By Charissa Kim Allen
My work as a therapist is anchored in the modality of Restoration Therapy, where I conceptualize each client’s story in two organizing camps: love and safety. Here, I will only focus on this first camp, love. In my conceptualizing, the love each client did or did not experience throughout their lives, especially in their formative years, informs their basic identity. This basic identity is best expressed in terms of uniqueness, worthiness, and desirability. When a person experiences violations in the camp of love, they hold a wounded sense of identity.
In treatment, I walk alongside clients as they explore the violations of love that have informed their wounded identity. More than just emotions (mad, bad, glad, sad), I help clients understand the primary messages to their identity that they thematically act upon, even if unconscious. Primary messages are those “I am” statements about ourselves that surface in pain. Here are some examples: “I am…unloved, unworthy, insignificant, alone, worthless, inadequate, unacceptable, unwanted, defective, not measuring up.”
Understanding our core violations of love, regardless of whether or not they encompass “big T Trauma,” is a difficult process. It requires acknowledging the ways in which our caregivers, family members, partners, friends, and authority figures intentionally or unintentionally planted seeds of doubt around the fact that we are truly loved and worthy. The process also makes us grapple with the ways that our wounded sense of identity has led us to automatically cope in destructive and ineffective ways. Often, to our dismay, this destructive coping keeps us in interpersonal cycles in which we further unloving behaviors and further receive unloving messages.
For Christians, the process also creates a spiritual dilemma: we may know in our head that we are loved by God and created with worthiness. We hear sermons of our belovedness and feel inspired to embrace intimacy, take risks with confidence, forgive perpetrators, and release people-pleasing. But our brains, bodies, and nervous systems have internalized a deep contrary message, and we end up in our old cycles of blaming, shaming, controlling, and escaping.
Vienna Pharaon, MFT, says it succinctly: “You can want something, desire it deeply, and truly feel confident about your declarations. But if your system perceives a threat, it will continue to operate in protection mode instead of making space and room for the things you say you’re ready for.” Author Bessel A. Van Der Kolk also makes the point: “If your parents’ face never lit up when they looked at you, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be loved and cherished… If you grew up unwanted and ignored, it is a major challenge to develop a visceral sense of agency and self-worth.”
Oof- so where is the hope? For each person, the journey towards hope is unique and lacks a one-and-done formula. But what I can posit is that each journey will include a blend of our spiritual, emotional, physiological, psychological, and relational centers.
Do I believe that God is powerful enough that, even without mental health engagement or intentional new ways of relating, God can miraculously reverse a person’s core wounds to identity and provide a lasting sense of belovedness? Who am I to say God can’t? However, I also believe that God has been intentional in designing the human brain, body, and relationships — and that more often than not, the “healing” process will engage all of these.
So where do we begin? For part II of “Love: Healing our Wounded Identities”–>
Charissa Kim Allen is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working out of Orange County, where she lives with her husband and little one. As a former campus minister, minister’s wife, and lifelong pastor’s daughter, she is passionate about the mental, emotional, and relational health of Christian leaders as well as Asian American family systems.
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