Mishandled

How do you evaluate healing? How do you know if someone is healed or hiding their pain in plain sight? What do you do when you know someone is not okay but they think they’re fine and healed? What do you do when someone knows they’re not okay but they don’t want to talk about it?

The goal of this piece is to capture what it feels like when someone—who you believed would hold you and treat you with care—drops you. That dropping could look a variety of ways, but what happens after that is usually the same: The person who has been dropped, tries to pick themselves off the floor and put themselves back together again. Some people are successful at making it look like they have everything together, but there are those who don’t appreciate that the weight and depth of those cracks are taking a toll on their spirit.

But how do you move forward? What if the person who dropped you moved on, not realizing what they’ve done and you never get an apology because you never see them again? What if you have to see this person all the time and they don’t think they dropped you at all? Instead, they minimize your pain and justify their actions. How do we navigate the complex emotions in pain that come with being injured while also moving in peace? Are boundaries sufficient? How do you actually heal?

I think the first step is acknowledgment that you are still in pain. When we disregard our pain, we take for granted that it factors our emotions and how we care for ourselves. Ignoring that pain is what causes us to be susceptible to triggers, and those triggers can cause us to lash out and drop someone else. And we may refuse to acknowledge our harm and stand justified.

But Christ always seeks for us to look like him, so by acknowledging our pain, we can start to pull our emotions apart. We can dig deeper into how we felt about each moment and everything that happens and articulate certain beliefs that have stemmed from the injury.

From there, we can allow Christ to heal us and give us the truth about who we are, who he has called us to be, and what he wants for us. All those things will comfort, edify, and uplift because that is Jesus’s character.