By Charissa Kim Allen
–>To read part I of “Love: Healing our Wounded Identities”
Just like we courageously journey to label the deeply personal core messages about ourselves in pain, we also journey to discover the deeply personal corrective truths about our identity. And just like our pain messages are scattered throughout our past, our corrective truths are also scattered within our already-lived lives. Contrary to what we may have learned about only looking outwards and upwards to find a sense of love, we can also look into and back at our messy, earthly realities to find the same answer.
In therapeutic treatment, this looks like asking questions like:
- “Growing up, in the midst of all these violations of love, who and where did you go to for comfort?”
- “When you look at your life, where did you experience the exception to your primary pain message?”
- “When did you know you were truly loved, worthy, cherished, and significant?”
The brilliant design of our brains make it so that we hold onto memories encompassing pain and threat much easier than those encompassing neutral or positive content. This is because the brain is wired for survival. It would rather remember the signs leading up to a bear attack than what a specific flower smelled like moments before. It would rather remember when your mother told you “you are a disappointment” than all the times another caregiver embraced you with affection.
You can imagine that a brain that has experienced multiple severe violations of love has little storage space to actively remember safe and loving connections. All to say, we sometimes need prompting and support to recall experiences in which we were confirmed in our belovedness. And the good news is, the experiences are very likely embedded in our lives, just needing to be unhidden to our consciousness.
Beyond simply labeling these exceptional snapshots, there is power in re-experiencing the memories with our whole being. In therapeutic treatment, this looks like asking questions like:
- “How do you remember feeling when that new message was communicated?”
- “What do you remember about their facial expression or body posture as they said that?”
- “When you sit with this message of love, what does it naturally make you want to do?”
When our senses and somatic states are stimulated in association with the corrective memory, we truly start to feel and believe the message: “I am loved.” We see, feel, hear, smell, and touch the evidence. Our limbic system, which processes our emotional memories, buys in.
As we engage our holistic being, the process of rewiring our brain quickens. Again, our brains are of brilliant design: they hold neuroplasticity, which means that new neural pathways can form despite a lifetime of old pathways. Imagine with me the snowball effect of these new neural pathways that conclude belovedness.
- Recalling corrective memories of nurtured identity makes way for re-experiencing physiological states of being loved.
- From this organic place, we practice new empowered behaviors that nurture interpersonal dynamics of reciprocal love. Giving and receiving love becomes cyclical in relationships.
- Suddenly, tried and true messages in Scripture hold new weight within us- like that of Psalm 119 when the Psalmist declares a fundamental truth of the created: “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
The reality is that this process of recalling, remembering, re-experiencing, and rediscovering the truth of our beloved identity needs to be chosen over and over again. In our process of embracing our restored sense of self, we will continue to be triggered by our old cycles- especially in pain. But the new creation (in spiritual terms) or new neural pathway (in psychological terms) in us strengthens over time. And just like the pain cycle once was, the new restored cycle becomes increasingly automatic. Despite our past pain, trauma, and wounded identities, there is hope and possibility for all of us, as we ground ourselves into truth-speaking evidence and choose new pathways, to operate out of a grounded sense of our belovedness.
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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