Inner Healing From Trauma And Soul Wounds

Every person needs the healing of the heart in one are or another. We are always a work in progress. As we allow the Holy Spirit to bring up issues in our soul, He gives the grace to fix, heal, and mend our broken heart.

“Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes, we are healed.”

Isaiah 53:4-5

I want to draw your attention to the fact that before He addresses the health and healing of your body, Jesus’s mission was first to address the health of your soul or heart. Many times, when a person has been abused, rejected, wounded, or hurt in some way, there is an emotional wound that needs to be healed. Demons use this hurt to enter into a person and have a hold on their life.

A wounded soul or a hurt heart oftentimes harbors feelings of unforgiveness, pain, rejection, and loneliness, which is sin that opens the door and gives a legal right for demons to operate. I wish I could tell you that deliverance fixes everything in your life but it does not.

Deliverance is one of the tools that God has given us as the Church to help humanity by setting them free from demonic strongholds and oppressions. Another tool that I am going to focus on today is the healing of the heart.

The Operation Of The Mind And Soul

Our soul consists of our will, mind, and emotions. When a person goes through a traumatic event – it could be a physical, emotional, or sexual abuse or sudden event – that they are not able to process emotionally at that time, in order for the person to keep functioning, what happens is our soul suppresses those feelings and emotions so that our core personality can move forward. This is the way God created our soul.

Depending on the severity of the event, especially if it happens in childhood as children have not developed the ability to process certain feelings and excessive emotions, what could also happen is the soul dissociates from the event completely, and creates a seperate personality that gets frozen in time. This is what psychologists call a split personality. Some people do not even remember the event that happened.

The Healing Of The Heart

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted.

Isaiah 61:1

Broken means shattered into separate pieces. Before Jesus talked about healing or setting captives free, He said He came to preach and the next thing He said is He came to bring the shattered pieces of our hearts together.

Defining Trauma

Trauma is a wound or fracture of the inner person. It results from exposure to an incident or series of events that ar emotionally disturbing with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning, mental, physical, social, emotional and spiritual well-being.

Trauma is a side effect of events which happen to us that are beyond our control. It can be a form of verbal, spiritual, sexual, emotional, or physical abuse. It can also come from an accident, falling down stairs, and sudden bad news. These are all major traumatic events that change the course of our lives. It can also be multiple minor events that can eventually cause a very similar effect on our lives.

Traumatic events have both long and short term consequences on our lives. Psychologists have identifies three categories of trauma: acute, chronic, and complex trauma.

Acute Trauma

Acute trauma results from a single incident. These are derived from a major life changing event and shock.

Chronic Trauma

This arises from repeated and prolonged events. These could all be minor events but if they are repeated and continuous, they have similar effects. An example of this could be someone in a verbally abusive relationship.

Complex Trauma

These types of trauma come from exposure to multiple varied events, which are often invasive and interpersonal. They are the hardest to deal with because they contain multiple levels of damage and events across different times frames that need to be dealt with.

The Consequences Of Trauma

The effects of soul wounds caused by trauma are depression, emotional overreaction, emotional shutdown, triggered emotions, switching of personality or moods, being divided within the self, loss of time and memory, hearing multiple voices, self harm (cutting), and suicidal thoughts or attempts.

Another consequence of trauma is sickness in the body. When the soul is sick, it begins to have adverse effects on your body and it will begin to get sick. Scientists have found that people experiencing any of the traumatic symptoms we have discussed affect the body in a negative way and are tied to the supression of the immune system, the thyroid, digestive system and the body’s natural self-healing properties.

People in this condition are also commonly seen gaining or losing weight. They have the experience, even if they are eating healthily and exercising, that they cannot change their weight or be healthy. When such people receive inner healing, their digestive and immune systems resume the function they were designed by God to do. With time, even without supernatural healing, your body restores and recovers itself.

Many soul wounds occur as a result of a basic emotional needs not being met. Every human being has four basic needs that need to be met in order for them to function wholesomely.

Physiological Needs

These include air, water, food, shelter, clothing, sleep. If a person gets deprived of these physiological needs, they can develop a trauma or wound.

Safety Needs

Physical and emotional safety and protection.

Love

Every individual needs a sense of being loved and belonging through friendship, intimacy, family and a sense of connection.

Esteem

Everyone needs respect, self-esteem, recognition, strength, and freedom.

The Importance Of Childhood Experiences

From the age of 2 to 12, you are a recording device. From the age of 13 onwards, all you do is replay what you recorded in the first years of your life. You cannot help yourself but play out what you recorded, if it is good or if it is trauma. This is why patterns and experiences seem to repeat in people’s lives. You might even make a decision to change and maybe you kept it for three months but soon enough, you will find yourself go back to your default setting of what you recorded from 2-12 without the healing of the heart.

Traumatic events can take place outside of childhood but that does not detract from the importance of the experiences of the first years of our lives.

“…The ruler of this dark world is coming. But he has no power over Me, for he has nothing to use against Me.”

John 14:30

What Jesus said here is that the devil has no strings he could pull on to manipulate Jesus. In other words, the devil has no soul wounds that he can use to trigger Me to act out of character.

Three Elements Of Complete Freedom

Jesus is here to heal your fractured heart and soul. For you to live in complete freedom, there are three elements that you have to address. It can start with any element but all three are necessary.

Deliverance

If there are demons behind your soul wounds, which most of the time there are, they amplify the feelings and effects of trauma, like fear, anxiety, insecurity, and so on. You need to receive deliverance from demons. Oftentimes, that takes the triggers from 100 down to 30 but the trauma triggers will still be there.

Emotional Wounds

Here, you have to deal with the emotional wounds themselves by asking Jesus to bring healing to the soul. When the soul is healed, the triggers are finally gone.

Bad Mindset

This is the third step because once the demons and the triggers have gone, people can still experience the same things because their thoughts have not changed. They still think of fear even when there is no traumatic trigger or demonic amplification of fear just because they have conditioned themselves like that for a long time. This is why Apostle Paul says that our lives are transformed by the renewing of our mind in Romans 12:2. We need the Word of God in order to renew our mind and realign our thinking, to create new neuro-pathways in our brain to think about the subject of the matter differently.

Jesus’ Answer To Inner Healing

In John 8:32, 36, He gave the complete solution to inner healing, deliverance and renewing the mind. He said you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Whoever the Son sets free is free indeed. This includes deliverance from demons and healing of the heart. Then, reading God’s Word until it changes our lives by changing the way we think.

How we Receive Healing

Dissociation

When a person suffers from severe trauma that causes dissociation, we need to ask the Holy Spirit to bring up that memory to the surface because they might have hidden or forgotten it. Oftentimes, these were scary events and the person can relive some of the emotions or experiences during this time. All that part of the soul needs to come up so it can be dealt with. We allow that to come up. Then, we invite Jesus into that memory. When Jesus comes, peace comes.

Next, we ask Jesus if there is any lie the person has embraced during that time. Ask Jesus to exchange the lie for the truth. After that, we ask Jesus to show us if there is anybody they need to forgive because unforgiveness is an open door to demons. Often it is the abuser that needs to be forgiven; it can also be ourselves and it can be the responsibility we placed on God that He allowed something to happen. We do not forgive God. We release Him from the blame we had placed upon Him and repent of it.

After this, we ask Jesus to heal their heart. Here, you often see the people weep and cry as they experience the passion and love of Jesus. Then we tell them to leave the area of that memory with Jesus to the safe place He leads them to.

The proof that the person is healed of soul trauma is when you ask them to recall the memory again, there are no emotions, triggers, or tears attached to it. The details of the event begin to fade after inner healing, whereas before they could vividly recall things.

Supressed Emotions And Wounds

In the same way, we allow those feelings to come up and invite Jesus into that feeling with them. Tell them to look for Jesus in that memory. He is there with them wherever it took place now as we pray. Next, we identify the emotions. They could be betrayal, anger, bitterness, hatred, unmet basic emotional needs – and picture handing them over to Jesus. Let Him take it/them.

Ask Jesus if the person has believed a lie due to the traumatic event. Have them ask Jesus for forgiveness for believing the lie, name it, and renounce it. They are who God says they are. They have what God says they have and they can do what God says they can do. Tell them to say I am not defined by this event, in the name of Jesus Christ. Then, ask if there is anyone they need to forgive in this specific memory. Speak the name of the person and that they release forgiveness over them in the name of Jesus Christ. God has forgiven them and therefore, they can forgive others.

Let Jesus speak the truth about them into their situation. Hear the truth, and the truth will set you free. Embrace Jesus and let Him embrace you with His loving compassionate arms. Together with Jesus, walk out of that memory. Walk out of that room, car, wherever it happened and go to a safe place with Jesus Christ.

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