Healing Emotional Wounds

Do you remember a time when you were hurt emotionally, very badly?  Does it continue to haunt and hurt today when you recall it from memory?

Can your spouse easily recount the times you’ve hurt them, with excruciating detail?

If you can answer in the affirmative to these questions (and honestly, who among us can’t) then you or your spouse most likely have emotional wounds.

We all carry emotional baggage or what I’m calling emotional wounds.

We have blindly accepted that emotional hurts make us who we are, or that there’s no real cure for them other than time, or perhaps we all just need to learn how to bear our burdens or let go of the past.

We have a Healer

We have a healer, and His name is Jesus. The process I’ve outlined below is essentially a conversation with God. It consists of the following major points:

• Identification of an emotional wound;
• If necessary, confession of sin surrounding that wound;
• Confessing that you want the wound removed
  • This is a particularly important point.  You cannot be double-minded in this regard.
  • You either desired to be healed of a thing, or you want the pain it brings.  It\’s your choice.
• Asking for the wound to be removed and healed.
• Accepting the healing.
• Identification of new emotional wounds
  • God created our psyche to wrap wounds in protective layers, like an onion.  You’ll find that after one emotional wound is healed, another may replace it.
  • You’ll know you’re finished when you are at peace with the incident that caused the wound.

The Emotional Healing Process

Speak these things aloud.

Recall that whenever Jesus performed healing, He spoke aloud against infirmity.  When God created the universe, He spoke it into existence.  I don’t know exactly why speaking these things helps, but it does.

Have faith in God.  Amen, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it shall be done for him

Mark 11:22-23

1. Identify a painful emotion associated with a particular event.
   •  If the emotion is sinful, ask God to forgive you and receive His forgiveness.  It is good to remind yourself of forgiveness principles, such as 1 John 1:9
   • Say that you believe His blood has taken away the penalty and consequences of your sin.
   •  If it is not sinful, go to the next step.
2. Tell Jesus you want the emotion removed from your soul.
3. Ask Jesus to heal the wound in your soul caused by the emotion.
4. Tell Jesus you receive His healing.
   • If the emotion is there because you may have believed a lie about that situation, ask Jesus to show you the truth about the situation.
5. An optional step is to ask Jesus to give you something positive to replace the negative emotion that He is removing.
   • If you ask Him to take away sadness, you might ask Him to give you joy.
   • If you ask Him to take away anger, you might ask Him to give you peace.
6. Rest for a moment, ask for His presence to come and rest in Him.
7. Recall the situation that caused the painful emotion.
   • If there is a new negative emotion, begin again at Step 1.

When I was very young, I was molested/assaulted by an older man.  After my memory of the event resurfaced, my emotional healing process progressed something like this:

• Jesus, I feel anger towards that person.  I don’t want to feel this anger anymore.  Please take this anger from me, and heal the wound in my soul; I receive your healing.  Please give me peace in place of this anger.

Once I was done with this process, I paused for a moment and then recalled the event.  I observed that I then felt a different emotion and went through the process again.  After several iterations (I don’t remember how many, or the emotions other than anger), I was completely healed of assault against me.  It\’s now like a distant memory to me, as if it were something written about me, not something that happened to me.

My History into this Process 

I should also mention that before I learned this emotional healing process, I had thoroughly made use of Neil Anderson’s Victory Over Darkness and Bondage Breaker.  My opinion is that his books will help you immensely, but they don’t always result in helping you heal the resulting wounds.

Thereafter, I developed a process not as involved as above, which worked seeming well enough.  I then found Praying Medic’s work Emotional Healing in Three Easy Steps and have continued to use it ever since.