Healing Combat TraumaSample

Proactive Remembering

We all have a place in our minds where we hide what we don’t want to remember, a secret chamber where those things are hidden away. Things like alcohol, drugs, or thrill-seeking behaviors may help us keep the secret chamber door shut tight. That seems easier than remembering what happened during combat. Remembering is painful, difficult, stress-producing, and absolutely no fun at all. So, why do it? Without doing so, we cannot move forward into healing.

When you experience the horrors of war, your brain switches into defensive mode in order to keep you alive. These traumatic events were put on the back burner. Some things needed to be examined, felt, responded to, mourned, accepted or rejected, and filed away properly. Your brain took those events and put them on your brain’s hard drive, along with all the soul-ripping emotions that went along with them. But they weren’t meant to stay there. Unaddressed feelings and painful memories can become like computer viruses, disrupting your system at the most inconvenient times. They can leak into other compartments of your hard drive and corrupt them. If they aren’t discovered, brought out, and dealt with, they’ll worsen, and the whole system will suffer. But if they are exposed to the light of God, their power over you can be weakened and removed.

Jesus Christ wants access to every area of your life – not to impose Himself and dominate you, but to bring healing and victory. Like a patrol in Fallujah searching from house to house, checking every nook, cranny, and shadow for terrorists, He wants to enter even your darkest, most ominous corners to conquer the foes lurking there – whether they are physiological, psychological, philosophical, or real spiritual entities.

We have no secrets from the all-knowing God. There is no safer place than prayer to begin remembering what happened and allowing Him to comfort us. In addition, talking and praying with others who have experienced similar trauma opens our hidden wounds to God’s healing power through being seen, known, understood, and comforted.

Thought of the Day: Stuffing away painful memories may seem like the easiest and safest thing to do, but the truth is, the safest I’ll ever be is within God’s love and grace. I can invite Him into those painful places and experience healing from my past.