Five Keys for Dealing with Hurt Webinar

Welcome again. My name is Arlan Miller. I’m joined here with Ted Witzig Jr., our clinical director here at ACCFS. And Ted, we are going to talk about a topic today that is, I want to say popular, but it’s not the right term. But it’s a common topic, right? Hurt. Yes. Five Keys for Dealing with Hurt.

Yeah, and help. Let’s just get some lay of the land here first. You know, is it popular or often talked about because it’s so common? Or because of all the misinformation that’s out there, or what’s been your perspective as you’ve walked into this space?

Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s pervasive. And one of the things about that is that it happens in both directions in all of our lives. To some degree, we both cause hurt, and then in other places, we receive hurt. And then the other thing is that hurts accumulate. Yeah, and then how to fix them. The world and the church people have different ways to try to work with those and so that’s what we want to do.

Yeah, well and you think about some of these statements to your point. I mean, so we’ve heard the statement that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, true or untrue. Alright, if that was true, I wouldn’t have a job. I think what happens is it sounds really good. It sounds like, oh, hey, you can’t hurt me. But words go to the core and some of those other ones like time heals all wounds again, time can provide perspective and perspective can be helpful on things, but time itself, just like time doesn’t make somebody mature or wise.

Time doesn’t heal wounds. Another one, just forget it. Get over it. Yeah. Stop it. Yeah, as if it’s a switch to flip. And of course, we’d love it if we could or if others could just flip that, but it doesn’t work that way.

And then there are distortions of things that are kind of true, but then not true, like forgive and forget if on one hand, yeah, we want to forgive is good. And yeah, we want to want those things to not be in the front of our mind. But if you forget means that I’m supposed to be able to white out part of my memory or I’m never supposed to have a recalled memory of a hurt. Then we’re stuck, and so it’s not a realistic scenario. And that’s what we end up with. So, Christ said it this way. He says, you know, it is impossible but that offenses will come. I mean, so basically saying, unless you go off into a cabin in the woods by yourself, there’s going to be offenses. Yeah, there are going to be times. And I think one of the things is that we have to just understand the inevitability in one hand that hurt is part of life.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to not be hurtful or to not heal hurt, but it’s just one of the things, it’s part of the corruption or fallenness of the world, that we live in. So, we have these statements here. So, hurt will happen, right? That’s one of those things. Emotionally relational hurts can be as painful as physical hurt. And healing is not automatic, but it is possible. So, speak into those.

So, one of the things is that sometimes people have in their heads, especially around things that have to do with emotions. It’s a little bit like, well, if I had a broken arm, people at least see that I had a broken arm and could understand that hurts.

But it’s hard to understand when you’re supposed to be counting on someone and they fall through, and they hurt your trust and things like that. But I think of the other things is that emotional things, relational things, create a different kind of wounding and physical pain, but it all counts.

And it’s cumulative in that regard. I think the other thing about healing is that it is not automatic. I think that there’s a lot of people that just want to say, well, I just want to forget it, or I’ll get over it or whatever. And again, small things we can probably turn around pretty quickly, but the larger something is, the more it takes an intentional healing process to walk through.

And that doesn’t always mean you have to go to therapy. Sometimes it does maybe, but the concept is the bigger the hurt, the more intentional the healing process. So, what I’m hearing is it’s a big topic, it’s a varied topic. It is, yeah. So, what we’ve tried to do is pull out five general keys, but we’ll get into some specific with each of those and the next slide shows these 5 pieces here. You know, the type of hurt matters. Grieving is a part of the process. Painful memories are going to be painful. Forgiveness is important and we need to know when to escalate.

These are five things that seem to be common themes, common keys that come up often. We’ll walk into each of those in a little bit more detail here, offer some resources with each one, some skills with each one, but realize we’re going to dig into a very big topic at a surface type level and yet try to provide a level of hope and encouragement because that’s what I heard you say, Ted. There is hope for healing, no matter what the hurt.

Yeah, and I think one of the things is that sometimes people just get discouraged with hurt and get to a why try. But I don’t think that’s really where we want to be emotionally, but also, I think that God has provided a number of ways to shed hurt, to help us to overcome, and we’re going to talk about some of those today.

So, let’s talk about the type of hurt, and you were into this already a little bit, that the type of hurt does matter. And there are different types. So, some questions we have on the screen there, is this personal or is this impersonal? If it’s a personal scenario, that’s different than if it’s out of sight, out of mind.

Yeah. And I think another thing is like some things, let’s say there’s this school that you want to go to that is accepting 100 but you’re 102. That can be hurtful and frustrating, disappointing, but nobody deliberately violated you. It’s still really your hopes and dreams and it crushes for a while.

But the closer the relationship is and the more trust there is in a relationship, then that’s where it starts to go really deeper. The other thing is some hurts are one-time hurts. And so, it’s that whole thing of if something happens accidentally or infrequently, but when something is a pattern, that can also really change. If I said something that was hurtful to you on a one-time basis, but if I was growing up in your house and that was the pattern for 18 years, there would be a different level of hurt. Sure. Another thing is how deep was the initial wound? One of the things that we find, and we’ll look at this a little closer, we look at types of hurt and sometimes the initial wound is really deep. And then wounds remind us of an earthquake and the aftershocks, even though they’re smaller, they remind us of the earthquake. And so, it ripples back. And so that’s one of the things that people really struggle with is like, when am I going to get over this? When am I not going to think about this? And so, that’s part of it.

The last thing I would say too is that some people are in positions of trust. So, a parent to a child, a teacher to a student, a pastor to a parishioner, a police officer to the community. And so, one of the things is that sometimes you’re an authority figure at work or whatever and the power dynamic in the relationship changes. If a 6th grade kid would come in and say, I don’t think you’re a good counselor. And I’m like, how do you know? Yeah. But if it was my mentor that said something to me, oh, yeah, it’s a different point.

So, there’s an aspect of evaluative with hurt, right? If you are one who has experienced a level of hurt, one of the first stages it sounds like is just to think through that a little bit, you know, it’s like, okay, so why am I feeling this or what is impacting me here at this point?

Yeah, and what’s the level because different levels of hurt have different levels of responses. And I think another thing, and this is something that comes up, that sometimes there are other factors that would change how a person responds. So, for example, if you have a parent who is now part of your life and then later on is developing dementia and then saying and doing things that are painful or somebody in the midst of bipolar mania gets aggressive and things like this.

One of the things we have to do is, it’s not that the things they say aren’t hurtful, but we do have to remember that right now I’m talking to the illness. Okay, you know, this is dad over here. This is how dad responds. This is the mental illness. This is the disease talking. Separate it a little bit.

And it’s just understanding the context. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t open old wounds. But the other thing to remember is that by being able to remember that it helps us to put context around because the more we feel like somebody did something intentionally, the more it feels personal, and the more it violates trust or our sense of self-worth.

Those are the things that go to the core. Sure. So, I’m going to make a point and then we’re going to go on to a little bit more of this. At the bottom of several of these slides, we have resources and those are links. The handout that’s on our website on this webinar page will have those live links there.

Also, all of those resources have been listed on this webinar page. So, these would all be resources. You can go deeper into any of these topics and spend some more time in that area. So, Ted, let’s go into this next portion here where we just again, separate out a little bit, these different types of hurts.

And this slide is going to talk about errors. The next slide is going to go a little bit deeper the type of wounds or offenses speaking to mistakes, irritants, and poor choices. So, these are things that probably happen often. And you’re saying these are ones that we be wise about how much they impact us.

Yep. I think a couple of things, this is just a way to look at these. This isn’t the perfect list or anything like that. But I think one of the things we have to understand is that sometimes our tendency is to get really frustrated, irritated and take things personally that really weren’t meant to be personal. It’s a little bit like if I set the peanut butter jar out on the counter, and then I forgot to put it away, if my wife said, you’re just doing this to make me angry, she’s giving me way too much credit because that would mean I would have done that out of absent mindedness not hurt. And so that’s an irritant, a mistake, and a poor choice, but I didn’t mean to. But if she takes it that way, then she’s going to internalize that.

The other thing is, we might make a poor choice doing something that you wouldn’t want to repeat. But sometimes, and that’s what can be a minor thing if it’s a one off, but if that becomes the pattern, sometimes that accumulation of something really is the issue.

You’ve mentioned that a few times. I think it’s an important point to drill into. So, there’s an aspect of that hurt that’s a first-time thing. But there’s an accumulative impact of hurt as well. So, correct me if I’m wrong here. You could have a scenario where there’s an offense that happens from someone, but because the healing wasn’t all the way taken care of with that, down the road other offenses, maybe not as major, they factor into that accumulative effect. And then the reaction could be stronger than what would maybe be naturally normal.

They can. And I think the other thing that can happen is a hurt from the past. Let’s say it was from an authority figure maybe in your home or at work, now you’re at another job or another thing and an authority figure over here does something, and you respond to this person like you would respond to that person.

Yeah, there’s like a trigger in that. There’s a trigger. So that can also take place. Yeah. So, irritants, I mean, that almost reminds me of this idea of forbearance. There are times when the appropriate response is forbearance over irritants. We all have quirks. We all have things that just kind of happen. I always say, ride in your car with your kids for a long drive, a road trip. You’re going to find some quirks that come up. Absolutely. Right.

But if you would leave that peanut butter jar out deliberately knowing the impact it has on your wife over and over again that goes into another level. Yeah, and I think the thing is of knowing that bothers her I need to start becoming more attentive to that and be like hey if I get it out, I need to put it away.

And I think that’s also where age can come into this. Childhood irresponsibility is one thing. Little kids have to be reminded. That part of training up is reminding. The problem is when we start to internalize that they’re not only doing this, but they’re also doing this on purpose. Sometimes we superimpose that. Other times, it could be real.

So, let’s go to this another level now. So, these are the deeper ones, right? Offenses, hurtful omissions, hurtful words and actions, major sin, major harm of some type. So, this would require a different response, or this would have a different impact. A and B, they’re hurtful omissions and hurtful words and actions.

You can kind of put those in two clumps because the omission is where some kind of neglect happens. Something, somebody didn’t follow through. Somebody forgot something important. Somebody didn’t show the love that should have been. So, there’s actually a neglect or a loss.

Where in B, the hurtful words and actions that something was invasive, some harmful words, things done that were painful. So, one’s about omission. One’s about action or intention. So, a lot of different things can go in there and there’s still a range as to how severe those are.

But I think that’s another thing to remember is sometimes we’re really frustrated. I’m thinking of something right now for myself. I had something that I was really hurt by and really frustrated by. And I hadn’t actually verbalized it to the other person, but it was something that I felt really wounded by, something that they weren’t doing that I felt like they that they should be.

So, one of the things that happens is that it just helps to understand what kind of boundaries we have or what kind of assertiveness we have to follow through on in order to work to heal some of those things. Well, and I think there for this first one, it’s hurtful omissions are probably just you thinking of your example, like that other person might not even realize the impact that’s happening, right?

Yeah, sometimes they don’t realize. Sometimes they’re not capable. We want somebody to give us something that they can’t give. Sometimes they’re in neglect. And so, I think that’s why this topic is so tricky and so pervasive is that all these could be true.

Yeah, yeah. And unless you’re really gifted, usually that idea of assuming good intent is usually a harder thing. Right, I mean, usually we go to like, oh, that was deliberate. That is personal. When sometimes I mean, like forgetting an anniversary is the example that’s there. If that’s a long-time absent-minded thing, that’s different than if that becomes a pervasive, I just don’t care, right? The relationship is not meaningful to me, and I know it’s meaningful to you, but I don’t care what you think. That’s right, and that’s where knowing the context of what’s happening takes place. I think the difference is down at the bottom on major sin, major harm, we would never say that there’s a right context for abandonment, abuse, and adultery.

We’re not making excuses for those things. We’re also saying that one of the reasons we put this in this category is that each of these things violate trust and strike at the core of relationship. And so, they oftentimes take a lot more work to heal as well. So, the first step here is that you value to think about the type of hurt there is or just be willing to realize different hurt has different impact and has different responses.

Then begins the second step, which talks about grieving. Grieving is part of the solution. Yeah. Right. Hurt gives rise to a lot of emotions. Yeah. There’s anger, there’s frustration, all these things get in and similar emotions to that grieving process, right? Speak to what you mean when you say grieving is part of the solution.

So, one of the things is when people get hurt, they become familiar with the emotions of anger and frustration. But we sometimes don’t realize that the grief process is actually triggered by this. Something is lost or something is wounded. Yeah. And then the other thing is that the good news, and not that feels good, but that the good news is God’s given us the grieving process and something called lament to help us to deal with hurt. And so, I think it’s one of the things to remember.

Speak to that term. What does that mean? Sure. So, lament is a God given process to be able to turn toward God in our pain and to cry out to him and in the Psalms, a lot of the Psalms and throughout the Bible, there’s a number of people that lamented. One of the things you’ll find is that they turn towards God, and they cry out in the rawness of their pain.

This is really key. It’s saying, God, why is this happening? You know, where are you? How could this happen to me? And what it does is it helps us avoid one of the key things that hurt wants to do. Hurt wants us to go internal, fume inside.

Yeah, okay. And then let hurt and then bitterness and all those things just build down here and again in the short term, obviously right after it happens, that’s very common. It’s another thing if it’s ten years after and so grief allows us to go through the process of being able to feel that protest. That’s hurt. To feel the pain of it, to feel all these different things that go on, but it’s a way to walk through healing.

I want to say something else, just in that anger is a tricky one with hurt. Because on one hand, it’s absolutely understandable. We feel wounded, anger is a response. Anger as an emotion says something is wrong and it’s pushing back. So that’s not necessarily a problem to have that initial response.

The problem though, is when you hurt. If all your focus goes on how bad you are, and you’re not trying to say that the other person didn’t do something bad but if all the focus goes this way, one of the things that happens is it actually starts to block the ability to find ways to release it here. Okay, and what you see is a lot of people really invested. And I think it’s our nature at the beginning to really point out the problem and again, early on, it’s understandable, the longer it goes, it tends to accidentally build up.

Yeah. So, we call it a secondary emotion. I want to come back to that and build on that anger just a little bit, but I want to go back to that lament for just a second. And so, if we put on the lens of being a helper or maybe somebody who might be helping or walking through someone who isn’t hurt and you hear that lamenting that goes on, right?

I mean, it’s going to look different for every person, but it’s basically crying out to God, sometimes very raw. It sounds like very raw things could be said. How do we walk as helpers with that, but not maybe internalize it ourselves or go into that? So, I think that it’s really helpful to just be able to do two things. One is when someone’s been hurt and they’re sharing that with us, one is to note the difference between times when they’re venting. Yeah. Okay? When somebody’s venting, they’re oftentimes trying to shed emotion or trying to get some initial validation. And if somebody’s venting, again, to some degree, we all need to be heard.

And so, I think that there’s a part of being heard, listening, and taking in. So, one of the problems that helpers sometimes have is trying to fix things too early. Yeah. Make it go away. And the reality is they may need to go through that fix, but sometimes early on, they’re just not ready to hear it.

The second thing is if they’re in a place of lament, let’s call it lament. Sometimes we go, oh, I shouldn’t be having these feelings. I shouldn’t do this. And we’re just stopping down. Lament gives us a method. Not that it has to be the same for everybody. Grief gives us a map or a road map to walk through the hurt and to take it towards God, to take it towards healing.

And I think that’s where a lot of people, if they have a guide to help them with that, they can move it from, I’m venting, then I’m processing, I’m seeing God walk with me, and helping me to get to where I need to go. It’s not easy, but I think that listening early, knowing when somebody’s venting, versus when somebody’s actually ready to process.

Yeah, being in the midst of that, being able to kind of contain those emotions, just have those emotions, and just let them go because it sounds like this is a key point like anger at God. I mean, that’s going to happen often, it’s part of the grieving process.

Often you get into that place, right? And so, we need people to help us say that’s okay, but we can’t stay there. That’s right. We have to keep moving on. One of the things that happens is when somebody has that, one of the most common responses is to turn away from God in the sense of how could this be or this shouldn’t have been, and I turn, and I go internal.

I go away. The first step of lament is to turn toward God. And it’s to talk to God about the questions, even in its rawness. And again, the Psalms, we know Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd, Psalm 22, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Okay. And, again, this takes us to some resources.

Also, we’ve got a podcast and a little video on lament and some resources around that. Some things on grief. And there’s different kinds of griefs. Obviously, we think about losing a person in death. But one of the things is disappointments in life, a divorce, a broken relationship, a sense of betrayal.

It’s a loss. And so, realizing the close tie there between grief and loss and hurt. You just cannot separate those, and the resources are there and they’re available. Some are shorter articles that can be used for personal growth and encouragement. We have a grief course that you can walk through. You can do it by yourself but with others would be really helpful just to process some of those things together.

I said I wanted to go back to this idea of anger being a secondary emotion. So, we have the classic iceberg. Anger is at the top. That’s what you see but realize what’s underneath. How do I, again, as a person who’s experiencing it myself, or as someone who’s helping someone who’s experiencing it? How do I use this to my advantage? So, with this, again, it’s helpful. Anger as emotion is saying something is wrong, or I’m protesting or pushing back against that. The question of asking where that comes from is, for example, if I was embarrassed, and then I respond in anger.

Then that helps me understand what I have to deal with there. Or, if I was rejected. So, look for what’s underneath the surface a little bit. Because if you called me out in a staff meeting and I felt embarrassed, not that I would ever be late on anything, right, Arlan? Not that that would ever happen, but if that happened and I felt embarrassed, that might be all I got. I felt there’s a feeling of exposure, but it even might be true, but then the feeling of rejection might be against something else. But the whole point is being able to talk about the right thing, because if I talk about how angry I have been for a hundred years, but I never discuss the shame or rejection I felt, you’re going to stay at that surface level. We’re going to keep spinning up here. Yeah. So, this pushes you to go underneath the surface.

Yep, which is a critical piece. That’s going to the third one. I think this is a key one. Understand painful event memories. Yes. There will be memories of painful events. Yeah. They will not be pleasant. You know, hence the name. Yeah, they’re going to rise. It’s going to be important to recognize them, to label them, to understand them, to understand maybe what triggers them.

And then we get into this idea of rumination. So, Ted, there’s a lot here. But I know even some of the questions that were submitted by people who registered for this webinar, that was a key question. How do we keep these memories from controlling our thought life in many ways.

Sure. So, a couple of things to start with, first of all, the brain is constantly turning information and making connections. And so, the fact is, we don’t necessarily ask for memories to come up. They come up. And the thing about it is the more that something is unhealed, the more it will tend to come up. So, I think that’s one of the things to understand is that early on after a hurt, particularly if it’s a bigger one, it’s not like, you know, you forgot to get my cereal, but if we feel hurt, the most common thing for us to do is to replay it and that initial replay is natural. It’s normal. We stir on it, but while that might happen a lot early on, we hope that it comes down. The fact though, is that some of the time we believe that the more we think about something, we’re going to solve it. So, there’s a fixing going on there.

If we just figure out the key to the puzzle this time, it’s going to go away. And it just goes over and over and over and that shouldn’t happen. And I would have said this and then we could even start to have conversations. My wife has caught me in the morning, brushing my teeth or doing my hair and she said one time, did you win? I said what do you mean? Did I win? She said from what’s going on there as you’re getting ready for work, you’re having a conversation with somebody, and the whole thing is that sometimes we can actually really ramp ourselves up. And the more we ramp ourselves up in the fight or flight, one of the things that happens is our focus narrows on who we are against.

So, I think one of the things that we could do is if we can label, like, well, there it is. Yeah, and whether that’s a specific theme, like, oh, there’s the rejection theme or, there’s the embarrassment story that I’m building myself. Yeah.

So, the story that they’re doing it on purpose or, oops, there’s the memory of whatever that’s come up, not that that makes it go away, but to label it allows us to go, okay, there it is. Okay, I see it there. Now I have options and choices with it. I have the option and choice to ruminate about it, which is to play the negativity back. Or, I can start shifting, I can shift to other strategies. I want to be very clear, the strategies that we use in the moment are to really help us move away from the rumination to something else. They don’t necessarily answer all the questions, okay?

Because let’s say something meaningless happened. Somebody did something and you can’t figure it out. Well, staying up all night every night until you figure it out when there’s no answer, is going to be a meaningless thing. Go into some of these strategies. You’ve seen this play out countless times, so what does this look like? How do you see people go from a place where that rumination is getting you stuck as you say there, to a place where we’re able to take these painful event memories and kind of put them in the right place.

So, the thing to remember about rumination is your body’s fight or flight response will tend to go up the more you’re ruminating and the more intense that it feels. So, one of the things that you will see by a lot of these have been strategies, prayer, meditation and deep breathing, journaling, all these things.

One of the things that they’re trying to do is lower the intensity of that physiological arousal. It’s to lower that. Okay. Well, why would that make a difference? Well, actually it allows a different part of our brain to become engaged. When our emotions are engaged in a fight or flight sense to things, our midbrain, our limbic system is in who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s the bad guy, you know, that kind of thing.

When we get calmer, our frontal lobes, the part of our brain that allows us to see perspective, the part that allows us to see God working with us and these kinds of things, can come into play. It’s like a different part of our brain comes back online. So, prayer, when you’re at a very threatened stage or you’re feeling very fight or flight is going to be more of that crying out to God kind of prayer.

Yeah. Where prayer is things kind of settle. It’s like, Lord, give me perspective. Help me in my anger to not sin. Help me, Lord, to see. It’s more settled. You talk about journaling being time bound. Is that so it doesn’t turn into a physical rumination as you write over and over and over again?

So, there are many ways to journal. And if you have a way to journal that works for you, I’m not trying to tell you that you can’t. But one of the ways that I like to recommend journaling is to have people do if they’re trying to get rid of emotion to say, okay, I’d like you to journal for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or 15 minutes, whatever the time is, 20 to 30 minutes is pretty common in the psychological literature.

But the concept also is the time bound. So, we just don’t go on and on and on and on and on. The other thing is you can do it. Say I’m going to journal and I’m going to fill the front and the back side of a page and then I’m going to be done. So, some kind of bounding, it doesn’t mean you can’t come back to it, but then instead of ending on a high, like high intensity, if the journaling is still particularly up here. Then to take some time to do some deep breathing to say, okay, that’s closed. Now I’m closing my journal. Yeah, I’m done with that for a while. I’m trying to meditate on who God is or just his faithfulness or those kinds of things. And just so that we can have time on that. We’re working with it and time off that I don’t have to be.

Because the brain a lot of times with hurt, especially fresh hurt, is just going to want to run again and again. This method called the front screen, side screen method is one we use a lot with anxiety and pain and different kinds of things. You can think of your mind as having two screens and the front screen is like the life that you want to live. These are your values. Exactly. Your core values, where you want to go in life. There’s a side screen over here that is where things pop up of painful thoughts and memories, the intrusive thoughts maybe negative thoughts about yourself and the tendency is to move away from your front screen and the things that you value in life and to go up in your head fighting with the side screen of all the things that are not right and things of that nature.

The concept isn’t that it’s wrong to have thoughts that pop up, but here’s the thing, the more you fight with this side screen, the more you fight with why this person was wrong and why this shouldn’t have been, the more we get attached to the side screen. It takes you, it’s like navigation. It takes you off your true north or what you value, and it puts you into this. And so, it’s not saying that you can’t ever think about it. But again, one of the things is where you’re going to find real healing occur is when we can lower the intensity and then we can actually process forward.

When it’s high intensity, we’re just going to be more in that fight or flight. So, you’ve mentioned this idea of replacement, I think, is the word you used or just shifting. So that’s really what we’re talking about here at a fairly practical level is you shift from the distraction to what you value to what you know you want to have in front of you where you want to steer your life.

Yes. Noting, by the way, that when we’re ruminating, when we’re upset about something, the absolute last thing you’re going to want to do is self-calming. Okay, when we’re really chewing on something, it can be really hard to allow ourselves to pivot, but it’s really key that we do. Yeah, because it’s that point you said, to want to be right It’s like we want to figure it out this time, right?

Because once we close the equation, right, then it will go away. Yeah, that’s the feeling and what I’m hearing you say is that’s rarely going to happen to rumination. We’ll get into more like getting other help or professional help or whatever, but that’s where you need someone trained to help you really do that properly.

And that’s good, that is going to be one of our tools going forward. So, let’s go into the fourth one and this speaks into formal forgiveness. Right, so there is an aspect of forgiveness with this. Just like grief is often a common impact with hurt. Forgiveness is a common aspect of hurt as well to move on.

So, decisional emotional forgiveness. We talk about them taking time. Yeah. Being a process to work through. What are some of the keys to forgiveness that you’ve seen as you’ve worked with individuals trying to move to that place? So, the biggest thing here is that most people that are in churches would say, if you said, hey, are we supposed to be forgiving?

The answer would be, of course, that’s part of what we’re supposed to be. The how of forgiveness is very elusive for a lot of people and that’s what we’re actually talking about here. Most people know that they should forgive but the how is tough. Forgiveness is broken up in research into two different parts, decisional forgiveness, that’s deciding to be forgiving. I’m going to make the decision to do it. Okay And then the emotional forgiveness is getting the other parts of our emotions more in line with that. And these both can take some time to get there. Some people are ready to do decisional forgiveness, but emotions aren’t ready. Some people won’t, don’t even get to that place where they’re, nope, I won’t, I’m not even going to forgive, that’s where they’re at.

So, what we’re talking about here is that the forgiving process is a way to release painful emotions and sometimes the forgiving process is about releasing a toxic person, and this is sometimes people say, what are you talking about there? And I think one of the things that happens is that sometimes we think that forgiveness is always about going to restore a relationship. Sometimes, though, the people that have hurt us don’t acknowledge that they’ve hurt us. Sometimes the people that have hurt us are dead. And so, one of the things we have to do is if you see that there is a spiritual aspect of forgiveness, we’re supposed to forgive as we’ve been forgiven.

But then this emotional, relational part, is really about a release and it’s turning over the act of wanting to get even and, Arlan, that one just resonates with me because that get even instinct is just so big, or I want them to hurt like I have hurt. I mean, that’s just so much a part of forgiveness is the idea of letting go of that. We say, hold on, speak to that. What does it mean to hold on? So, one of the things is that a lot of times Christians will have a belief that if they have forgiven, that when they’re reminded of a hurt, that they won’t have any feelings about it or feel positive about it.

The fact is, emotions of hurt are, if you think about it, something that happened that was hurtful to you and you spend time thinking about it, you’re going to feel the feelings that you felt related to it. So, holding onto forgiveness is that when we’re going through life and then something pops up, maybe it’s an anniversary of something that happened that pops up, holding onto forgiveness is recognizing that hurt reemerged.

Maybe even after years it reemerged. And I, instead of going into a rumination process and resurrecting it, I’m going to say, you know what? That’s something that I have worked on that I have forgiven, and I am going to put that back. So, there’s a shifting there. There’s a shifting and it’s not saying it doesn’t hurt and say that was a wound that I have and so I deal with it.

I’m talking about somebody who’s gone through a forgiving process and when those memories come up to just note it and to hold on by saying, you know what, I realized why it hurt but forgiveness is such that what I’m doing is I’m just like Jesus gave me the gift.

I am not going to let go of this by grace. It’s tied probably to that, I mean that fourth point I think is a key point too, right? You let go of, if they would just, or I wish it was a different situation. Yeah. And you hold on to, or you trade it for, the reality is. Yeah, and the thing is, we live a lot of times, and it causes a lot of pain.

If this person would just stop this or start this or if they wouldn’t have done this. And again, I could only agree with that, if they would just, but they didn’t, and they haven’t, and sometimes they won’t, and that’s really painful, and it’s really frustrating, I mean, there are people that we would say, if they would just repent, if they would just go to treatment, if they would just, but they don’t.

Okay, and so the reality actually brings us back within our circle of influence. The reality is as much as I want them to go to treatment, they’re not. And so, I have to figure out how to live. As much as I wish that this person would have responded in this kind of way, that’s not what happened, and my job was lost or whatever.

Those are painful things and I’m not trying to say they’re not painful, but living in the, if they would just, keeps us living like if we stay anxious, they will change. Yeah. And actually, one of the things when you look at resilient people and people that can cope with life well, one of the things that happens is they accept reality as it is. Now that doesn’t mean that things can’t change in the future.

But when reality is the way it is, we deal with that. We ground ourselves. We agree. So, a couple of thoughts to that strike me. So, you said earlier about this idea that early on sometimes we just want to withdraw and go into ourselves. Right? Or it can make us just go into our own bubble. So, we mentioned here and kind of highlight this idea that like something like forgiveness, often you need the accountability of others to help you go through it. So, the Choosing to Forgive Workbook is a great workbook that you could help with hurt, and someone could walk through it with you. In the sense of saying, let’s walk through this forgiveness process together and through what this looks like and that kind of thing.

Because I’m guessing there’s just that often overwhelming temptation towards isolation. Yeah. Just ignore it and make it go away. And I think one of the things is that the goal here is to do that with a trusted person that’s mature, that can walk with you through that. It’s not going to ramp up your emotions.

Exactly. It’s not a mutual ramping session. But what I like about going through a study or a workbook or something related to things like forgiving and grief is that we oftentimes need the mile markers as we’re going through those things because our mind loops. Grief is not a one-time process. It’s waves that are coming in. Forgiving, it goes up and down. And so having those mile markers and different skills to work through helps. And then being able to have a witness to our pain, but also the support and accountability to keep moving that helps us along the way. And I think we use that a lot in counseling, having somebody either go through a workbook or the ACCFS courses.

That’s one of the beauties of it is to go through it with someone. We’re not asking you and wouldn’t recommend if you have a deep pain or hurt to go to Facebook and ask it, telling the world what happened and why somebody is a bad person. This is not a good plan. Okay. So, we’re not promoting you put your stuff on a billboard but having that close person that can walk us through.

What that is really is venting, right? Yeah. So, I don’t think we designed it when we kind of talked about this with this in mind, but as it strikes me that there’s a little bit of a progression sometimes with dealing with hurt. In this sense, tell me if I’m wrong here. Okay. But sometimes you don’t just jump right into forgiveness. Somebody’s had hurt, and it’s deep and it’s painful. If your counselor is, well, just forgive and forget, you know the idea, just move on. That’s not going to be helpful. There’s the emotional processing and some of those things that have to happen first to move a person to a place where they’re ready for this deeper work of forgiveness.

That is true. And I think one of the things that can happen in families and churches is that when we know forgiveness is part of the process, one of the things that will happen is the hurt will occur and it’s, just forgive. Okay, that’s the first thing and that actually shuts people down in a way. It’s like if you’re harping on me to forgive right away, one of the things that happens is I will not talk to you about it, that kind of thing. Now, I understand there are people who harbor hurt who need to forgive but don’t and you may have those cases that are really hard as well. But the concept, I agree, is to see it as a progression and a good way to say it because you will see that part of each of these steps, recognizing the hurt, feeling that hurt, but also moving through it in a way of decisional emotional forgiveness that helps so much in that release.

Sure. Let’s go to our last one here. Then know when to escalate, when to reach out for further help. When there’s pain, we want to make it stop. And we didn’t want to numb it or figure out a way to just avoid it or pretend it doesn’t exist. Again, time heals all wounds, right? Oh, if we just muscle through it over time, it will go away. But sometimes you’re in that second set of questions there where this hurt is interfering with my ability to experience joy, or it’s interfering with my relationship with others or my relationship with God or who I view God to be, or God might be asking me to do something, and I am not in a position to do so.

Right. That’s when I mean, you have experience here, when would you like to see people escalate and reach out for help? What counsel do you have here? Yeah. So, one of the things is that my initial hope is, and the purpose of this slide isn’t to say that everybody that has a hurt has to come to counseling, my hope and our hope is that the church and the Body of Christ is helping one another in going through these things as we’re dealing with those. But one of the things that we will say, well, how do you know when you need to come to counseling? And those four indicators are things that we look at and things like hey, you know what if something happened a while ago? Again, if somebody felt like they got hurt on Tuesday and today’s Wednesday, we’re not pushing somebody there. But if it’s interfering and it’s eating at us and it’s eating at our ability to move forward, and I think the other thing is when trust is hurt in a relationship, sometimes we can start to push away from trust in other relationships.

Another one, I think, let’s say somebody’s really hurt our confidence about ourselves and things of that nature and then we’re feeling very insecure about ourselves and then the opportunity comes up, hey, we’d like you to teach Sunday School, or we say, no, I can’t do it. Wait a minute, we need to heal something here because our adversary, Satan, also wants woundedness to be passed along. And so, I’m going to just say this is a general sense where you’re talking about interfering a relationship with God and what God has asked us to do. I look at it this way, this is going to sound a little trite, so forgive me on that, but Satan wants hurts to be a millstone around your neck that drowns you.

God wants to take the things that have hurt us in life, the pains of life, the hardships of life, the trials of life, and by his grace and strength, transform those into stepping stones, and there’s a big battle over those because the difference between someone who has gone through something big or small that is transformation that continues to be overwhelmed by that and then kind of taken out of the game, so to speak, versus somebody who has done the hard work. It’s painful. And I at least don’t understand. I don’t think it’s quick. I don’t think it’s easy and those things, but where there is redeeming and reconciling work taken on. You think about the people that are able to impact other people for Christ and for the benefit of the church and the world, it’s oftentimes people that have had that kind of thing happen.

I will also say too, in counseling when somebody does come to counseling for a hurt, now, again, we’re talking about things that have been stuck and they’ve not been able to move through it. We have specific tool sets and specific trauma related treatments such as EMDR, that’s a trauma treatment or the WET is written exposure therapy. That’s a kind of specific journaling about a painful event trauma focused cognitive behavior therapy. These kinds of things can be very helpful at being able to help move the past into the past. That’s one of the things that I would say to somebody if their pain from the past keeps getting replayed in the present, then it’s not in the past. Okay. But if we’ve done our work and it’s in the past, and then periodically something happens, and it comes up then we call it, oh, there it popped up again. I know what it is, I hold on to forgiveness, I use my skills and put it back.

Yeah, and so the willingness to reach out to a professional for support, the willingness to step into that place or to honestly reflect as to where you’re at and that the past is not in the past and needs support to get to that place. Yep. That’s a key to overcoming or dealing with hurt. That’s right. Um, there was a question that came up in the submissions early on I want to just hit here. And if you have other questions, we have just a few minutes left in the webinar. So either chat them in or we’ll give a chance to unmute mike’s here in just a second and see if anybody has anything.

What if you’re stuck in a relationship or someone seems to be continually hurting you, but you want to help. And yet it seems like that hurt is continuing to be perpetuated on their part. It gets into a boundaries question I suppose, when do you know to step back and say, I can’t do it. So, obviously the details of this would make a big difference from one way to other but that is one of the things that we’re trying to figure out is with the healthy boundaries and one of the things to remember is that if this is somebody who’s behavior is overtly sinful or overtly damaging. That’s a different thing than if somebody’s behavior is irritating and kind of keeps calling up stuff from the past. At the same time, I think one of our desires a lot of times, and it’s mine too, is when somebody’s hurt us, we’d like to see them change significantly.

Okay. It’s like they need a personality reconstruction, right? And that might be true. Okay. And maybe somebody on the video is saying, yeah, what is it? You need to read not publicly, but the concept here is that we also have to accept who people are. And sometimes they are not willing to change.

Okay. And so, when that’s the case, we have to figure out how to set boundaries, particularly. Sometimes we need to have conversations and those kinds of things. But sometimes you can say, hey, I’ve talked to them 600 times, or it feels like 600, so it’s reality that conversation is this person. You know what, to say as much as lieth within you live peaceably with all men, it doesn’t say you will live peaceably with all men and that you will be best friends with everybody. It’s knowing what’s realistic and what’s not. So, let’s say I’m really desiring affirmation from somebody, and I work really hard to get their affirmation and they just don’t give affirmation. The fact is, I have to lower my expectations for getting affirmation. Now I might grieve that and that might be very painful to do. But the fact is, if I continue to believe that person, if I can just do this good enough, that person is going to give me affirmation, then I’m just living my life in captivity to that other person.

Yeah, you become held hostage. Yeah. I appreciate that, Ted. And I don’t think you need a personality check. I want to be clear about that. Any questions that anybody has, feel free to unmute and share if you do. Otherwise, we have one verse I’ll shift to just for encouragement here towards the end is this verse here in Corinthians, we want to leave you with this. The hope that’s in this verse is so powerful.

Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all of our tribulations, that we may be able to comfort those that are in any trouble by the comfort with we ourselves are comforted of God.

Any thoughts or anything to emphasize with this verse? Yeah, I think that this is one of the verses that I love to think about with that concept of being, and we use a term sometimes in the counseling that we are all wounded healers and that that we all have our hurts.

And if God has been able to work in us, and we’ve done the hard work of it, then that wounding can be flipped over and reconciled and healed, and we can become wounded healers. The opposite of that, we say, is an unhealed wounder. And that’s the person that hasn’t done that work. The heaviness of that continues.

I think this verse is just beautiful about what a wounded healer’s life is like. And we want to be mindful. This is difficult stuff, right? Hurt is hard, and there’s pain. And as we said from the beginning, there are offenses that will come, but God offers beauty in the midst of the ashes, and he offers the opportunity to bring comfort.

But we need to lean into these keys, and you need to step into them to shift towards that hope and reach out for help when needed. Thanks so much for joining. Thanks for being part of it and may God bless you.

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