Freedom or Oppression? It’s Your Choice

Today's Thoughts

When you’ve been wounded in a particular area over and over it tends to cause coping mechanisms which enable you to temporarily block the wounds from surfacing. These coping mechanisms usually appear in the form of addiction. It can be anything from becoming a workaholic to overeating, watching too much television or the obvious drug, alcohol or sex addictions. They’re all forms of escape, a reprieve from the cold, cruel reality of what happened to us. They enable us to survive and function but not to truly live. We become the walking dead and I don’t mean flesh-eating zombies…I mean emotionally dead. We refuse to dream or hope for a better day because it means we have to dig up the past events which left a traumatic hole in our hearts. We don’t want to face how vulnerable we were, how wounded we were or who did the wounding. We just want to move on and forget it ever happened. But you can never truly forget…it’s always there…lurking in the back of your mind. Anything can trigger its memory: a song, a movie, a place or even a general comment thrown about by an acquaintance who has no clue what you endured.

The problem with burying the past when you haven’t dealt with it is that it will resurface like a zombie who’s hungry for human flesh. It will dig itself out of that grave you put it in and it will come looking for you. When it finally finds you and you’re not able to put it back into the cage or crypt you locked it in…it will consume you until there’s nothing left, until you’re completely decimated. That’s what pain does to you when a wound is left unhealed. Furthermore; any additional wounding that comes from other sources not only add to the lesions you already have but leaves you in a sorrier state than you were before. It’s a recipe for disaster and unless you deal with this you keep adding ingredients to the main course of your own demise.

The bottom line? Face your past, face the pain, face the events which traumatically affected you. It won’t be easy, in fact it will be extremely painful but that pain will dissipate as you face the facts head on and get some freedom from them. When a injury properly heals you only see the scar, you don’t feel the effects of when you first got it. It’s only a memory, it no longer torments you and drudges up any buried emotions with it. When an injury is healed you’re no longer afraid to apply pressure to that part anymore because you’ve fully recovered. But when you leave your injuries or wounds untreated you’re absolutely afraid to put any pressure on the affected area for fear of further damage. It’s the same with emotional wounds. If you don’t treat them or get proper healing—you’ll build walls around your heart for fear of getting hurt again and you won’t know what it means to truly live, be happy or experience peace.

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