How Healing Complex Trauma Transforms Our Image of God

EP 141 How Healing Complex Trauma Transforms Our Image of God  

[00:00:00] INTRODUCTION

And so I prayed that day, “Lord, I, I throw out, or I give back to you. And I throw out everything I thought I knew about You. Please give me new eyes, new ears, and a new heart with which to see You and know You.” I said, “I'm going to throw out all my preconceptions about who You are. Show me who You are.” 

“And by the way, while You're doing that”, I said to Him, “Can You also show me how You see me because I don't know how to love myself.”

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[00:00:32] Welcome to Becoming Me, your podcast companion and coach in your journey to a more integrated and authentic self. I am your host, Ann Yeong, and I'm here to help you grow in self-discovery and wholeness. If you long to live a more authentic and integrated life and would like to hear honest insights about the rewards and challenges of this journey, then take a deep breath, relax, and listen on to Becoming Me. 

[00:01:04] EXPLORING SECURE ATTACHMENT WITH GOD

Hello, everyone. So in many of my episodes of and chats on Becoming Me podcast, if you're just listening to this instead of watching it on YouTube, I have been talking about secure attachment with God and how central having a secure attachment with God is to the interior life, to us becoming more ourselves, even to healing.

[00:01:27] So there is a concept that those of us who maybe grew up from within a more religious environment may be more familiar with than the concept of having a secure attachment with God - and that is the image of God that we have. Okay, now, even that concept of image of God is not really like that prevalent if you just go for Mass or traditional catechism. It's not really covered in that. It's 

already something that's derived from, I think, a growing appreciation for the psychological dimension of our relationship with God.

[00:02:08] But anyway, in more, let's say spiritual healing retreats, you may already come across this concept of image of God and how we have a distorted image of God and how important it is to heal 

our image of God. I used to have the impression that healing my image of God was just something that I needed to be done unto me. And I didn't realize that it wasn't that simple. I mean, definitely there is that element of healing coming from above or coming from God that is pure grace that I cannot work for, but which I can ask for. 

[00:02:46] What I didn't know until maybe like the last seven to eight years of my own journey is how much of the other kinds of integrated healing would actually impact the healing of my image of God, or how it would change my image of God.

[00:03:04] HEALING THE IMAGE OF GOD

So really in today's conversation, I want to talk about some of the ways that healing from complex trauma changes our image of God, okay. How that actually heals our image of God from a way that's probably quite different from our more common understanding through spiritual healing retreats of what it is to heal the image of God that we have.

[00:03:24] A PERSONAL HEALING JOURNEY

Let's take a moment and rewind to December 2008. Right, which is, that's like 15, almost 16 years ago now. Okay, that was when a very significant episode in my own healing journey happened.

[00:03:41] Now in 2008 December, I reached out to a priest that I felt prompted to reach out to. Someone that I knew from my childhood, but who didn't know me really, really well, or know my family really, really well, which I thought was the perfect sweet spot for what I needed to talk about. So the previous seven years or so, I had been living under the shadow of a very grave sin that I committed when I was much younger, right? And I had gone to Confession, I intellectually believed that God forgives me. 

[00:04:19] THE IMPACT OF COMPLEX TRAUMA

But to be very honest, deep down, I didn't believe that I deserve God's forgiveness. I believed that I was no longer worthy of His love, and I really felt like, you know, I am blessed that God loves me because I really don't deserve His love. I'm unworthy of any blessing that He has in store for me because I am such a sinner. And even though I believe God has forgiven me, I actually do not believe, or did not believe at the time that I was any more worthy or to be His disciple or His apostle. 

[00:04:55] Okay, so basically I just felt like a really undeserving servant. Pretty similar to the prodigal son in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. If you recall, I mean after he had squandered his father's

fortune, his share of inheritance and he finally had an awakening while he was trying to fill his stomach from, you know, the food that he was giving the pigs that he was tending. It occurred to him that he should go back to the father and beg for his forgiveness. And he had rehearsed in his mind that he would tell his father that, you know, I no longer deserve to be called your son, right?

And just treat me like your servant. I'll just be happy to come back under your household. 

[00:05:32] That was how I actually really felt and believed. I mean, I didn't make the connection to 

the parable, of course, for so many years. It was so subconscious. But something died in me and I just thought that that death was because of the sin that I had committed. I didn't realize that that death was because I couldn't receive God's love. That's such a huge huge difference, okay? 

[00:05:59] The death was not because of the sin I committed, which I had even already gone for Confession and received forgiveness for. It was that I just couldn't be alive anymore, right? So my whole life, at that point, I was a young woman.. I was only my 20s.. I felt that that was it. I will be existing through life, but it was so sad. It was so sad. 

[00:06:18] So anyway, in 2008 December, I reached out to a priest that I felt prompted to reach out to, to tell him about this issue, about the, about the sin. With every honesty, I told him exactly what had happened, but I also wrote to him about how I had been feeling. And he very compassionately extended an invitation to meet him. And even before I met him, though, I remember the thing

that really stood out in his response to my email. And I wrote him this really, really long, uh, okay. I 

wrote him an email and I attached a word document because the story was really long, and he wrote back. I remember it was so comforting for me to read that.

[00:07:03] One, he said, you know, you've been carrying this burden for too long. So come, yes, come, let's have a talk, let's have a conversation. And two, the issue is not that God hasn't forgiven you, but that you are unable to forgive yourself or believe that you're worthy of God's forgiveness. And then he had this line. He says, “the problem is you have a distorted image of God”.

[00:07:23] And that was the first time I ever came across that term in my life. Just to let you know, I am above average, well-formed and informed of my faith. I had read book after book on apologetics, about the faith, to understand the catechism, and I'd never come across this idea of the image of God or having a distorted image of God. I thought that all I needed to do was to learn what the 

Church teaches about God, learn what the Catechism to the Catholic Church teaches about God, 

and that that would be enough. But clearly something was off and I didn't even realize what was missing until I read that line in the email - “You have a distorted image of God”.

[00:08:05] But I didn't know what that distorted image of God was, and yet instinctively, the moment I read that line, I knew it was true. It must have been the Holy Spirit moving in me and telling me, “Ann, this is naming a very important problem. You have a distorted image of God.”

[00:08:23] So, even after the conversation I had with this priest, which was wonderful, he invited me to pray for healing. He said it was important not just to have my sin forgiven because that's done, but my disordered image of God is something that needs healing. So that was also something that was new to me back then. But my understanding, and I think even the way the priest meant it, was still more of a spiritual kind of healing. It wasn't so clearly nuanced yet that there was a psychological and emotional dimension of healing that was also necessary.

[00:08:56] So anyway, about a week after the conversation with the priest, I was speaking with my 

goddaughter. I had an adult goddaughter who was in a different country than I was and we were just having like a Zoom conversation. I think it wasn't Zoom back then, it was something else I can't remember right now what what software it was we used but.. We were having a conversation and I was just sharing with her, updating her on what was happening in my life and in my journey and then I blurted out this phrase that, “I feel like God is obliged to love me”. And, even as I said that, I knew that wasn't true because God is free. God is not obliged to do anything. God is God, right? 

[00:09:44] But it was so revealing that I realised that was actually what my heart was saying, “I feel like God's obliged to love me”. 

 Why? Because, well because He's God. He's perfect. He's perfectly loving. Right? He's perfectly knowing, He's perfectly powerful, and He's the perfect father. He loves me unconditionally. So if God didn't love me, if God couldn't forgive me for what I have done, then He would no longer be God. So therefore, in order for God to be God, He has to love me. 

[00:10:21] So in a very roundabout way, in a very intellectual way.. So I was a student of philosophy, okay, I studied philosophy. Uh, sometimes I think the way that I've become wired to understand things can become limiting. I think that's the case for all of us. Which is why it's so important to keep growing and expanding and, and evolving the way that our mind works as well, right?

[00:10:43] But anyway, so I realized in that moment, “Oh my gosh, I think that is my disordered image of God”. Maybe I had more than one, but that certainly was one of them. Because if I subconsciously believed that God is obliged to love me, it's so sterile and clinical and it doesn't feel warm at all. 

[00:11:01] There was no attunement. Okay, so now this is a new language that I've picked up in recent years. There is no sense that God is present to me, loving me because He wants to love me, that He wants, that He loves me because He desires me, because He finds me, even if I cannot understand it, lovable, right? So no wonder I can't receive His love. So right at that moment, it was such a graced moment of revelation. 

[00:11:29] I realized, “Oh, my God, I thought I knew You, I thought I had a good relationship with You because I really genuinely had some powerful conversion experiences earlier in my life”. I have experienced God's love for me and yet, clearly, if this was in operation in my subconscious that I thought somehow that, “You're obliged to love me and that's why I cannot receive Your forgiveness and Your love, I clearly don't know who you are”.

[00:11:58] And so I prayed that day, “Lord, I, I throw out, or I give back to You. And I throw out everything I thought I knew about You. Please give me new eyes, new ears, and a new heart with which to see You and know You”. I said, “I'm going to throw out all my preconceptions about who You are. Show me who You are.” “And by the way, while You're doing that,” I said to Him, “can You also show me how You see me because I don't know how to love myself. I don't know how to accept myself. Maybe if You showed me how You see me, because I at least intellectually believe that You love me, maybe that would help me to love myself.”

[00:12:38] Okay, so that was year 2008, kind of December or 2009 January. Okay, so a long time ago now. So let's forward back to the present. And in the present, I've been learning about healing of complex trauma, right? And now I'm piecing together that my inability to experience God's love all those years in my childhood and my youth and my young adulthood, my distorted image of God was there because of my trauma, because I was unable to see or feel anything else.  

[00:13:19] So today I'm going to be talking about some examples of how healing complex trauma can actually lead to a change in our image of God and what that change is, okay. Depending on what kind of trauma we're healing from, it's not comprehensive at all. I'm relying more on what I know, what I've experienced firsthand. And I know that this is true for a lot of people already, okay, more of the complex trauma on the side of emotional, a complex emotional relationship trauma. 

[00:13:47] TRAUMA PROJECTIONS FROM CAREGIVERS ONTO GOD

First of all, it's helpful to know this or remember this, how we see God, our image of God, it determines how we see ourselves and how we see others. And at the same time how we see God was shaped by our relationships with others, right? And so that is why complex trauma which is first and foremost something that had happened to us and that we lived with and it festered within us. Something that we received in some sense, then shapes how we see the world, shapes how we see God. And then how we see God, and this is especially the case if somehow your faith is very important to you and God is important to you, in some way or the other it's going to impact like

how you see God it's going to impact how you see yourself, how you see the world.

[00:14:30] If you believe that God is distant, that God thinks that you're unworthy unless you prove your worthiness, then that's how you're going to see, that's how you're going to see yourself. And that's how you're going to see others, and see the world as undeserving, unworthy, and in need of proving their worth to God that they are worthy of forgiveness and redemption, okay.

[00:14:55] So for a complex trauma survivor, our image of God is usually a reflection of the relationships that we have experienced that have harmed us, in the name of love. Okay. When I say in the name of love, it's this really distorted, crazy-making kind of experience where usually our caregivers, our primary caregivers, in our childhood people that we believe love us and who perhaps, you know, are doing the best, their best to love us and tell us that what they're doing to us or not doing for us is because they love us.

[00:15:29] Right, so for example, you did something and your father, your mother disciplined you, maybe corporal punishment, okay, maybe spanked you and they say, “I'm doing this because I love you”. Okay, Or they withhold their love, give you the silent treatment, as a form of discipline, and they tell you like, “I'm only doing this because I love you”, right? That's what I mean by experiencing things and our relationships that have harmed us. 

[00:15:55] Okay, these are things that we now know can harm our ability to, to mature affectively, okay, to develop healthy attachments with people, with anyone, to develop a healthy perspective or ability to relate to ourselves, to trust ourselves. Okay, a lot of these experiences, like the examples that I've given, if they're repeated constantly, it really skews and distorts our ability to see ourselves as good and lovable. 

[00:16:30] So for complex trauma survivors, and complex trauma is exactly the kind of trauma that's not necessarily like a big event, right, but the repetition and accumulation of many seemingly smaller traumatic experiences when you're left alone in that pain of being unseen, unloved, and then you develop all these scripts to try and understand your world. And a lot of those scripts in order to help you understand what's happening to you, it says things like, “Well, I'm unlovable. I'm sinful, I'm unworthy and that's why my parents are treating me this way.” And then that becomes our belief about ourselves. And that becomes our belief about God, that God sees us the same way that our parents see us. Right? 

[00:17:15] So what we experience in the name of love which has harmed us, we somehow now project that onto God. It's the only way we can think of. After all, we are told that God is our father, right? So first and foremost our parental figures and what we experience from them will affect how we see God. So let me give you a few examples of kind of like a complex trauma and how that skews our relationship with God. 

[00:17:41] THE EFFECTS OF EMOTIONAL NEGLECT

So the first example, emotional neglect. Okay. We know now that emotional neglect leads to a form of trauma as well, because children, all of us, require attunement, right? Secure attachment. Now, having emotional attunement and secure attachment missing from our life, even if it's not something that was actively done to us, like physical abuse or sexual abuse, right, something important and necessary that was missing from our life, that was withheld from us - that leads to trauma as well.

[00:18:14] So many of us have experienced emotional neglect one way or the other. For example, because maybe our parents themselves didn't have the capacity to be emotionally attuned, right? Or they were just absent. Sometimes maybe through no fault of their own. Maybe they really, they were struggling to, uh, to earn enough, maybe to put food on the table. Oh, there are so many reasons. Maybe one of our parents was ill or mentally ill, or maybe there were addictions going on at home. Or we had another sibling that was ill. You know, there are many different circumstances that could lead to our emotional neglect. It's complex itself, okay, but no matter how it happened, when we have suffered emotional neglect, we develop certain  scripts. 

[00:19:00] So how that impacts our relationship with God could be that I can believe that God is benevolent, right? Like I can believe, I believe my parents are doing the best that they love me, but God is distant. And you know what? “God does not care about my inner world, my hopes, my dreams, and my emotions.” Because honestly, like, if, in my own lived experience, there were more important things than my hopes, my dreams, my emotions, than my inner world, then that leads to emotional neglect. Then I'll believe that God is too important and too busy with more important things in the world than my inner world. 

[00:19:38] And so if that's the case, imagine the parent that you had that did their best to care for you and maybe provided for you materially, but they're so busy that the only time they really are present is to make sure that you're not hurting yourself or that you are doing the right thing. Sometimes we may have parents that only seem to spend time with us when we're not doing well enough in school or we have done something wrong and they're there to scold us, to teach us right? And, and, and outside of that, they're not around. They're not around to get to know who we are. They're not around. They're not interested in what we're interested in.  

[00:20:16] So we then begin to feel also or believe subconsciously that God is only interested in me doing the right thing, doing well enough, being a good Catholic, being a good disciple, whatever that is, but God is not interested in how I feel, right? So that's what emotional neglect can do to our image of God. 

[00:20:36] THE EFFECTS OF EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL ABUSE

Second example, if we have experienced emotional or spiritual abuse – okay, I just want to say that I put emotional / spiritual abuse because when emotional abuse can happen in a highly religious environment, whether it's in a family or in a church community, it is also almost always spiritual abuse okay, because it directly impacts the way we see God and our relationship with God.

[00:21:02] So let's say, we experience our relationships where a caregiver constantly says that “I love you and this is why I'm doing this to you. So, this is whatever I do to you, I do because I love you.” Okay, and I want to believe, every child wants to believe their parent. I mean, why wouldn't we, right? 

[00:21:22] But let's say we experience being treated with contempt, or we experience their inconsistency, or we actually experience something overtly even abusive, or being gaslighted, or being manipulated and, and kind of like controlled to do what it is that our parent wants. Alright, then we are going to also begin to believe that, well, I believe that God loves me. Because God is good, right? But at the same time, I expect God to treat me with contempt, or I expect God to manipulate me, or to do whatever is required so that I will do what He wants me to do, right?

[00:22:03] Often, abuse is about control. It's about taking away our freedom so that we will fit what it is that our abuser wants. I'm not going to go into the details. So there are many subtleties to this of course, and there are a lot of complexities to this. But just for the sake of discussion and because there are already many people, so many people, who really do live in families where there is clearly emotional and spiritual abuse okay. And, I think it's very very important that if you are one of these people that you recognize abuse as abuse alright, that this impacts your relationship with God and how you see God.

[00:22:44] So in context of emotional and spiritual abuse, what often happens is we begin to believe that I must do exactly as God wants or I will suffer the consequences. Because that was the experience we had, let's say, growing up. If you're in a household that was abusive, if you don't do what is it, what it is that your caregiver wants you to do, regardless of what means they use to try and get you to listen to them, for example, right? Then you will usually suffer the consequences, right? You will suffer the tantrums, or the harsh discipline, or you'll suffer silent treatment or severe criticism, or being shamed, or being humiliated, or experience financial abuse sometimes, you know, which is often intertwined with emotional abuse. Being controlled and you realize, if I don't do what my caregiver or parent or this, this other person, could be spouse, if you're now, you're an adult, a lot of times, if we haven't healed, we may end up marrying an abusive spouse. If I don't do exactly as he or she wants me to do, I will suffer the consequences.

[00:23:53] And if I see God this way, it is infinitely worse because God can ensure not only consequences in this life, but in eternity. So if I don't do exactly as God wants me to do, I will suffer the consequences in eternity. 

Okay, just pause for a moment and think.

[00:24:16] If this is how you actually think of God subconsciously okay, and I want to say subconsciously because a lot of times consciously that's not what we think about God. The effects of trauma lives in our body, lives in our nervous system - and a lot of times this is not aligned with our mind, with our intellect. And that's exactly why, even in the area of trauma healing, there's more and more literature suggesting that just purely cognitive means of therapy are often insufficient because trauma lives in the nervous system and in the body.

[00:24:53] So it's the same thing. We may explicitly cognitively believe that God loves us, right. That God gives us freedom, but in our bodies, our experience could be exactly this, that I must do what God wants me to do, or I will suffer the consequences. 

[00:25:09] THE EFFECTS OF ENMESHMENT TRAUMA 

The last example I'm going to talk about today is enmeshment trauma. Enmeshment is also something that I've mentioned and talked about in previous episodes on my podcast.

[00:25:19] Okay. So enmeshment trauma can happen in, in family systems or any kind of systems where there are very poor or even no boundaries. Alright, so then someone who grows up in such a system will usually have no sense of self. And remember, enmeshment trauma also usually happens in a way that you believe this is the right thing. You believe that this is love. 

[00:25:42] So for example, an enmeshed family system will often portray love as being enmeshed, that you and I, there are no boundaries between us so we should all want the same thing. We should all believe the same thing. Whenever you make a decision, it should be something that everybody has a say in, for example, right? Because none of us are supposed to have our own life. It's, it's everybody, right? 

[00:26:07] So there's no boundary and there's something very harmful about that. We don't develop a sense of self. We don't know who we are even as we grow up into adulthood. And, we become extremely reliant on external sources to validate who we are, what we do - and, that can lead to all kinds of trouble, including codependency. That's very common for people who grew up with enmeshment trauma, and including, becoming very susceptible even to indoctrination and, you know, cults. Because, if I have no sense of who I am and I don't trust my own judgment and I've grown up to believe that I need to be part of a system that tells me exactly who I am and what I want and what I should do, then I will gravitate towards that kind of system where someone else will tell me. Because, I'll be so anxious if I'm left on my own, right? If I don't heal, I will have no sense of who I am. 

[00:27:00] So, when we have enmeshment trauma, there's also this underlying sense that any thought or desire that I have that is different from what the system wants or believes is good is wrong, and should be stamped out, okay? Should be removed. 

[00:27:17] THE IMPACT OF SPIRITUAL ABUSE

When we project this onto God, then it becomes any thought or desire that seems different from what is established as God's will is sinful or heretical and I must repent or I'll be cast out, right? Cast out from my church family, or cast out from heaven eternally. A lot of times this is part of spiritual abuse that causes spiritual trauma, right?

[00:27:40] There is so much fear of having any thought or desire or exercising the freedom of our will that God actually has given us. Unless it is completely aligned with what others tell us is God's will, okay? That we, we just lose all sense of that inner freedom. This is very, very tricky because if this is what we grew up with, this itself is a distortion of God's love for us, right? 

[00:28:11] And so when we have caregivers, let's say in our families, if we grew up in religious families that represent God to us this way, and that, “if you don't listen to what God's will is through me, the authority that God has given me as your parent… Right now, I tell you this is God's will and if you don't listen to me, you're being a sinner, right? You're sinful, alright? And, and you, you risk going to hell”. 

[00:28:34] It's the same thing in our church family and the way that we understand the authority that God has given the Church. We often do not question or think critically or reflect critically on how systems and sinful systems and all kinds of issues and distortions and dysfunctions affect the way that authority is interpreted and understood by the Church herself, the institutional church herself.. How it is taught and passed down and portrayed and how people perceive it. 

[00:29:08] And when we don't question that, and we don't critically reflect on that, very often it is easy, especially if we were already conditioned in our own families like with enmeshment, to just latch on to the church in the same way and think, “I should not have any thought or any desire or anything that is apart from what is clearly established as God's will by those in authority over me because doing so is automatically sinful and heretical, and and if I don't repent, I will be cast out”.

[00:29:43] How can I not live in anxiety and fear if this is what I subconsciously believe all the time, right? So, this is another way that our image of God will be so distorted. How can we not live in fear in our relationship with God if this is what's actually going on in our subconscious? 

[00:30:01] HEALING THROUGH AUTHENTIC LOVE

So healing then happens when we experience authentic love and attunement, right? So the distortion happens because we experience dysfunctional love, right? Dysfunctional love that has wired our nervous system a certain way and believe that's what love is. And therefore, we believe that God who is Love loves us in such dysfunctional ways. And so we continue to be in anxiety and fear. 

[00:30:26] When healing happens, and healing only happens actually when we can experience authentic love, authentic attunement from God - thankfully, that can happen with grace when God reveals Himself to us in a way that's different from who we thought He was, right? 

[00:30:44] So if you recall the story I shared at the beginning of today's session, today's conversation, where I said, I realized that I had this, this belief that, that God is obliged to love me. I later on over many, many years, experienced the opposite of that. God let me experience how His love was really, truly, freely given, that it's warm, that it was attuned, that He delights in me, that it wasn't, it wasn't a clinical kind of like, He loves me because He should. That healed me and all the other distortions that I have had through, let's say, emotional neglect or enmeshment. I was also healed through an experience of a healthier kind of love. 

[00:31:29] REWRITING OUR STORY WITH GOD

When this kind of healing happens, what happens is that it rewrites the story in our nervous system, right? So the old story is what I've just described, now is rewritten. And now, there's a new story and so our image of God will change. 

[00:31:45] So for example, earlier when I talked about emotional neglect and I said that God is, you know, when you have emotional neglect then what you believe is that “God is benevolent but distant and does not care about your inner life”, right? And “God is only interested in you doing the right thing and not how you feel”..

[00:32:02] With healing, what we can experience is that: 

God loves to be close to me. He wants to be close to me. 

He cares deeply about my inner world, about my hopes, my dreams, and my emotions. 

He's interested to know how I feel and He wants me to feel my feelings because He gave them to me and He loves me to process my emotions with Him. He's never too busy for that. 

[00:32:27] I can experience now that God cares more about my freedom to love Him than He does about my doing the right thing to please Him out of fear or obligation. He's close to me. He's attuned to me and He really, really wants to help me build up that sense of freedom to be safe enough to tell Him exactly what I think, what I feel, to say ‘No’ to Him even - if I'm not ready to say ‘Yes’ to Him. He delights in that because that relationship is more primary and more important than me following the “rules” or doing the “right” thing, etc, etc. 

[00:33:03] In the case of emotional-spiritual abuse, I'd mentioned that our distorted image of God often is that even though I believe that God loves me, I believe that He can treat me with contempt, and that He will use ways of like, guilting me into doing the right thing, right? “I must do exactly as God wants, or I will suffer the consequences now and in eternity”. 

[00:33:25] When I begin healing from emotional and spiritual abuse in those sense, I experience that God is actually really gentle and patient with me. And I think more amazingly, what I personally experienced was just how much reverence God loves me with. Reverence is a term that we usually think of as something that we offer God, right? We, we offer God reverence because He is worthy of our reverence. And that's often, you know, what's the proper thing that catechetically, we're taught and we're believed. 

[00:33:58] But, the incredible thing is when God becomes real to you and personal and you experience His parenthood, you experience the crazy love that He has for you. You realize that there is never love without reverence. Okay, there is never - there can never - be love without reverence. So because God loves me so much, God loves you so much, He has incredible reverence for us, okay. He honors our dignity in a way that we have never experienced anyone honoring our dignity. He respects our freedom, the freedom that He gave us, more than anyone else respects our freedom. And that is incredible. And truly, I can say it feels crazy coming from somebody with a background of complex trauma where doing the right thing always seems to be more important than having freedom, right? 

[00:34:50] To experience that God actually honours that freedom first, because if I didn't have that freedom then nothing that I do no matter how honorable and good, really counts for anything. It's, it's not done with love, because there's no love without freedom. That's incredible. But that's the change that can happen when we heal from emotional and spiritual trauma. 

[00:35:13] I experienced that God desires me to mature and learn how to use that freedom to love like Christ, right? He does desire me to develop over time, because that's what happens when you grow. And, God created everything in creation to change and to grow and to mature. We're not static. So a baby isn't capable of running straight away, right. He doesn't expect us to be able to run straight away spiritually. 

[00:35:46] And those of us who have been traumatized, many of these basic, very basic facets of our humanity such as owning our freedom, learning how to exercise that freedom, even from a very immature point of view, we didn't have that opportunity to exercise that, right? Because we're so afraid of using our freedom in case we choose something that is against what others want of us. And so, we learn to just forfeit our freedom. We never learn how to use it.

[00:36:22] If we heal, and when we heal, from this kind of trauma, we have to go back to where we were when we stopped growing and developing. And that may look messy and irresponsible at the start, but God delights in it because God wants that healing so that we can continue to mature and to grow. Or else, we'll forever be frozen in an infantile state of undeveloped freedom. And that's not what God wants at all. 

[00:36:48] EMBRACING EMOTIONAL FREEDOM

Because if someday we wish, if someday we are to be able to love more and more like Christ loves us and loves the world, well that requires emotional freedom and emotional maturity. 

[00:37:02] And the final example that I gave was in enmeshment trauma, right? And in enmeshment trauma, I'm “allowed to want only what God wants me to want”. That's how I see God. And that “any thought or desire that seems different from what is established as God's will is therefore sinful and heretical”. And, “if I don't repent, I will be cast out”. 

[00:37:19] When I heal from this kind of enmeshment trauma, I realized that God wants me to discover and own the desires of my heart. It is incredible. I experienced that God wants me to confidently know my own mind. When I was younger, I truly, it's not that I didn't experience desires, but I didn't trust my desires and I'm always looking to God to tell me, “is this what you want me to want? Is this what I'm supposed to want? Right?” And until I can get some kind of assurance that yes, this is what God wants me to want, I couldn't acknowledge the desires that I had, right? Or my desires would cause me anxiety or guilt because maybe it's not what God wants me to want.

[00:38:05] But as I healed from my enmeshment trauma, I realized, and it's so astounding, that God delights in me. Listening fearlessly to my desires together with Him. Exploring what these desires mean. What He's saying to me through the desires He's given me.

[00:38:23] I've realized that my desires are often God's ways of communicating with me. And that God delights in me being confident about what I think, even if it is different from what I've been taught. Because how else can I become my own person? How else can I become open to how God wishes to reveal to me Himself and who I am? Unless I am bold and confident in my discernment, my own discernment, right?

[00:38:51] God's unconditional love for me, which is the source of a lot of this healing, is what gives me the courage to continue becoming me. Even when others reject me. 

[00:39:04] Now remember, in enmeshment trauma, the greatest fear is being rejected from the group. Okay, the biggest fear is being ejected from the family system or the church system or whatever it is because if you do not heed what we tell you or what we've established as God's will then you will be cast out. So the fear is that if I be myself, if I become myself and it's going in a direction that's different from what the system wants of me, then I will be kicked out so I stop being myself. I'm not going to be authentic. I'm going to people please, appease. I'm just going to remain numb and suppress my desires, my thoughts. I'm going to stop being alive.

[00:39:45] As I heal from that though, I realize that's not, that's not who God is at all. That's not what He wants of me. And His unconditional love for me becomes the power that fuels my growth into becoming my most authentic self. And I will find that I become less afraid of other people's rejection or even of the system's rejection. And interestingly, this, only this can make possible the, how should I put it? Only this can make possible a more unconditional love that comes from us. 

[00:40:22] Think about it. If we are always living in such a way to avoid rejection, can we say that we truly love others? 

[00:40:29] If I only love others in ways so that they will not reject me, my, I can't say I really love them. But, if I am not afraid of them rejecting me because I can be myself. And, if even experiencing their rejection and misunderstanding of me I find that I can will their good, I can forgive them, I can grow in forgiveness and my capacity to love them because now I have more and more resources of love because I'm more tapped into God's love for me and I'm more tapped into my own love for myself. Then, I can love others more unconditionally. And isn't that more like Christ? Right? 

[00:41:05] So healing from enmeshment trauma transforms the way we see God and experience God's love for us. 

[00:41:11] NAVIGATING THE HEALING JOURNEY

So what I've described in just these three examples really, already are examples of very significant and fundamental changes of our image of God. These are very fundamental and they're really very significant. And when you experience it in your own life, they can feel very weird. Because everything that's unfamiliar generally feels a little threatening to us. That's the way our system is, even our nervous systems, right? 

[00:41:36] We are created, our nervous systems are created to always have a healthy fear or anxiety, like kind of like a healthy respect to not just trust what is unknown. And when we experience something that's unfamiliar, it'll always feel a little scary. And so it takes time as well for us to, to grow in these, in these changes, to adapt to these changes and to trust that these changes are indeed good for us, are God's way of growing us. 

[00:42:06] It happens over a really long time, okay, through many deaths. And by that I mean deaths to the way we understood ourselves, death to the way we thought the world worked, death to the way we believe God, how God is, who God is, death to what we mean or what we've always believed faithfulness means or what good means. Death to the old ways in which we thought, this is what it means to love somebody.

[00:42:32] So these are very difficult deaths to die. But healing requires many deaths because the dysfunctions in which we grew up.. They are prison walls and to break free of those prison walls so that we can become more alive and to love with authenticity, truly, with a fearlessness that the Holy Spirit can give us.. That requires death so that we can be resurrected, right? And these deaths, they transform us and they transform our relationships in very foundational ways, which means they are very strong ways that we will change and these changes are not easy. Not for us and not for other people who love us or know us, okay. 

[00:43:22] What is unfamiliar will often feel wrong. And that is why I've lost count of the number of times that people who are on this healing journey have confided in me like, “I keep thinking, I keep fearing that I'm going off course. I keep fearing that, Oh, no, I've lost, you know, I've lost the map. Like, am I regressing? Am I moving away from God? This is so different from what I've believed all my life or what it means to be a good Catholic, for example. Am I going crazy? Am I becoming a heretic?” 

[00:43:51] Like, what is unfamiliar will often feel wrong. And the systems that we belong to, whether it's our families, our churches, not everyone, but the systems, okay, so now I'm not talking about

individuals, we can often, hopefully, have individuals that have also undergone these transformations and growth. And, they can be the source of hope, wisdom and guidance and support for us. But the systems as a whole, the dysfunctional systems that we are part of family or church, for example, they will often push back on our healing and change. It's just what it does. It's what you can expect. 

[00:44:28] So I'm going to say this: The fact that the systems that we belong to will push back is to be expected. It doesn't mean necessarily that what we're doing is wrong. Just because we also automatically may feel guilt because we've been so used to just going along with what other people tell us the right thing to do doesn't necessarily mean that we're doing something wrong. Sometimes it’s, and I've heard this quoted many, in many places - sometimes, the sense of guilt could be a sign that we're doing something brave that we're healing from what was harming us before.

[00:45:01] So all of this, of course, requires wise accompaniment, grounded guidance, okay. But the thing is though, we cannot receive this kind of guidance from people who are still stuck in those same systems who have not yet made their journey of growth. 

[00:45:23] Okay, so if you go and revisit the episode that I did about the book <The Critical Journey> about maturing through different stages of faith, and I encourage you to do so if you're not familiar with it, you’ll realize that it's always, it's always kind of like, it's like a law almost, alright, that those who haven't gone at least as far as we have gone is going to find it very difficult to be able to guide us because they haven't experienced that part of the journey yet. And another kind of like law or rule is that the further you go in the developmental journey, the harder it is going to be to find people who have gone on that journey. But I believe God always provides and His grace is going to be sufficient. That's how I've always experienced it. 

[00:46:11] It's not easy. There are times you feel like you're left hanging. And I believe that even those deep seasons of doubt and anxiety or, of grieving what was past and then experiencing doubt because everything that you thought was so solid and so certain and true, you, you don't feel that they're solid or certain anymore. Those are seasons to deepen our trust in God and to deepen our surrender, and to experience the pushback from the people that we love to find that they cannot understand us. That too, is part of the journey of maturing in love. And that's what makes this journey beautiful, if you ask me. Because if you, like me, have always prayed for the grace to be able to love like Christ, that you wish to really be united to God, then we cannot expect anything less but the Cross in some way or form, to experience death in some way or form.

[00:47:12] THE ROLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT IN HEALING

So when in doubt, what I found to always be reliable is to look for the Fruit of the Holy Spirit, okay?

[00:47:18] When we focus on the externals of what we do or don't do, what we say or don't say, what practices, what disciplines, what spiritual or devotional practices we do or don't do, whether we spend time in Adoration or not, or whether we have set aside time for prayer the same way that we used to or not, how frequently we go for Daily Mass or whether we struggle to go for even Sunday Mass, for example..

[00:47:45] When we fixate on all these externals, we can remain very trapped. This is especially true for those of us with complex trauma, okay, because the way we see the world has been skewed. The way we see God and love has been skewed. There needs to be a very fundamental transformation. And so if you look at the external measures, it's going to be easy to get confused.

[00:48:06] Look instead for the Fruit of the Holy Spirit, because even in scripture we're told, test everything, you know, in the Spirit, right? So in Galatians, the letter to Galatians in Chapter Five, you have listed the Fruit of the Holy Spirit, right - so look for love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. 

[00:48:30] You will be amazed that when you're on this healing and integration journey, sometimes when the external metrics of what you do seem to be a huge mess and you think that you're a huge failure. Or, other people may look at you and think, “oh my gosh, you've regressed. Like, you've gone off course.” Okay, of course when you look interiorly and realize that..  But, I'm experiencing more joy than before. I have so much more peace than before. Even though this is messy and there's so much unknown, I have more peace. Oh my gosh, I find myself so much more patient, not only with myself, but I'm growing in patience for other people who are driving me crazy. 

[00:49:10] You may even find that you have patience with people who misunderstand you and cannot understand you. You find that you have more capacity to be kind to them. You find that you actually have more strength to be faithful to God, but that your understanding of faithfulness could be evolving and changing, but you want more than anything to be faithful to God. And you find that in your prayers, you're asking more and more for the grace to be faithful to God, and you find your spirit is more gentle.

[00:49:38] This is especially the case if you used to be very zealous and very, very harsh in the way you want to exercise what is right and good. And you find now you're gentle. You've taken on God's gentleness with you. And, you find that there is a new kind of self-control that isn't coming from a protector part of you that is kind of like slamming you down through fear and harsh control trying to get you to do the right thing.

[00:50:08] What you're experiencing, if you're experiencing this as a Fruit of the Spirit, is that it's coming from the inside. It's gentle in itself. There's a kindness to yourself, and yet you find that you're not as reactive as before. That's a huge way to detect self-control. You're not as reactive when you're triggered. When you're upset you don't just react. That is a Fruit of the Spirit, okay, in self-control. And especially among all of this, I say look for love. Because like St. Paul's is of course, of everything, of faith, hope, and love, I mean, which are the three things that would endure, the greatest is love. And this is verse, in 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, where it says, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things”.

[00:50:57] Now here's the trick, here's the difference, okay? Healing brings this kind of love from the inside of us. Freely. Not as a coerced performance that we feel we need to do out of fear. So there's a huge difference between trying to will ourself to bear all things or to become a doormat, for example, because we feel like we need to bear all things. Then to find that this is coming from a strength that has been growing within us through the grace of God as we heal and integrate, and we find that we continue to hope. So that that hope brings us through safely deep seasons of doubt and even seeming despair and yet there is hope that can sustain us and that allows us to endure all things. 

[00:51:46] Now when we talk about growing into the second half of our life spiritually, this is huge because the terrain is so different from what it was like in the first half of life, okay. But these are some ways, these are some ways that healing from complex trauma changes our relationship with God, changes our image of God.

[00:52:09] CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON HEALING AND GROWTH

I really, really hope that you have enjoyed today's discussion and that this gives you something new to think about. And I hope that you can begin to pick up how your healing journey is changing and healing your image of God.

[00:52:22] So until the next time we chat. Bye! 

[00:52:30] OUTRO

Thank you for listening to Becoming Me. The most important thing about making this journey is to keep taking steps in the right direction. No matter how small those steps might be, no matter where you might be in your life right now, it is always possible to begin. The world would be a poorer place without you becoming more fully alive.

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Until the next episode, happy becoming!