A Childhood Trauma
When I was a young kid before my parents' divorce, we lived in a ranch-style house in a decent area of town. In those first years of my life, I felt safe and protected. Until that one night.
I woke up to yelling and screaming and the sounds of my father running down to the basement. My mother was yelling that someone was trying to break in through a window. Having no concept of what was happening, I felt confused and terrified.
My father eventually came up from the basement brandishing a baseball bat and ran outside to chase the would-be intruder through the neighborhood until he got away.
After that night, my life changed in many ways, but I never slept the same again. I'd wake up terrified, having to check the doors and windows even when I lived on the sixteenth floor of an apartment building.
What's funny is that I never even saw the person who was trying to break into our house. Nothing happened to me. My father saved the day by chasing him away. Nonetheless, fear followed me. I remained terrified.
I now know that this response is called trauma, but before I learned that concept, I just thought I had lost my mind. It was like being afraid of a ghost that I had never seen. It bothered me for years.
So many of us have experiences that are similar to or worse than this. Something happens that changes us, but instead of seeking healing, we seek comfort, which often isolates us. Every time I checked a window or door at night, it made me feel better only in that moment. It didn't address my underlying fear or offer any type of healing.
After trauma, healthiness requires healing. Otherwise we go through our lives spending tremendous amounts of thought and energy trying to protect ourselves, even when it's unnecessary.
Maybe you check a lot of doors and windows in your life because of a legitimate wound, but is that helping you? Or do you need to go back and heal instead? Most of the time healing is what needs to happen.
The good news is that our heavenly Father can handle the protection part if we let Him.
Excerpted with permission from Get Past Your Past: How Facing Your Broken Places Leads to True Connection by Jason VanRuler, copyright Jason VanRuler.
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