Healing the Big Hurts in our Lives – Revisited

A reader shared with me today that my Blog post from several issues ago (Recovery from Big Hurts) left her a little troubled.  It wasn’t that she disagreed with the post.  It was just that it all seemed to go too fast from trauma to a soaring spirit.  I’m glad she expressed her concern because that certainly wasn’t my intent.  When I wrote that post, I had several specific situations in mind.  One of them, from initial trauma to closure was an 18 month journey.  Another was shorter; another longer. 

When we are deep into the hard stuff, many of us would like to rush through it quickly in order to escape to the peace on the other side.  This makes total sense.  The hard reality is that recovery from big hurts takes significant time.   It cannot be rushed.  In fact, rushing that recovery might mean that we are not acknowledging the depth of our pain.  And as the saying goes, unacknowledged pain is transferred pain.  In other words – pain that is unacknowledged will find its way into another area of our lives.  And who among us wants to give that much power to our original hurt?  

Another friend of mine commented to me today that only those who have suffered can really understand another person’s pain.  She’s probably right.  But that kind of compassion doesn’t come from gliding quickly over the hurts in our lives.  It comes from digging deeply into ourselves as we wrestle with whatever it is that is before us.  Eventually this digging and wrestling produces something within us that is pure gift.  We have been in the crucible and ideally, we have emerged refined.