Gaining the Victory Over Unhealed, Emotional Wounds

Life is made up of memories. And if course some are good and some are bad. Your marriage is made up of a life lived together where some of the memories you create together deliberately, and others just seem to happen.There are also memories you bring with you into your marriage that sometimes tend to haunt the life you are now living together. They may be hurts you or your spouse experienced early in life before you ever met. When you came to marriage, some of those wounds were never healed, but they were just covered over by a scab. We all know that a scab protects the wound unless it is scraped off for some reason. Unhealed emotional wounds tend to erupt when other difficulties within your marriage uncover those hurts you still need to deal with. The way you remember what happened in your past is very important. Memories if embellished on or that are elaborated in your mind become distorted as time passes and festers new and hurtful feelings. It was said by Lloyd Ogilvie; "We mortgage the future based upon what happened in the past. We have positive memories of the past which we can't imagine could ever be repeated, and we have negative memories which we know will be repeated. Often we become the image of what we remember instead of what we envision for the future." Think of how powerful the last sentence of Lloyd Ogilvie's statement is. Is the future of your own marriage mortgaged on memories from the past? There may be deep hurts you carry within you and that circulate in your head more often than you want them to. To overcome a past hurt, you have to lower the walls you've built around that hurt and confront those concerns. Sometimes the change is immediate, but more often than not healing is a slow process. You can take down those walls you built as protection. The presence of Jesus in your life can make the difference. Satan the enemy does not want you to heal and needs to be put in his place, and his place is to be out of your mind. Change is possible because faith involves inner transformation not just outer conformity. When the hurtful feelings rise again (because the devil is persistent), call upon Jesus. Jesus will never leave you nor forsake you (Deuteronomy 31:8). Give Jesus access to your painful memories. It may be a slow process according to the weight you carry, but He wants you to have the peace you need and that will be so welcomed when you gain the victory (My thoughts with Quiet Times for Couples, page 213). Sherry