Loved and Found: The Healing Power that Overcomes Trauma and Shame

Humans are curious creatures. We are breathing miracles that embody the creative brilliance of the King of the Universe. He isn’t an aloof God, externalized from our infirmities and issues, but rather the one Lord and Father of all, who isn’t far from any of us (Acts 17:27) even in our trauma and shame.

That Truth comes alive in and for those who accept the olive branch of The Father’s Offering, in Jesus. As God’s Son and our Savior, Jesus poured His entire life to reconcile us with the Father, receive us into the family, making us righteous–all by faith in Christ.

God’s abundant affection toward us characterizes the miracle of salvation, but our own diminished self-worth causes us to wrestle with giving and receiving a Love this relentless, raw, and real. Our relationship with God, ourselves, and others would ideally be characterized by all the Father initiates and imparts, but the same complications that entered Eden, afflict us, too.

When we search outside of God and His expansive provision, we stumble and injure ourselves in search of identity and validation. We scout for attention, affirmation, and affection in the wrong places, though we were already created in and for love by our God who is Love. In response to the Father, we love and learn how to receive and rest in it for ourselves, return it to Him, and release it to others.

The pathology of trauma and shame

A soul that injures itself operates similarly to an auto-immune deficiency. Many times, when we have been infected by trauma, our hearts and minds behave with the same pattern where dis-ease deconstructs the body from the inside out.

When infirmity causes the body to become confused, it wars against itself. It mistakes the agents that promote health and help, enemies. Pathologically, cells attack their teammates instead of aligning with their allies to target invaders for elimination.

As with this kind of internal mutiny, trauma enacts a similar pattern in our mental and emotional health. Shame reconfigures our perception of the past, distorting our thoughts as we filter present encounters through memory and preconceived notions about our future. Together, trauma and shame tag-team, co-opting disruptive incidents and toxic behaviors leveraged against us.

They antagonize us from within, operating through thoughts and feelings that cause us to act out our internalized self-loathing and rejection. This internal battle gains momentum when we linger in unresolved pain, persuaded by trauma and shame to sabotage and self-destruct.

Search and rescue

Our history of misplaced trust convinces us to deny access to God into the secret passages of the soul where we need compassion and rescue. Shame arises, leaving us debilitated, suspended between the love we crave and the vulnerability we loathe. Between fear and pride, we hesitate to expose ourselves where there is promise and potential to receive help and healing.

We trust the tangibility of our wounds more than the power of God to restore. God is enough to protect us, even where we cannot shield ourselves from harm.

It takes the Holy Spirit’s revelation to make this clear. Sometimes, His voice breaks whispers in the stillness when we are alone, yet with God in the presence of our pain. From the pit of despair, we realize only God can elevate and establish us on a firm foundation.

The Holy Spirit can be trusted to guide us through the maze of familiarity where we have sought heart repair through dysfunction. Instead, we encounter Christ, found by the One who left ninety-nine others to locate us, wandering in the wild (Matthew 18:12-14).

Safety and support for trauma and shame

Through the precious gift of relationship, God restores brokenness. Christ binds our wounds with His anointing and infuses us with healing that awakens us in fellowship and renewed relationship with His Holy Spirit (Isaiah 61;1).

He invites us into risk, where our faith in the One who knows all graces us for the unknown and obscure. He releases His empowering Presence, to counsel and lead. He also orchestrates nourishing connections with others in the Body who are active extensions of His Heart.

Miraculously, where relationships have represented past pain, connecting with a safe and supportive community enhances soul health. Through mutually enriching relationships, we grow interdependently.

While we may supply different needs for those in our circle, the Holy Spirit works through such connections to repair and rebuild desolate places where we have occupied either side of abandonment and rejection, as both offender and offended.

The gift of forgiveness, though imperfect people, provides rest and refreshing in relationships that teach us how to give and receive love. As we deepen intimacy with Christ, we can be transformed and ushered into the healing that stretches and strengthens us as well as those in our support circles.

Soul journey

In tracing the arc of Jesus’ miracles, we witness that He confronted the person’s internal condition, forgiving sin first. He breathed life into the soul, bringing wholeness where sin had bruised and bullied humanity before His advent.

Those who were transformed mentally, emotionally, and physically expressed a desire to keep following Him along with the twelve and others. Yet, Jesus released them to return to their homes, families, communities, and even the Temple, allowing the miracle to testify in manifested sight, hearing, life, and mobility.

Those of us who have experienced the saving might of Christ’s shed Blood have a new spirit though we struggle and strive in areas where we feel enslaved to the past. Our spirit reveals newness that enters when we confess salvation through Christ Jesus. Our old soul craves the wholeness that our spirit now knows.

Like its unseen counterpart, the soul longs for the Holy Spirit’s healing and delivering power. That is the soul’s hope: to experience comprehensive restoration and renewal in entirety for the mind, will, emotion, memory, imagination, and affection.

The soul’s journey, however, is not one of immediate transformation, like the spirit’s, but rather is reset on an ongoing basis (Romans 12:1-2). As we continually present ourselves to Christ, we crucify our fleshly nature (Galatians 2:20).

The blood of Christ has not only atoned for our sins but washes the wounds that sin inflicts against our souls. That sin, whether our own, something committed against us, or an unfortunate traumatic encounter has the potential to continue wounding, even if we have forgiven.

It is when we allow the shed Blood and broken Body of our Lord, and the power of the Holy Spirit to minister, we evict the effects of trauma and shame. Where they have trampled through our lives, we can experience ever-increasing degrees of wholeness and freedom.

For this reason, he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. – Hebrews 2:17, NIV

Next steps

While we may seek love and belonging in odd places, we don’t have to search for what the I AM has generously provided. The Father has already extended to us everything we need. We shelter and dwell in safety, a place of acceptance in His Beloved Son.

Regardless of the effects that trauma has manifested, the Greater One living inside supersedes the enemy and his mal intentions (1 John 4:4). Love came looking, found us in sin, and redeemed us from shame.

For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. – Luke 19:10, NASB

Love is still scanning the earth for a place to show Himself strong. Here, in your vulnerabilities, may the Holy Spirit find a haven to heal you in the recesses of your soul.

Take some time to identify and schedule an appointment with a counselor for your next step out of the shadows of trauma and shame. The Lord desires to draw you closer to the place where you will recognize that you have been loved and found in Him.