, and so we hide our truest selves and offer an only what we believe is wanted. If we are a dominating kind of woman, we offer our “expertise.” If we are a desolate kind of woman, we offer our “service.” We are silent and do not say what we see or know when it is different from what others are saying, because we think we must be wrong. We refuse to bring the weight of our lives, who God has made us to be, to bear on others out of a fear of being rejected.
Shame makes us feel very uncomfortable with our beauty. Women are beautiful, every single one of us. It is one of the glorious ways that we bear the image of God. But few of us believe we are beautiful, and fewer still are comfortable with it. We either think we don’t have any beauty or if we do, that it’s dangerous and bad. So we hide our beauty behind extra weight and layers of unnecessary makeup. Or we neutralize our beauty by putting up protective, defensive walls that warn others to keep their distance.
AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE
Over the years we’ve come to see that the only thing more tragic than the things that have happened to us is what we have done with them.
Words were said, painful words. Things were done, awful things. And they shaped us. Something inside of us shifted. We embraced the messages of our wounds. We accepted a twisted view ourselves. And far from that we chose a way relating to our world. We made a vow never to be in that place again. We adopted strategies to protect ourselves from being hurt again. A woman who is living out of broken, wounded heart is a woman who is living a self-protective life. She may not be aware of it, but it is true. It’s our way of trying to “save ourselves.”
We also developed ways of trying to get something of the love our hearts cried out for. The ache is there. Our desperate need for love and affirmation, our thirst for some taste of romance and adventure and beauty is there. So we turned to boys or to food or to romance novels; we lost ourselves in our work or at church or in some sort of service. All this adds up to the women we are today. Much of what we call our “personalities” is actually the mosaic of our choices for self-protection plus our plan to get something of the love we were created for.
The problem is our plan has nothing to do with God.
The wounds we received and the messages they brought formed a sort of unholy alliance with our fallen nature as women. From Eve we received a deep mistrust in the heart of God toward us. Clearly, he’s holding out on us. We’ll just have to arrange for the life we want. We will control our world. But there is also an ache deep within, an ache for intimacy for life. We’ll have to find a way to fill it. A way that does not require us to trust anyone, especially God. A way that will not require vulnerability.
In some ways, this is every little girl’s story, here in this world east of Eden.
But the wounds don’t stop once we are grown up. Some of the most crippling and destructive wounds we receive come much later in our lives. The wounds that we have received over our lifetimes have not come to us in a vacuum. There is, in fact, a theme to them, a pattern. The wounds you have received have come to you for a purpose from one who knows all you are meant to be and fears you.
HEALING THE WOUNDS
RENOUNCE THE AGREEMENTS YOU’VE MADE
Your wounds brought messages with them. Lots of messages. Somehow they are usually land in the same place. They had a similar theme. “you’re worthless.” “You’re not a woman.” “You’re too much...and not enough.” “You’re a disappointment.” “You are repulsive.” On and on they go. Because they were delivered with such pain, they felt true. They pierced our hearts, and they seemed so true. So we accepted the message as fact. We embraced it as the verdict on us.
As we said earlier, the vows we made as children act like a deep-seated agreement with the message of our wounds. “Fine. If that’s how it is. I’ll live my life in the following way...” The vows we made acted like a kind of covenant with the messages that came with our deep wounds. Those childhood vows are very dangerous things. We must renounce them. Before we are entirely convinced that they aren’t true, we must reject the messages of our wounds. It’s a way of unlocking the door to Jesus. Agreements lock the door from inside. Renouncing the agreements unlocks the door to him.
Jesus, forgive me for embracing these lies. This is not what you have said of me. You said I am your daughter, your beloved, your cherished one. I renounce the agreements I made with (name the specific messages you’ve been living with. “I’m stupid. I’m ugly.” You know what they are.) I renounce the agreements I’ve been making with these years. Bring the truth here, oh Spirit of Truth. I reject these lies.
WE FIND OUR TEARS
Part of the reason women are so tired is because we are spending so much energy trying to “keep it together .” So much energy devoted to suppressing the pain and keeping a good appearance. “I’m gonna harden my heart,” sang Rindy Ross. “I’m gonna swallow my tears.” A terrible, costly way to live your life. Part of this is driven by fear that the pain will overwhelm us. That we will be consumed by our sorrow. It’s an understandable fear – but it is no more true than the fear we had of the dark as a children. Grief, dear sisters, is good. Grief helps to heal our hearts. Why, Jesus, himself was a “Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa 53:3)
Let the tears come. Get alone, get to your car or your bedroom or the shower and let the tears come. Let the tears come. It is the only kind thing to do for your woundedness. Allow yourself to feel again. And feel you will – many things. Anger. That’s okay. Anger’s not a sin (Eph 4:26) Remorse. Of course you feel remorse and regret for so many lost years. Fear. Yes, that makes sense. Jesus can handle the fears as well. In fact, there is no emotion you can bring up that Jesus can’t handle. (Look at the Psalms – they are a raging sea of emotions.)
Let it out.
FORGIVE
Okay – now for a hard step ( as if others have been easy). A real step of courage and will. We must forgive those who hurts us. The reason is simple: Bitterness and unforgiveness set their hooks deep in our hearts; they are chains that hold us captive to the wounds and the message of those wounds. Until you forgive, you remain their prisoner. Paul warns us that unforgiveness and bitterness can wreck our lives and live to the others (Eph, 4:31; Heb.12:15). We have to let it go.
Forgive as the Lord forgave you. (Col.3:13)
Now – listen carefully. Forgiveness is a choice. It is not feeling – don’t try and feel forgiving.It is an act of the will. “Dont wait to forgive until you feel like forgiving, “wrote Neil Anderson. “You will never get there. Feelings take time to heal after the choice to forgive is made.” We allow God to bring the hurt up from our past, for ”if your forgiveness doesn’t visit the emotional core of your life, it will be incomplete, “ Said Anderson. We acknowledge that it hurt, that it mattered, and we choose to extend forgiveness to our fathers, our mothers, those who hurt us. This is not saying, “ It didn’t really matter”; it is not saying, “I probably deserved part of it anyway.” Forgiveness says, “It was wrong. Very wrong. It mattered, hurt me deeply. And I release you. I give you to God.”
It might help to remember that those who hurt you were also deeply wounded themselves. They were broken hearts, broken when they were young and they fell captive to the Enemy. They were in fact pawns in his hands. This doesn’t absolve them to let them go – to realize that they were shuttered souls themselves, used by our true Enemy in his war against femininity.
ASK JESUS TO HEAL YOU
We turn from our self-redemptive strategies. We open the door of our hurting heart to Jesus. We renounce the agreements we made with messages of our wounds, renounce any vows we made. We forgive those who harmed us. And then, with an open heart, we simply ask Jesus to heal us and follow this prayer.
‘Jesus, come to me and heal my heart. Come to the shattered places within me. Come for the little girl that was wounded. Come and hold me in your arms, and heal me. Do for me what you promised to do – heal my broken heart and set me free. Amen.’
