Heal the wound—everyone’s wounds talk.  Regardless of age, we all have wounds we’re dealing with and they come from various things.  Living, other people, expectations, choices—all things have had some sort of impact on our lives and they can determine how we treat ourselves and others.  I don’t like to admit when my wounds do the talking and for a long time they were the only thing people would hear from me.  I let them do the talking for me.  The thing is everyone’s wounds are real—we all feel what we feel, that is a fact, but we need to remember that what we feel isn’t necessarily the truth of what happened and if we let how we feel decide our actions, our wounds will be the only voice people hear.  Healing is meant to be a release and it is cathartic—there’s nothing that compares to releasing the weight of pain we carry with us.  We have to acknowledge how much the pain of what happened does the talking for us.  That means we have to be willing to acknowledge our behaviors in certain situations may not be what we expect of ourselves.

We can spend years recovering from things if we don’t do the work of healing and digging out the pieces of things that fester in our minds.  Thoughts do fester.  They can either be the seed of something great or the beginning of something that eats away at everything good.  We can either see the good in things or we can see the negative and remember—we have the choice of what we see.  That all depends on how we heal our specific wounds.  We have to find our triggers and do the work of disarming them.  We have to face the reality of what we feel and examine what actually happened and WHY we feel the way we do—is there some sort of transgression that can be fixed with a few words?  Is there some true trespass on the core of who we are (or others/things we love) that made us question everything?  Were there true violations and traumas in our lives that, while they weren’t our fault, we need to close the door on?  No matter what it is, it takes the willingness to look inside and examine what really happened and why we feel the way we do and how that impacts our actions—and others.

We want to stop the cycle of hurting ourselves from things we have control over.  The most horrible places aren’t always physical locations—they are in our minds with the stories we repeat continuously.  The more we repeat the story, the more engrained in our minds it becomes and those trenches can take a long time to heal.  We want to get to the start before those trenches create more offshoots and bleed into other areas of our lives and then impact others.  We do not operate in a vacuum, so this isn’t just about ourselves—this is about preventing further hurt to others as well.  This is about avoiding planting the seeds of pain in others because we couldn’t face our own.  We are powerful yet we all fall prey to the ideas in our heads, the stories we tell ourselves.  It isn’t always easy but it’s less painful than we think.  We have the power to tell a new story—or at the very least we have the power to take out the root of what caused our pain in the first place.  Once our wounds are healed, not only do we feel better, but we prevent hurting others thereby planting more seeds of pain.  We also become an example of HOW to do the work and what happens when we do.  Don’t let the ghost of something etched in our minds do our talking.  Heal, stop taking pieces from others to feel better, find the connection to self and become whole on our own.  That is when our voice becomes loud and clear.