I wonder if sometimes we experience a painful event and we become very wounded by that specific event. And I wonder if we have certain wounds that we use as a lens to evaluate every situation from that point forward. Whenever something pokes that wound, we feel the pain all over again or we hear accusation as if it’s the first time. We go for years and years or even decades of thinking that we are receiving the same message. But what if we are really not? What if our lens of pain is causing us to see things that are not there, or maybe to see things that were never even there in the first place?
I recently watched an episode of This Is Us where Kevin is in a therapy session and tells his family about the pain he felt as a child. He felt like his brother was his mother’s favorite, and his sister was his father’s favorite. And he had no one. He felt like a fifth wheel. He developed a voice in his head that repeated and said, “You are not enough”. He tried to drown that voice out with things like football, acting, fame, and then when that didn’t work out, he tried to drown the pain in prescription drugs.
His mother admits that his brother was “easier” to love. When we see Kevin’s childhood footage, we see that he did experience times that might feel like rejection. But at the same time he was very loved. The truth was that he had thousands of experiences where his parents reached out to him in love. But Kevin didn’t remember the love that he experienced, he only remembered the pain. In the footage of his childhood we also saw how angry, jealous, mean and disrespectful Kevin behaved as a child and how difficult he made it for anyone to love him. His rejection was a self-fulfilling prophecy. He believed everyone would reject him, so he was angry with them. His anger came out in treating everyone poorly, and that made it harder for anyone to get close to him. Also, he believed that he would see rejection, and so he noticed all of the things that could be construed as rejection. And he failed to notice any of the ways that his family tried to love him.
I wonder if we do this too. One bad experience is used to color everything. We let our feelings tell us what people must have done to us. Everyone has their lens that they see things through to interpret events in our lives. And everyone has feelings that are a result of that interpretation. I wonder if we could be more open to checking to see if we are seeing things with clear vision.
I wonder if my parents were as neglectful as I experienced them to be. I wonder if there were hundreds of happy and loving interactions that I just don’t have any memory of.
Early in our marriage John pointed out little mistakes of mine, like forgetting to turn the lights off or hanging the toilet paper the wrong way. But he learned to have more grace and he stopped pointing out small things. But those comments had already hurt me. I felt like he expected perfection and that he was always judging me.
But now as I look back I remember hearing John’s angry voice ringing in my ears each time I made a little mistake, and I would feel more hurt, judged, and angry, even though he had never said one word about those issues for 15 years. He wasn’t judging me, or saying anything, or even thinking anything. I was taking something that happened 15 years prior and allowing it to control my thoughts and feelings in the present. I don’t think he even judged me when he first brought up those things early in our marriage. But it hurt, so I thought he “hurt” me, and it lodged itself deep.
Sometimes I share an opinion with John and I am not asking him to agree with me, or do anything, I’m just sharing what I think, and the way he reacts, makes me think he is feeling something that is a reaction to something much deeper than what I just shared. Could he be believing that I am thinking things about him that I’m not even thinking? Could he be hearing accusations where there are none?
I wonder if we all imagine people saying things that they never said.
“I don’t care about you”
“You are stupid”
“You are not good at your job”
“You have to be perfect”
“I don’t love you”
“You are a burden”
“You are not worthwhile”
And we become hurt over and over even though no one is hurting us. Maybe it’s our own voice yelling inside our head or some voice from the past but not this person.
A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb is still attached. People with amputated limbs will sometimes feel pain in the limb that does not even exist. I think we carry phantom wounds deep inside. We feel hurt and we believe that someone is hurting us, but if we look more closely, they aren’t. The pain is real, but it is coming from a phantom wound.
Wow. Some really great insights here. I can really relate to a lot of what you said in relation to one particularly difficult relationship in my life where I believe my past hurt still affects me. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently and your description of a ‘phantom wound’ is certainly relatable.
But what’s the solution? A gradual process of healing, by the grace of God, through prayer and effort and gentleness. That’s my take on it, anyway.