Healing
For what is it that your Father’s tender heart and loving eye looks for first, but the wounded place on which to spend his chiefest care?
— Amy Carmichael, Gold By Moonlight
Category: Healing
10 Posts
Forgiveness Is About You.
Forgiveness is not giving up your right to justice. In fact, you may need to seek restitution of some kind for the wrongs that have been done to you. You may even need to resort to legal recourse to get support or help in your healing.
Forgiveness does not remove or alter pain from the past. The hurt and sorrow of yesterday can’t be changed. Forgiveness can only make your present and future less painful.
And, perhaps most crucial of all, forgiveness in no way excuses the wrongdoer. When you’re ready to forgive, you do so for yourself. His inexcusable behavior stays inexcusable. Forgiveness isn’t about him. As I’ve mentioned, it’s only about, and for, you.
— Eve A. Wood, MD, The Gift of Betrayal, p. 61
My New Life
Sometimes we have to give ourselves space to grieve what we have lost: a person, a way of life, a dream. But at some point we have to stand up and say, this is my new life and in this life I need a new job.
— Elizabeth Edwards, Resilience, p. 35
Connecting with Power
I forgive other people. I won’t find forgiveness until I do. But I don’t use forgiveness to feed denial, and forgiving doesn’t mean I let someone hurt me again. Forgiveness is how I stop being victimized. It connects me with power.
— Melody Beattie, The New Codependency, p. 206
Choosing Not to Blame
Our intimate partners are by and large our most important persons. Because we share responsibility for our lives with them, because they are magnets for our disappointments, it is all but written into our marriage contracts that we will blame them when things go wrong.
But what happens when we make a point of doing the opposite? What happens when we let go of our proclivity to blame and resent our lovers for our own disappointments? Every time we forgive and thank each other we teach each other critical, and generalizable, life lessons: There is no master plan. There is no life that we were supposed to lead. There is no good future in wishing for a different past. The assumption that things should always go our way, and that someone or something is to blame if they don’t, only leads us away from the path to our better selves.
— Mark O’Connell, PhD, The Marriage Benefit, p. 164-165
Grievance vs. Mourning
If grievance is the act of wishing for a different past, then mourning is the act of accepting that past in order to allow a different future.
— Mark O’Connell, PhD, The Marriage Benefit, p. 160
Focus on Abundance
When we focus on abundance, our life feels abundant; when we focus on lack, our life feels lacking. It is purely a matter of focus.
It is true that we can’t be in denial about the pain in our life. That is damaging to our physical and emotional health. And just as importantly,
We can’t be in denial about the abundance in our life!
— Susan Jeffers, PhD, Gratitude: A Way of Life, by Louise L. Hay and Friends, p. 132-133
Seeing the Inner Light
True healers take into account any type of darkness, but their real task is to see the Light in their clients so as to help them remember and consciously reconnect to their own inner Light. In this way, both healer and client are healed together. Parenting is the same. The ultimate gift of a parent to a child is to care for the inner Light of children until they can care for it themselves. True friends are those who believe in you through thick and thin. They still see the Light in you even when your moods and behavior are dark and low. Mentors, managers, leaders, visionaries, peacemakers, and everyone who truly serves . . . they all see the Light.
— Robert Holden, PhD, Happiness Now! p. 29
The Place We’d Rather Live
In the aftermath of catastrophic wounds, an obsessive, demonizing hatred may be mobilized to help us survive. And yet here, too, understanding eventually becomes the desirable thing, if for no other reason than we don’t want to keep feeling like victims and living in hate. It rarely hurts us to be more generous. In many cases, even if the grievousness of the wrong is never acknowledged or atoned for, we may want to feel our way back to a caring place. It’s the place we’d rather live.
— Robert Karen, PhD, The Forgiving Self, p. 175-176
God Can Redeem Anything.
Our experience has taught us that God can redeem anything, so we never give up on anyone….
What we wanted to do with this book was offer hope for marriages through a paradigm shift. It comes from taking a different perspective — getting your eyes off yourself and putting them on the Lord.
We have a passionate desire to see marriages changed, made whole, and restored. Our prayer is that more and more marriages will epitomize God’s plan, not society’s. Although the world seems to hold virtually no hope for marriages and families being restored, we want to spread the word that “by his mighty power at work within us, he is able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask or hope” (Ephesians 3:20, NLT). It is possible for a marriage to be made brand-new!
If you can trust God to show you the bigger picture of your marriage, he will do it. Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” In other words, he will direct you and make it clear where you are to go.
— Cheryl & Jeff Scruggs, I Do Again, p. 178, 183