Healing After Spiritual Injury
Oh, friends, I’m here to tell you about Spiritual Injury and how you too can find a new way forward and heal from the trauma you have experienced. You are not alone and no longer do you need to move through your daily life feeling hopeless and depleted of energy. In today’s blog post, we’ll dive in to what Spiritual Injury is, how it zaps your energy, and what steps you can take to break free from the trauma to live a life that is happy, fulfilling, and everything you deserve!
What is Spiritual Injury?
Sometimes referred to as Moral Injury, Spiritual Injury is the result of an event that creates an irreconcilable mental contradiction that generates moral and spiritual distress. Often resulting in emotional turmoil which can lead to destructive behavior as one attempts to reconcile the past.
Spiritual Injuries are invisible injuries which often go undetected and remain untreated because people carry guilt and shame which makes it difficult to discuss and seek treatment for these injuries.
No one can decide for you if you have sustained a spiritual injury. Most of them have happen initially, as we were children. We do the best we can to patch up our emotions, our thoughts, and our feelings as we live the effects of the trauma response – we call this life. Most of my spiritual injuries happened when I was a young child.
Although the injury is the catalyst for the trauma what tends to hold many back from realizing their healing, the agreements made as a result of the injury, and the subsequent pain caused by the inability to make sense of it. The mental anguish and emotional turmoil are often experienced for years as one attempts to make peace with the effects of trauma. The unidentified trauma responses that lead to shame, guilt, remorse, and dissatisfaction are often followed by the question, “Why me?”, which begins the cyclical mental process that leads your energy away from the question that matters most – HOW?
How Can I Heal My Spiritual Injury?
In my forthcoming book, The Energy Harvest: A Spiritual Model for the Enhancement of Your Life, I delve into my own spiritual injuries and the rewarding work that it took to heal those wounds. I was inspired to put together The Energy Harvest workbook so that you too can heal and find peace and love and harvest the energy from your chosen God source. It was important for me to find those who had healed from trauma. I sought out the experts to assist in my enlightenment and understanding. “I have come to the conclusion that human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma. I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening—a portal opening to emotional and genuine spiritual transformation” (Peter Levine, MD).
But today, I offer some steps covered in my workbook that you can start taking today!
1. Identify Your Emotional / Spiritual Injuries
What are the events that caused the spiritual injury? Be completely honest with yourself, even if they are painful to think about. Identifying and describing them is the first step to being able to overcome the hurt and pain. One of the key features of trauma is avoidance. Yes, friend, it does hurt to relive an event, but this hurt does not define you and unless you fully identify the hurt, you cannot heal from it.
Going back to the point and time when you experience the “FIRST” of anything whether it was positive or negative, is where the energy (emotions, feelings, thoughts) is stored. I call this the “scene of the crime” because these experiences hold the clues and DNA of what our responses to the experiences and how the mental emotional physical trauma loop continues to support itself.
It takes courage to face the “boogeyman” that once terrified your inner child. Now you have the opportunity and the road map to lead you back to where your inner child was wounded. Now you can offer a better understanding to your inner child and make more sense out of the experiences that caused the initial injury.
By identifying what the inner child needed in that moment, you begin the healing process. It is through this process that the energy of brokenness is changed to higher vibration of gratitude. This is how you go from injury to invincible!
In an attempt to reconcile the negative experiences and recreate the positive experiences, your beliefs that govern your internal guidance system are based on these “first time experiences” that have shaped you. The Energy Harvest workbook offers a framework to assess where you may be “stuck” in the fight, flight, or freeze responses and provides spiritual tools to reconcile these fixated physiological states.
You are strong enough to take this first crucial step, I believe in you!
2. Set – Preparing for the Journey
Here you train your mind to practice self-compassion and self-kindness so that you can focus on difficult emotions, allowing yourself to feel them. Allowing yourself to reduce shame through self-compassion will allow you to include yourself in healing and pave the way for self-acceptance, self-love, and forgiveness.
A shift must take place in your thinking before you can move forward. I have heard it said, “you cannot fix the problem with the same thinking that created it”. However, the idea that you need a paradigm shift is not a solution that has come to mind. Accepting that you are the problem just as much as you are the solution is where you begin to make progress.
Accepting that there are things beyond our control is where most run into difficulty. It takes humility to admit to yourself that you do not have all of the answers. Denial of your strengths and weaknesses, and assets and liabilities can keep you locked into limited beliefs and cyclical behavior patterns that seem to lead to the same feelings of failure and dissatisfaction with life.
At this step, you will choose a higher power. A power greater than yourself and greater than the spiritual injury and subsequent trauma. “There is growing empirical evidence that our spiritual values and behaviors can promote physical and psychological well-being” (Gerald Corey).
The Energy Harvest spiritual model provides you with the spiritual tools that make it possible to live a more meaningful and fulfilling quality of life. Here you will come to gain respect for the natural ebb and flow of the universe. Healing is when you and your Power Source work together with the universe to restore you to a healthy paradigm; where fear-based thought processes and negative feelings do not dictate how you respond to life as you break free from the mental loop that holds you back from moving forward.
Friend, you can do this!
3. Achieve with Action
What will a more healed version of you look like? Through imagination and visualization, you can achieve it! Through the simple exercise of sitting down with a pen and paper to write out a description of what you want, you will create an image in your mind and that image will build your vision. Your visions can change the world someday!
It takes practice to imagine yourself the happiest you can become. You have to begin where you are and build your dream from NOW forward not from the past. When you begin the vision from a past perspective you will not have a high enough vibration to reach the level intensity to support forward dreams manifestation because the past energy will weigh you down.
Imagine the best thing that could ever happen in your life...ok how does it feel? This feeling is only the beginning... now quickly, what is the next best thing to raise the vibration to match the intensity of the first feeling... as you build upon your feelings, the energy is intensified and your vibration is raised higher and higher. Ester Hicks taught me to raise my vibration.
Meditation and prayer to your God source is also another great way to imagine and visualize what you want to achieve. This is where you take a moment to find a relaxing position and multiple cleansing breaths. Then invite your Higher Power (God, Creator, Spirit) to show you a vision of His plan for your life. The ability to call on your Power Source will be your greatest asset as the power to moving into action will come from your belief in the ability to work hand in hand with this power to achieve improved clarity and focus of vision.
You are not alone in this work, friend!
4. Sustain
Reaching this final step has been hard won and you cannot afford to forget the time, blood, sweat, and tears that you invested into your life. The inner work that you accomplish will set you up for great success now and forever. The foundation built through regular spiritual practices has aligned your body, mind, and soul to make them strong enough to weather any storms that may come your way.
Through the teachings of trauma expert Peter Levine, Md., “I have come to the conclusion that human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma. I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening—a portal opening to emotional and genuine spiritual transformation.”
It is in this step where you commit to regular spiritual practice and moving through these steps as often as needed to maintain and exceed the tremendous progress that you have made to free yourself from the trauma of spiritual injury. What actions will you take to remain consistent in your healing journey?
You are courageous, keep going!
